July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Flurry is launching an exchange dubbed Flurry Marketplace for its mobile advertising platform so that the right advertisers can be matched with the right content publishers. The advertisers can offer bids to buy ads in real-time and target the exact audience they want to reach.

San Francisco-based Flurry makes analytics software that monitors consumer behavior on 1 billion smartphones and tablets each month. It captures over 1.3 trillion actions that those consumers perform in those apps each month, so it has a treasure trove of data that is useful to advertisers. With the new Flurry Marketplace, the company has created an exchange where advertisers and content publishers can team up to target ads at intended audiences in an automated, programmatic fashion.

The bidding takes place in real-time with pre-bundled data from more than 300,000 apps. Advertisers known as demand-side platforms (DSPs) and Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) can now reach audiences in a targeted and automated way through real-time auctions.

“Despite big data advances, app publishers continue to sell inventory undervalued and blind because programmatic buyers don’t yet have a platform that overcomes publisher fragmentation and provides quality audience data in order to improve buying decisions,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry chief executive, in a statement. “Flurry Marketplace aggregates and enriches advertising inventory from thousands of applications with relevant, granular audience data that empowers DSPs, ATDs, and networks to buy efficiently.”

Market research IDC predicts that real-time bidding (RTB) ad spending will top $13 billion by 2016. With such marketplaces, ad buyers can set bids on the ad impressions, or how much they will pay for their ads to be shown to audiences that meet certain thresholds, such as 18-to-34-year-old females who enjoy role-playing games. The dynamic market determines the best price for the transaction in order to maximize the return on investment for both the advertiser and publisher. Publishers can set a floor price to protect the value of their inventory from racing to the bottom.

With Flurry Marketplace, advertisers can get more granular detail such as gender, device, geography, application category, application, and Flurry Personas (or profiles of users who behave in certain ways). Flurry will give advertisers access to more than 300 million monthly unique users and allow them to bid on billions of ad requests per month. The technology is compliant with an industry standard known as OpenRTB. Flurry Marketplace is part of Flurry’s AppSpot data-powered supply-side ad platform.

“Flurry is on a mission to significantly improve and simplify app advertising,” said Rahul Bafna, head of product management for Flurry advertising solutions. “In the long-run, we believe that delivering big-data powered solutions such as Flurry Marketplace is the only way to ensure a win-win-win among advertisers, publishers, and consumers.”

Flurry says that, compared to other mobile RTB Exchanges (and online ones for that matter), Flurry Marketplace offers high-value audience data bundled into the service. The company says this is a significant differentiator because advertisers have more knowledge about the inventory they’re bidding on (i.e., the audience they will reach). The right advertiser will bid more for the right audience.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Alas, the days of Mad Men are over. Long gone are lingering business lunches where advertising deals are struck over booze and cigarettes, and automated, real-time bidding has taken their place.

LeanMarket, a company that specializes in real-time bidding for ad space, is introducing a mobile ad buying platform. Real-time bidding is all the rage for internet advertising these days because businesses want to be as specific as possible in who they target. Whenever a user visits a website, data is collected and advertisers place bids for that impression on an ad exchange. The transaction happens in 1/10 of a second and the winner gets their ad published in front of that person.

LeanMarket’s technology helps advertisers successfully navigate this complicated and fast-paced system. The company participated in Y Combinator‘s most recent class and its first product focused on web-based display ads. However, with the explosion of mobile and mobile advertising opportunities, LeanMarket is trying to stay ahead of the curve with its demand-side platform.

“There is a big transition in advertising because buyers and sellers are not negotiating person-to-person, they are meeting on big ad exchanges,” said founder and CEO Cyrus Lohrasbpour. “Real-time bidding has been going on for years now, but all the software to help advertisers is designed for the enterprise. LeanMarket is self-serve and open to everyone regardless of budget. LeanMarket is doing for mobile RTB what Google AdWords did for search advertising.”

Rather than requiring lengthy contracts and high-minimums, LeanMarket adopts a pay-as-you model that accommodates the needs of small businesses and startups. Customers go to the website to create a campaign. They dictate parameters, such as demographics, time spent on a page, search history etc… and how much they want to pay. They then upload their ad and LeanMarket takes care of the rest, bidding on relevant ad space and providing real-time reports.

The product emphasizes transparency. Advertisers can see exactly which apps their ads appear in and can monitoring their activity through real-time reports. They can also pause the campaign if there is an error. All of these features are particularly important for smaller businesses where every dollar matters.

