Auction-based media management will hit the mainstream within the next year and change the way marketers, agencies and publishers buy and sell adverts. All of this is fine, but what does this mean? And how are you supposed to manage this change in the media buying landscape? To understand this better, let’s take a closer look at what’s currently happening in the ad exchange world.
The ad exchange landscape
Yahoo’s Right Media and AdECN have been around for a while. They are gaining excellent traction in the marketplace claiming their share of the $23bn a year display advertising marketplace, and all the while doing this, proving their value to advertisers.
Added to this is DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange. It launched two years ago and has only been open to Ad Networks or network like entities. Google is launching a revamped version of the DoubleClick Exchange in September this year and will include access to the Google Content Network via AdWords. This is a significant development because it means marketers will be able to control their search and display ad exchange from one platform.
Something else to consider in this picture is that Google AdWords has over a million advertisers, and that by using DoubleClick’s Dart for Publishers, Google will be able to offer advertisers access to a significant part of the publisher market. Talk about matchmaking on a massive scale!
Dealing with disintermediation
So what does this all mean? Traditional media matchmakers and advertising agencies will find themselves becoming quickly disintermediated by what’s going on. For some people this might be a cause for alarm, but it’s actually happened before in the paid-search landscape, and there are lessons to be learned.
Many marketers run their paid search internally. However, when they outsource, it is to specialist search providers, not agencies. This is because typically traditional agencies are no good at implementing paid search campaigns, where the value you bring is how well you optimise and strategise. For example, many advertising agencies spend 80 per cent of their time creating reports instead focusing on strategy and optimization, which is essential if you really want to get the most mileage out of your search campaigns.
In addition to this the paid search marketplace has also become fairly mature, and specialist consultancies are taking the lead at offering these services to clients, replacing the role of traditional agencies, who are not really part of the game anymore.
If we apply this thinking to auction-based media management – like paid search – there is no barrier to entry, and again, the value that should be provided is in how well you can optimise and strategise. Agencies are not part of the search game, so what will happen to them when display advertising follows the paid search model?
The future in an ad exchange world
We believe there will still be a need for direct, custom media buying in the ad exchange world, but that room will be made for a new breed of service providers who will manage display advertising. These companies will help advertisers with marketing process management as their programs scale. And they will also provide custom data management and analysis services as well as actual transactional and optimization services.
Yet, out of all this, the question marketers, agencies, and publishers should really be asking themselves is how well prepared they are to deal with this changing landscape? Do they have the right technology partnerships, processes and people in place to help them deal with what’s to come?
