Come meet us in New York and L.A.
We love to meet our clients, hear first-hand what’s on their minds and offer solutions to your business needs. That’s why we host a breakfast series for our clients called “Eggs & Exchanges” where we highlight strategies for helping them to increase revenue on the Right Media Exchange.
The next breakfast series will be held in New York City on September 16 and in Los Angeles on September 24. We’re particularly excited about the program:
Session 1: “Servicing Brand Advertisers: A Yield Opportunity”
As offline advertising dollars shift online and brand campaigns move to performance, networks and publishers are presented with several opportunities to increase yield. This session looks at how ad operations teams can increase yield by having tools in place to drive better performance results than their network competitors and by providing site transparency to alleviate brand advertiser concerns.
Session 2: “Improving Quality: How to Create Revenue with the Least Risk.”
Proper creative management affects all Exchange members. In this session, we will look at the process from the perspective of buyers, sellers and networks as well as share troubleshooting techniques and escalation procedures.
If you’re already a client, we hope to see you at Eggs & Exchanges. If you’re not currently working with Right Media and would like to learn more about us, drop an email to rightmediaevents@yahoo-inc.com and we’ll get back to you.
–Liza Cichowski, Brand Experience Manager, Right Media Exchange
The health and safety of an exchange depend upon its participants
Online security is a problem as old as the internet itself. Despite the ongoing efforts of the computer software and security industries to combat threats such as viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other malicious code, we and other online businesses, find ourselves in an arms race with the perpetrators, who continue to launch attacks with increasing sophistication. Unfortunately, advertisers, agencies, networks, publishers and consumers are becoming more vulnerable to these insidious new threats, which threaten not just the online advertising industry, but the Internet economy as a whole.
What can you do?
As frictionless trading between ad networks becomes more and more important, advertisers are looking for innovative ways to maximize their return on investment and publishers are looking to limit the amount of unsold inventory. Liquidity in the marketplace should not come at the expense of quality, and we are committed to balancing the revenue or performance goals of our customers while at the same time helping them to drive a positive user experience. This means that all stakeholders must be even more diligent about whom they do business with and use reputation as one of the determining attributes, instead of relying solely on revenue. If we sacrifice quality, there is a much higher risk of driving away brand advertisers who are turning to performance advertising as a more targeted, measurable and cost-effective marketing strategy.
Since the Right Media Exchange is an open technology platform that our customers—advertisers, agencies, networks and publishers—use to do business more directly and with greater visibility and control, we are not involved in ad creation or in the purchase or sale of online media. That’s why the overall health and safety of our marketplace depends on the efforts of all platform participants.
The Right Media approach
Our approach to combating threats to the Exchange includes trying to proactively implement industry-leading safeguards that protect our customers, their constituents and, ultimately, their end-users.
For example, all creatives or ad tags that run through the Exchange are tested by our Creative Tester technology (part of Media Guard) in an effort to detect and ban creatives exhibiting malicious behavior such as viruses and program installs, or that display attributes we consider to be high risk. Creative Tester subjects every creative or ad tag trafficked into the Exchange to a series of tests which simulate an impression, load the creative and record the technical attributes detected during the creative load. When Creative Tester detects certain types of malicious behavior, it automatically deactivates the creative and notifies the Exchange member who trafficked the creative or ad tag.
The Exchange also uses an automated detection program called SCOUR that checks Exchange traffic regularly, searching for patterns exhibited by desktop software and flagging sections that exhibit what, in our opinion, may be malicious traffic patterns. If we detect that some or all impressions from a particular section of a site on the Exchange have been initiated by applications that are prohibited by our policies, they are automatically deactivated (thereby making them ineligible to receive further ads via the Exchange and to generate any revenue for the publisher).
Keeping up the fight
Our continued investment in protective measures and the implementation of mechanisms like the ones highlighted above are helping Right Media protect all participants in the Exchange ecosystem from potential harm. However, attackers continuously find new, sophisticated ways to circumvent safeguards and malicious software applications continue to evolve in their behavior and delivery methods. We’re always working to understand these new threats so we can develop tools that can weed them out as quickly as possible.
Although the task at hand is challenging, we believe that by partnering with Exchange participants who are equally committed to eliminating these threats at their source, we can make meaningful progress. Right Media welcomes all thoughts and suggestions on this important issue because we believe that if we work together, we can maintain our leading position as the largest, healthiest and most successful online Ad Exchange on the market.
—Nilesh Zacharias, Director, Policy and Operations
Everyone’s talking about real-time bidding capabilities
I remember the day I realized that media exchanges like Right Media had technology that facilitated the selling of inventory on a per-impression basis, by allowing bids to be made on each and every opportunity. I was so excited by it that I immediately kicked the guaranteed world to the curb, and jumped head first into Right Media.