Lohrabspour got into advertising consulting while still in college and watched as real-time bidding grew in popularity. However, most of his clients did not have large enough budgets to justify expensive campaigns, and he was inspired to create a more flexible way to help smaller spenders take advantage of the ad exchanges. Advertisers can spend anywhere from $5 to hundreds of thousands.

For large corporations and scrappy startups alike, a strong mobile presence is increasingly important. Lohrasbpour said there is a significant discrepancy between the amount of time people spend looking at the screens of their mobile devices and the amount of money advertisers spend on mobile ads.

“A tiny portion of ad spending goes to mobile,” he said. “Advertisers are overspending on other types of media, and a big part of our real-time bidding mobile platform is to create efficiency, so marketers can reach the right people at the right time, and publishers can make enough through publishing ads to sustain their efforts.”

LeanMarket works with big ad exchanges like Nexage and MoPub and is already serving millions of impressions per day on mobile with beta advertisers, and growing 10% a week. There are competitive services out there, like Moolah Media, but the excitement surrounding this type of technology means there is room for multiple players in this emerging marketplace.

Read more about the emergence of RTB for mobile ads on VentureBeat. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Anyone involved within the online display advertising space during the past four years is likely be aware of the steady rise of Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and the emerging power of demand-side platforms (DSPs). Since RTB-oriented purchasing enables advertisers instant access to their desired audience, DSPs and other online ad technology providers are recognizing the huge potential in making user data (gathered through online cookies) commercially available to them.

Large digital marketers are learning quickly how to leverage these data sets to target specific and relevant audiences. The fast growth in adoption of large advertising exchanges, such as those operated by Google, OpenX and Yahoo!, is also evidence that many now are able to recognize and take advantage of the efficiencies they offer.

As this trend continues, we have been confronted by another emerging certainty: the rise of mobile advertising.

Smartphone sales have now eclipsed PC sales and it is estimated nearly 6 billion mobile subscriptions exist across the world. Although consumers are spending an estimated 23 percent of their time on their mobile devices, mobile still only attracts 1 percent of annual ad spend. Compare this to 29 percent of ad spend that is directed to print media, a media where consumers typically spend only 6% of their time.

It’s clear mobile has some catching up to do, and we need to help realize this opportunity for marketers. History shows that advertising budgets will eventually follow audiences and it is no secret that audiences of the future will primarily be using mobile devices.

A logical conclusion would be to simply apply business models and lessons learned from search and display media (as many companies are currently doing) to the mobile advertising market. It’s clear to me that this approach will fail to properly realize the mobile advertising opportunity that stands in front of us.

Mobile is in a state of beautiful disarray, and presents to us now the opportunity to innovate, re-imagine and re-design an advertising ecosystem that will flourish. Why?

Whereas online display zigs, mobile zags

Using cookies to track user behavior and identify audiences is a cornerstone of the online display space. The value proposition of all display DSPs is founded on their capability to use and sell this information. For example, one of OpenX’s largest DSP partners that spends millions of dollars each month on the OpenX Market, has 17 third party data sets that advertisers use to target audiences in display. It has none in mobile. Mobile has to “zag” in another direction and adapt to tracking and selling user data in other ways.

Rethinking Ad Units for Mobile

Advertising is just one of several monetization options available to app developers including mobile commerce, premium upsells, and virtual goods. Many app developers are so focused on user experience and retention that they are nervous about the impact advertising might have. The tradeoff might be easier to justify if the financial rewards were greater, but many premium app developers say that the monetization levels they currently see from mobile exchanges is not worth the possible impact. But herein lies the opportunity.

New kinds of ad units need to be imagined for the mobile world, units that app developers actually see as beneficial to their user experience. We are currently working with one large app publisher to develop an “in stream” unit that blends seamlessly into their app experience. The point is that mobile presents an opportunity to redefine advertising and make it better for publishers, advertisers, and consumers alike. This is the fun stuff.

Private Marketplaces

Private marketplaces are another exciting opportunity for mobile advertising. OpenX is currently building such an exchange with Samsung to serve ads into Samsung mobile devices. Private marketplace technology gives publishers and app developers instant access to advertising dollars and total control to determine the conditions under which their inventory can be purchased. For example, publishers can set floor prices, brand filters, creative filters, and levels of transparency to protect direct sales channels.

Large like-minded publishing brands will join together to create premium private marketplaces in mobile to realize high CPMs and attract premium advertisers that want to buy large pools of brand safe inventory at scale. These premium publishers will flip the common notion of RTB as a remnant solution and use it as a vehicle to create premium media auctions akin to a Sotheby’s or Christie’s.

