Early Adopters: Technology ‘Ecosystems’
Longtail’s look at trends and developments in the digital space.
I had a good hard look at the future today. At the Ad Trading Summit in London I saw a technology ecosystem that will change the way we buy and sell digital media, and one that will eventually extend to all forms of media, including TV.
It’s a bewildering landscape of ad exchanges, ad nets (vertical and behavioural), data exchanges, data suppliers, yield optimisers, ad servers, agencies, DEMs, and DSPs. This ecosystem is reality already in the US and is well on the way to being established in Europe so this is not a hypothetical situation!
Put simply this ecosystem represents a variety of technology platforms that are enabling buyers and sellers to connect automatically and in real time to buy and sell media, or more accurately, audiences. In this new world sellers will have a much better opportunity to effectively monetise their audiences and buyers will have much better access to more realistically priced and better targeted inventory.
This isn’t the death of the salesperson but it will certainly have a significant impact if only because of the transparency that is inherent in the system.
The surprising and disappointing thing for me was that most of this is by-passing Australia…for now. The market is deemed too small and too difficult for most of the emerging players. Having been part of the first iteration of Google’s Ad Exchange back in 2008, which they withdrew from the market citing poor publisher and agency engagement, we saw the potential of this form of trading platform. However I was fortunate enough to catch up with Tanzil Bukhari who is Google’s Ad Exchange Manager for Europe and apparently AdEx v2 is likely to be launched in the AU market in Q1 2011.
The DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) are particularly fascinating as they provide centralised media buying from different inventory sources like ad exchanges, ad networks and sell side platforms. They provide benefits such as workflow simplification, integrated reporting, algorithmic buying optimisation, and Real-Time Bidding (RTB) capabilities. From an agency perspective DSPs offer a tantalising opportunity to take back some of the control of the buying process.
Just a footnote to that – I saw the keynote address from Benjamin Faes, Head of YouTube & Display, EMEA, Google. Google’s play for the display market is ramping up (see their promo video here) and I for one am not comfortable with the thought of the big G owning display in the way it owns Search.
To be fair the relatively small number of major publishers in AU are unlikely to rollover and cede power to Google. We have already witnessed how Realestate.com.au has successfully held out against Google Maps play for the real estate market. Google will be very aggressive and from what I saw they are particularly ambivalent about agencies.
Certainly agencies will have to be on their game if they are to add value to the process but simple things like a lack of a commission structure will certainly impact on the classic agency business model.
Carlo Bertozzi – CEO
