Four aspects of transparency that are often overlooked

Earlier in the year, we shared our thoughts on the road ahead for Right Media, including a renewed focus on premium, third party technology integrations, more metrics, new products and policies, and improved publisher transparency.  I’d like to focus on transparency because it allows the Right Media Exchange to better address brand advertisers’ concerns.

We’re not the only ones talking about transparency.  If you search for “transparency” on AdExchanger, you get 160 different results!  While much of the discussion has focused on site transparency,  there are at least four additional dimensions of transparency that buyers need from their supply partners working on exchanges:

1. Targeting: Publishers are pressured to allow a very broad a range of targeting – age, gender, contextual, section, channel, the list goes on and on.  The challenge is relaying that information to the appropriate buyer so that they know which partners to work with when running a campaign targeting age and gender or when running a contextual campaign.
2. Geo: Many buyers are expanding their operations to new countries, accelerating their need to find supply in the right volumes and regions.
3. Creative: If you’ve ever tried to run an expandable ad unit across all your inventory suppliers, you’ve probably run into some problems.  There are inefficiencies around learning the types of creatives that your supply sources do and do not accept.
4. Brand Surveys: As we continue to see advertising spending from major brand advertisers migrate online, it’s increasingly important to help eliminate barriers to running brand surveys on network and publisher inventory.  Brand surveys help advertisers understand how their brand is viewed in the market and which brand attributes are preferred by customers.

We’ve talked before about how Right Media addresses site transparency with the Marketplace Select program, which consists of 90 buyer and 51 seller participants who share their site lists with partners they trust.  What does this mean for buyers?  Nearly three-quarters of impressions served through Right Media are coming from sellers who provide site-level transparency.

In an effort to address geography, creatives and brand surveys, we’ve invited our supply partners to participate in a supply transparency survey.  In less than three weeks, we already have 18 of the Exchange’s biggest supply partners participating in the program.  Here’s a small sampling of the types of questions we’re asking partners:

- Is your inventory contextually targetable using RMX query strings?

- Which rich media vendors do you accept?

- Do you allow creatives with audio? Flash creatives? Rotating creatives?

- What types of brand measurement surveys do you allow?

Right Media’s Supply Transparency Survey offers publishers a forum to showcase their inventory and attract top advertisers. It transforms the Right Media marketplace to allow transactions between brand buyers and high-quality inventory providers, and is yet another program enabling the Exchange to move up market.  Exchange partners should stay tuned and look for our findings in the Knowledge Base in the near future.

– Megan Bergholdt, Head of Consulting