Location, location, location

We are seeing signals from our exchange that granular geo targeting is becoming a primary driver of bidding behavior in mobile. Publishers that are able to pass a longitude and latitude are seeing more than a 50% premium on their inventory. If you listen to the free version of Pandora on your mobile device you might have noticed that Panera Bread is selling sandwiches at lunchtime. The holy grail of driving local commerce via digital media seems to be getting closer and is eminently achievable with mobile. I personally have been listening to this vision since 1996 when we launched AOL’s local content network Digital City. It has only taken 15 years for the technology to catch up…

Aggregators of local ad spend such as offer sites including Groupon and incumbents with deep Yellow Pages roots will likely drive the adoption of mobile RTB as they laser in on the untethered consumer at their doorstep. The ability to target granular geographic data in real time will be enough to build a robust mobile ad market until the industry adopts a universal audience tracking mechanism. This hyper-local targeting opens up a whole new way of thinking to the advertising community.

For example imagine the relevant kinds of audiences brands can reach within the radius of NFL football stadiums on Sundays during the football season? The combination of location, time of day, and an untethered consumer makes the targeting opportunities staggering. Mobile DSPs are currently burning the midnight oil in their proverbial garages to bring this opportunity to life.

What is a Mobile DSP anyway?

The primary distinction between an ad network and a DSP is that DSPs have the technology to determine the value of an individual impression in real time (less than 100 milliseconds) based on what is known about a user’s history. A DSP will then place a bid and serve an ad based on that value.

For example, auto advertisers work with DSPs to serve ads to people they know have recently visited an auto website to ensure their ads are seen by those that are, in all likelihood, in the market for a car. The decision-making logic that display DSPs are dependent upon to deliver value to their advertisers is based on the knowledge of a user’s history.

But herein lies the mobile dilemma rendering this model irrelevant, since a user’s history is currently very difficult to determine in the mobile world. If DSPs depend on knowledge derived from a user’s history to create value in display how can they reinvent themselves for a mobile dominated world where user history is no longer available?

There are several new exciting companies calling themselves “mobile DSPs” that are emerging with the aim of solving this issue and replicate the rapid growth and success that DSPs have experienced in the display world. Companies such as TapAd, StrikeAd, and EveryScreen Media to name just a few. Each is developing a unique approach to solving this problem, but the race has only just begun.

Most of them do not share their methods in detail for obvious reasons, but all have serious venture backing and are working on solutions that will bring targeting and relevancy to another level. They all have bright data scientists building the audience targeting models of the future that do not rely on a web cookie. One example is that somehow mobile DSPs are able map IP addresses from home Wi-Fi networks to other devices to identify unique – but personally unidentifiable – users.

The success of these new mobile DSPs will accelerate the shift of budgets from traditional media into the digital world as media buyers gravitate to a deeper level of targeting and are forced to allocate budgets to platforms where human beings are spending their time: on mobile devices.

Mike Downey is Vice President of Mobile Solutions for OpenX and oversees mobile strategy, including the company’s partnership with Samsung. OpenX products provide a comprehensive revenue serving platform by combining ad serving, an ad exchange and a breakthrough approach to yield optimization. 

Fast forward to today. The world of online advertising has radically changed – mostly for the better.

Now online ad impressions can be found in marketplaces called exchanges. Advertisers can compete with each other for the most valuable impression by bidding via an auction process in real time — known as Real Time Bidding (RTB). But how do advertisers know what to bid on? Of the myriad of options available, the most common solutions are those provided by audience data companies. Audience data can be extraordinarily effective. In its simplest form, audience data tracks a consumer’s web usage and creates profiles based on browsing habits. So in these marketplaces, advertisers can determine which ad impressions have the right audience and then determine what to buy.

Pretty cool stuff, a fantastic evolution from just having to buy content as a proxy. How can targeting get any better than this? Essentially there is no waste, as an advertiser is only buying the audience that matters most to them – it’s almost the Holy Grail.

Unfortunately, this approach does have its shortcomings. Just because we know how and where to reach a target audience doesn’t mean that these folks are in the proper mindset to view, remember or respond to an ad. For example, if they’re engaged in content in a particular way, like emailing friends or watching videos, they won’t be receptive to certain marketing messages. Or if they are looking at pages that contain user-generated content (UGC) laced with profanity, this won’t be the environment that some advertisers will want to serve an ad into, regardless of the knowledge they may have about the user. Clearly, the ad environment is essential. If you don’t think that environment matters to an advertiser, you’re mistaken.

Take control of the environment.

Until now, the marketplaces I mentioned above have been unable to empower advertisers to define the environment in which they want their ads to appear. Online advertising has been disproportionately based on audience targeting, and some advertisers have dismissed environment as an unnecessary concern. But the environment problem is a major reason large brands have barely dipped their toes into RTB.

