As the new Head of the Right Media Exchange, Ramsey McGrory shares his vision for the future of the company.

Have you ever gone to a pro baseball game in early spring and wondered if your favorite team will make it to the World Series?  I’m in that place right now with my new job coaching Right Media through what I believe will be an exciting and promising season.

As one of Right Media’s earliest employees, I was excited to expand my role within Yahoo! and come back to the Exchange. Now that I’m about a month into the transition, I want to share where I’ve been and my initial thoughts for operating the largest ad exchange in the industry.

From when Right Media was acquired in mid-2007 until now, I’ve held several positions in the company.  From 2008 to 2009, I led Yahoo!’s Agency Development team, overseeing relationships with our largest holding company clients.  Anyone who believes agencies are dead hasn’t spent time with the agency visionaries who I have worked with.  There are incredible leaders at all levels at these agencies and they will continue to be a force that shapes how the industry evolves. Yahoo! has a long and trusted relationship with agencies and that will continue.

During my time working with the agencies, I became interested in how agencies and Yahoo! are both focused on leveraging data in the digital media buying process to create insights and effectively engage consumers. That’s why I accepted a role overseeing data strategy and business development.

My experience with agencies also deepened my understanding of how advertisers, agencies and third parties are leveraging data to generate awareness, interest and intent among consumers. The collaboration of buyers, sellers and trusted third parties is critical to delivering on the promise of digital advertising.  At Yahoo!, two examples of how we leverage data are 1) through closed-loop targeting and measurement through our Consumer Direct solution (a partnership with Nielsen) and 2) by using data to provide site context to help ensure marketers are showing on brand-appropriate sites.

Now that I have come back to Right Media, my agency knowledge has helped me define our strategies for marketplace sustainability and growth.  We are committed to keeping the Exchange as a cornerstone of the bidded display marketplace – with massive audience and the tools needed to drive efficient and effective media buying. We have efforts underway to capitalize on the supply, demand and data opportunities that will enable the most vibrant marketplace possible while leveraging the depth and scale of Yahoo! and Right Media together.  For example, the recent demand-side platform (DSP) pilot is a partnership between Right Media and Yahoo! to facilitate the DSPs.

Over the next few months, I plan to continue meeting with as many RMX members and market participants as I can.  I will listen to everything you have to say.  While it’s certainly gratifying to look back and see how far the Exchange has come, it’s even more exciting to look at what’s ahead. We’re still in the early innings and I’ve got a solid team. There’s a lot more baseball to be played.

– Ramsey McGrory, Head of the Right Media Exchange

I am delighted to announce that Right Media has launched a new web site and blog that reflect both our business objectives and our evolution as a company.  I’m particularly excited that our site now illustrates the new market ecosystem of our industry.  Visitors to the site can learn about Right Media’s capabilities for serving additional customer segments — such as demand-side platforms, ad agencies, and data players.

We invite you to visit our new site and blog often as we’re planning frequent updates about our solutions, insights and events that you won’t want to miss.

Right Media’s General Manager Bill Wise was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal last week, touting our “significant” lead over the competition. He also explained how Yahoo’s web sites are part of the Exchange ecosystem and represent a “must buy” for advertisers.

Wall Street Journal subscribers can read the full article.

As brand marketers bring more dollars online, Right Media is actively addressing the needs of the differentiated ad networks, direct advertisers, and global agencies to enable brand safety in our premium marketplace.  In the coming weeks, we will further define how the Right Media ecosystem is evolving in the following areas:

• Right Media Goes Premium: We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again! Last year, we tightened our focus on providing premium, differentiated demand and premium, transparent supply.  We’ve adjusted our strategy and charged our business development team with signing only premium, transparent brand buyers and sellers.

• Third -Party Technology: Right Media is focusing on developing relationships with partners who provide brand safety and verification technologies.  Our Exchange Technology Partner Program helps identify and support third-party technology to extend the capabilities of the Right Media Exchange.

