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.
