There was an interesting session today on how companies that are used to doing search advertising can dip their toes in the water with display advertising.  The session highlighted some of the major differences and advancements in display, and the potential mine fields to watch out for. 

While I expected to walk away from the session with a few simple bullet points on how to get started, I instead walked away thinking that the state of display advertising sometimes feels a bit like the Wild West.  That’s good and bad.  The Wild West was a dangerous place full of bandits and people with a general disregard for personal hygiene.  On the other hand, if you played your cards right, you had the opportunity to build an empire.  There is always opportunity in change, so let’s see how the panelists thought you might build your empire.

Why should you consider bothering with display advertising?

1. Scale. It’s huge.

2. Large monthly dollar commitments are not always required anymore

3. RTB (Real-time bidding)

4. Auction based CPM bid strategies

Based on the above, you might be thinking that display is getting more like search, and to a certain extent, you would be right. Then the session took an interesting turn and became much more display specific. Here are a few terms you should probably get to know if you are considering display advertising:

1. Ad Exchange (see Microsoft’s own AdECN)

2. Ad Network (see the Microsoft Media Network)

3. DSP (Demand Side Platform)

4. Data Exchanges (imagine buying cookies and user data to help you better target your users)

Ad Exchanges are simply a place where sellers of ad inventory make it available to ad buyers via an auction. Ad Networks are an aggregation of websites on which you can purchase ad placements.  A Demand Side Platform helps you manage your bidding strategy across multiple exchanges and networks (and there are many when you begin counting up the players in this space). 

So, what is Wild West about all of this? According to Sacha Berlik (founder and CEO of mexad), the danger is that advertisers need to understand the individual networks and exchanges they are considering advertising on.  He seemed to acknowledge that this is a bit of a daunting task, but without this knowledge you run the risk of not truly understanding why your campaigns are performing the way they are or you might even open yourself to your ad displaying on dodgy websites.  This is more of a risk when advertisers are running on a DSP and choosing to participate in ad networks that they are not familiar with. So the risk can be somewhat mitigated and Mike Baker of DataXu (maker of a DSP platform) was there to come to DSPs’s defense.

Mike contends that the time for DSPs is here and he showed some impressive campaign results to support his assertion. To Sacha’s concern that the data ecosystem that DSPs rely upon are not mature enough, Mike replied,“DSPs are designed to ride above the noise and the technologies are designed to make it performance based so that you shouldn’t have to know about the suppliers.”

It’s an interesting debate where one side is arguing that you must understand where you are advertising to understand your campaign and to monitor things such as your brand.  The other side takes a sort of bare knuckle view of the data and contends that you shouldn’t really care where you run you should only care about the results. 

Whichever side of the debate you fall on I think everyone would agree that while these technologies are maturing and the corpus of data grows there will be a lot of opportunity for advertisers, publishers, and platforms, but only if we all take the time to understand it and place smart bids.

In closing I would be remiss if I did not point out that Microsoft has a great Ad Network and if you want to dip your toes into the display market we would be happy to have someone contact you about your needs.

Thanks for reading,

Phil Greenwood