A bit of crystal ball speculation and debate took place on OMD NZ’s blog a while back about advertising exchanges. Ad-exchanges provide a platform for advertisers, networks and publishers to buy and sell their inventory via real-time bidding through technology. In taking the ‘human’ portion (largely price negotiation and customisation) out of the equation greater efficiencies (mainly cost savings on paper) are achieved.

I think exchanges will have their place just as performance networks have before them. I seriously doubt they will have the ability to increase CPMs for publishers, so the old conundrum of cost / benefit still raises it’s head for any publishers wanting to fund their sites via advertising. As for additional (pay-wall, T-Shirts, Mugs, Ipads & Android apps?) funding options – they haven’t yet proven themselves a viable proposition for many publishers or users for that matter.

In the interests of full disclosure, we don’t sell cost per click advertising and don’t farm impressions out to third party networks. We specialise in delivering targeted audiences and placements for our advertisers on behalf of our publishers. We do also sell Behavioural Targeting in conjunction with contextual targeting. I don’t see us or our publishers tipping inventory into exchanges unless they can seriously improve our effective CPM across individual sites. Does it cost us more to send real people out to agencies and advertisers as apposed to Google or Microsoft’s (assuming they own or buy the biggest exchange platforms in market) cut? I actually doubt it. Especially coupled with the other selling opportunities those people have beyond standard broad-reach banner campaigns.

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We’re building our mobile offerings across adhub sites, with FLICKS, BBC.com & Sella leading the way in iphone apps. Sella recently launched what is certainly the most useful trading application in New Zealand today and we’ve run some very successful campaigns for major brands on both FLICKS and BBC.com’s .mobile sites.

The following are Adam Cahill’s (of ClickZ) top 10 points for creating value and relevance with your customer

s from a keynote he attended with Emily Nagle Green, president and CEO of Yankee Group:

1. Mobile increases consumer expectations of connectedness. We tend to evaluate new opportunities with a tipping point mentality, asking ourselves “when is the opportunity big enough to take seriously?” The statistics already tell us that mobile has reached that point, but I loved how Emily reframed the issue away from hard facts and toward a very clear picture of the way behavior has changed as a result of the powerful computers we carry with us in our pockets and purses. Simply put, we expect more, all the time. Instead of thinking about whether mobile is big enough, we should be thinking about what expectations we’d actually be failing to meet without a thoughtful approach to mobile in place. Read the rest of this article.

This is an interesting article from the centre for media research. We too have experienced fantastic results for our advertisers with integrated content. Particularly when it encompasses all the facets using content, email and display advertising.

According to the second year of an Opinion Research Corporation consumer preference survey sponsored by Adfusion, consumers are more likely to read and act upon online advertising than they were a year ago. For the second year, consumers say articles that include brand information is the type of online advertising they’re most likely to read and act upon, compared to banner ads, pop-up ads, email offers or sponsored links.

Article-based advertising was preferred by 53% of respondents who said they are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to read and act upon the material, compared to 51% a year ago. Coveted demographic groups are even more likely to express a preference for articles. According to the survey, 66% of people between the ages of 25 and 34, and 60% of those making at least $75,000 per year, say they are “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to read and act upon article-based advertising. Pop-up ads were least likely to be read or acted upon.

In the national study of 1,053 adults conducted in March 2010, survey respondents rated their likelihood to read and act upon five types of online advertising:  banner ads, pop-up ads, e-mail offers, articles that include brand information, and sponsored search engine links.

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