• More Metrics: Our customers have asked for it and we plan to deliver! Right Media is in the process of identifying a set of Exchange-wide metrics as brand safety indicators. 

• Publisher Transparency: Marketplace Select was launched in July 2007 to facilitate site list sharing between sellers and buyers. Today, the program has 145 members.  We’ve also significantly increased the percentage of transparent exchange-wide validated URLs (VURLs).  Now, we are working on an initiative to help facilitate launching more types of premium buys on the Exchange and removing some of the obstacles created by rich media, expandable ads, and brand surveys.

• Product and Policy: We continue to invest in both product and policy and we will work to strengthen our commitment running an open exchange while protecting all participants.

We are looking forward to sharing our 2010 plans with you and welcome your feedback!

— Brooke Wyard & Megan Pagliuca

Earlier this week, we announced that Right Media will discontinue supporting the Direct Media Exchange (DMX) – our self-serve platform for small publishers looking to monetize their sites.  The DMX site will serve ads through January 31st and DMX participants can access their reports through March 1st.

This was a strategic business decision and it was made after careful consideration of our business model.  We believe that the future of the Right Media Exchange lies in the premium marketplace and we have spent the second of half of 2009 paving the way for what we anticipate will be a very exciting 2010.

We welcome the opportunity to share how we can help our clients and potential partners leverage the Exchange to enhance their businesses.  I encourage existing Right Media clients to reach out to their account manager or directly to me so that we can craft a specific strategy for your business.  If you are not currently a client, we would like to explore how we may work together in the future.  Potential partners may contact Steven Woolway at stevenw@yahoo-inc.com.

We’re looking forward to sharing our success with you in the coming months.

Stephanie Dorman
Senior Director, Client Services and Operations
skane@yahoo-inc.com

We have always been, and continue to be, an entrepreneurial group here at Right Media:  We continually challenge the norm.   We push each other to iterate and innovate– if not through code then through creative solutions.  We challenge, learn, and evolve with our top customers.  In fact, we challenge each other so much I urge people to yell, “challenge” in internal meetings if they don’t agree with something being said- it could be on a position during a heated discussion, could be on a market theory, could be on product prioritization… heck, it could be on what we decide to order for lunch!

In 2005, Right Media established ourselves as the first ad exchange when there was so much friction in the market that it seemed like anyone with an ad server could call themselves an ad network.  Today, we are the largest exchange with tremendous scale.  More than 120,000 active global buyers and sellers and roughly 9 billion transactions pass through the Right Media Exchange every day. It was always our goal to take the installed base of buyers, sellers, and overall marketplace liquidity and continue our maturation towards a more premium and differentiated offering.

Today, online advertising is again at a critical point in its evolution. Consumers are spending more and more of their time online and we as an industry have not effectively shown large marketers why the dollars should shift as well.  Now, that’s changing: The advertising community wants an upscale, high-quality marketplace where audiences can be bought at scale, and in real-time.  Yahoo! and Right Media have been at the forefront of this shift and we will continue to leverage the Exchange to capitalize on this trend.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that Right Media has refined its strategy to become a premium exchange focused on being transparent, differentiated and interoperable.  Our premium supply and demand ad platform will support an ecosystem of leading and differentiated digital advertising companies, including differentiated ad networks, leading advertisers, global ad agencies, premium publishers, data providers, and technology innovators in our non-guaranteed marketplace.

We also will have demand-side platform (DSP) capabilities, which is a marketer-focused buying solution that transparently manages media spend across multiple supply marketplaces.  Our premium ad exchange will enable clients to leverage value-added data across the supply and demand of the Exchange and offer  integration (interoperability) with other exchanges.

To read more about this topic, Advertising Age posted a story today about our new strategy. I hope that you will keep reading our blog for more updates about the Exchange.  And please feel free to tell us what you think by leaving a comment.  As you now know, I love a good “Challenge!”

—Bill Wise, Yahoo! VP/GM, Ad Platforms