By incorporating data about the ad environment into the ad buying process, advertisers can not only control the delivery of their ads onto pages they were previously blind to but can proactively dictate their comfort level with quality and safety in these developing marketplaces.

Here’s how it works.

The technology that enables this approach is page-level semantic analysis. Websites are like networks of pages. You can’t designate a whole site to be entirely safe without knowing what is on every page. For example, any news site has content about death, accidents, catastrophes, crime, etc. Advertisers can steer clear of this specific content if they feel it isn’t appropriate for their brand, while still reaching that site’s audience on other, more appropriate pages.

Page-level analysis looks at individual pages rather than sites or sections to reveal data attributes that indicate the safety and quality of each page. This allows advertisers to proactively define their environment upfront. Once the environment is defined, the ad buyer can then focus on targeting ads to users or content within that environment.

For example, suppose an ad impression has become available on a web page that has a few family photos with captions under each one. Through real time semantic analysis of that page, the marketplace can relay to an advertiser data about the quality, safety and category of that page. In this case, the page would have a low text-to-image ratio, be considered un-moderated UGC, is safe from profanity and mature content and be labeled an entertainment page.

This combination of attributes might be fine for some advertisers and not for others, even if their target audience is viewing that page. With this data, the advertiser can decide which combinations of attributes define the ideal environment for their ads before making a buy or bid decision.

Targeting by environment is a new way to think about bidding for and buying ad placements in these real time marketplaces. It’s not just about the audience, but also where and when to reach that audience that matters. Once the guys with the money get comfortable with the audience and the environment, we will see a tectonic shift in how dollars are spent online.

Andy Ellenthal is CEO of semantic advertising company Peer39, responsible for setting and overseeing the company’s strategy and growth. He was previously CEO of quadrantONE, a joint online advertising venture of major media companies including The New York Times, Gannett, Hearst, and The Tribune. Prior to that Andy led sales efforts for PointRoll, making that company the industry’s #1 rich media solutions provider. In addition he held a number of sales management roles at DoubleClick, Inc., where he was Vice President  of Advertisers’ Solutions.

Google (which has been emphasizing its display efforts recently), Gannett-owned PointRoll, and others offer rich media ad builders, but Oggifinogi said it’s the only company that integrates interactive ads with “real-time bidding” systems, where each ad impression is priced and purchased separately. Those systems are gaining support as a way to lower costs and give advertisers the opportunity to tweak their campaigns and ads as needed.

Greycroft Partners led the round, while iNovia Capital, Contour Venture Partners, individual investors also participated. In the funding press release, Greycroft partner Ian Sigalow says, “Oggifinogi allows advertisers to embed any functionality inside a standard ad unit –- from video to fully-interactive websites –- and the campaigns can be built in hours instead of weeks.”

Bellevue, Wash.-based Oggifinogi says it has created ad campaigns for more than 100 brands. You can see sample ads at the company’s website.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where the odd name comes from, TechFlash has the answer: “The name derives from two Italian words — Oggi which means ‘today’ and the slang term Finogi which translates to ‘finish what you start.’”

DoubleVerify

Given the importance of online advertisements as a key source of revenue on the web, it’s also important to make sure that the ads are getting served correctly. DoubleVerify’s ad verification service does just that, and allows those in the ad supply chain — including publishers, marketers, agencies, and ad networks — to better keep track of individual ads.

We’ve previously covered the launch of DoubleVerify’s realtime ad verification service, which crawls websites and automatically captures screenshots of offending ad placement. The real-time verification service said its technology is effective: Among sites that demonstrated 10 to 30 percent of ads that didn’t meet buyer’s specifications — including one that was off by a massive 70 percent — DoubleVerify was able to reduce those numbers to zero after notifying the offending sites and the ad agency behind the ads.

The company’s competitors include Collective and AdXpose. Its co-founder and CEO Oren Netzer says that DoubleVerify differs from the rest because it is more comprehensive.

Notably, the company’s service can see ads through nested IFrames — a coding technique which makes ads appear as if they are being delivered from a different page. Some 70 percent of online ad impressions are delivered via nested IFrames, and DoubleVerify tells us it’s the only ad verification company which can properly track those ads. It’s competitors, of course, take issue with that claim: A representative from AdXpose tells us that its product can also see through IFRAMES.

The company currently tracks more than 25 billion ads per month — a multiple of what its competitors verify combined. Its customers include over 50 Fortune 500 marketers.

DoubleVerify’s second round of funding was led by Institutional Venture Partners. It previously raised raised $3.5 million in funding from Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, and individual investors.