Thanks to Doubleclick for inviting me to a presentation on the launch of their ad exchange within this marketplace. As well as being great hosts they posed some very interesting questions about the value of media to advertisers and how publishers can increase the revenue they receive from their products.
Ad exchanges should be very attractive to advertisers and to the site owners.
Most large publishers have some areas of their site(s) that do not sell out. Up until now they have either had to use valuable sales team time to monetise this or to sell at less than the full value to a network who then mark it up when selling to advertisers.
The ad exchange should allow them to achieve the maximum market price for the inventory and as the process is automated it reduces admin costs.
The proposition to advertisers is that they can pay the absolute minimum necessary to achieve the inventory they need. This should reduce their media costs and therefore either their CPA or the price to reach a target audience.
The aspect that was most interesting to me (with my agency hat on) was the automation of the buying, reporting and invoicing process. Buying online media is very time consuming and agencies should welcome any opportunities to free up resource to spend on planning and client servicing. In the UK competing systems are being tested by agencies and publishers. On both the buy and sell side there are significant savings to be made and I expect systems to be in routine use within 18 months.
Tags: doubleclick, media exchange