The concept was simple: The highest bidder won the impression. I was amazed that bids could be evaluated so quickly and a winner chosen in real time, and even more so that the value of the inventory could be decided in real time based on market demand. Once I learned this, I was unable to focus on anything else transpiring in the industry, especially guaranteed or reserved buying.
Now we’re heading into a new era. It is still real time, but now it is real-time bidding. Advertisers are rushing to get set up with their own real-time bidding capabilities and hook directly into Right Media’s supply pool. In fact, it is a topic of discussion in every client meeting I attend. Every moment matters and they want to optimize their bids—in real time.
Bidding through third-party integration
Third-party integration requires two key platform capabilities: auction broadcasting and real-time bidding systems. What’s needed is the capability on the supply side to externalize the auction (auction broadcasting), while partners on the demand side provide the real-time bidding systems that are able to respond to that broadcast in real time.
If all of this sounds awfully similar to what Right Media already does on behalf of our demand and supply customers on every ad request, you’re correct: We’ve been doing real-time bidding for years. We were the first to offer it, we became the largest provider, and we are still the largest supply pool of real-time, bidded, non-guaranteed inventory.
What’s so special about this?
Externally broadcasting supply opportunities allow demand aggregators (large publishers, networks, agencies, and tech providers) to use their own predictive engines to decide on a unique bid value per impression. Traditionally these bid values were static, set per line within Right Media, and Exchange members relied on Right Media’s predictive technology to bid on their behalf within pre-configured constraints.
Today, Right Media’s dynamic pricing evaluates impressions and bids differently for every impression, based on many parameters in our predictive algorithm. In the new era of real-time bidding, external third parties will be able to use and control their own prediction mechanisms outside of the Exchange, and to use their own ad selection logic and optimization.
Who needs real-time bidding?
Real-time bidding won’t be for everyone. For many of our customers who bring demand to the ecosystem, using Right Media’s predictive algorithms is the best path to take, as it’s in real time and is dynamic. You won’t need to make large capital expenditures to build out the capabilities needed to participate in real-time bidding. Also, you’ll be able to get very sophisticated with your Yield Manager set-up, including automating the adjustments of bids per line item by using Right Media’s APIs.
Stay tuned for more on this exciting new technology, and please share your thoughts on real-time bidding by posting comments on this blog. Is this good for the industry, or bad? What are your concerns as an advertiser, or as a publisher? Will it raise publisher CPMs and performance? Comment below…
— Pedro Ponce de Leon, Senior Manager, Professional Services
Marketplace Select helps you avoid surprises with your ads
It’s Monday morning. You have your coffee, your bagel, and your morning meetings ready. Then, the call comes: “What the *#% is my finance ad doing on an adult site?” Well, your Monday and next-quarter budget are instantly undone.
This is exactly why people get nervous working with blind ad networks or exchanges. And it is exactly why brand advertisers can have a hard time making the transition into the nonguaranteed space. Never ones to shy away from a challenge, we decided to tackle this issue on our blog.
Know where your ads are
It’s clear that the way around this problem is transparency and control: transparency from sellers and controls that allow both buyers and sellers to help ensure proper delivery of ads. That’s why we created the Marketplace Select program at Right Media. We aim to create an open, transparent environment where even the most brand-concerned advertisers can have visibility into the content that they are purchasing through the Exchange.
Participation in the program is, of course, voluntary. So we decided to ask who would be willing to share a list of sites with approved partners for transparent media buys. The response has been overwhelming. Most networks and publishers on the Exchange not only don’t mind sharing a list, but care just as much about cleaning up inappropriate content and creating a trustworthy marketplace as buyers. That’s a good thing, because this goal takes cooperation from everyone.
Everyone benefits from a better marketplace, too. As one publisher said, “I can’t imagine anyone saying no. I’d think all Exchange participants would want brand campaigns with higher CPMs.”
Managing ad placement
Marketplace Select enables partners to share, manage, and approve site lists. We also recommend best practices for reducing content risk through, among other things, URL targeting and auditing.
Inappropriate content often shows up because networks have trouble controlling where their publishers place ad tags. To help alleviate this, we worked with Exchange members and derived a targeting solution for Marketplace Select that doesn’t depend on publisher classifications.
This system uses something called validated URL targeting, which lets the Right Media Exchange read the top level domain that an ad call comes from. That way you know exactly where the ads are running, regardless of publisher tag placement. This solution has become the preferred method by most Marketplace Select members and speaks to a growing commitment toward working together to keep the Exchange a viable and safer place to do business.
So, if you’re not part of the program, what are you waiting for? Contact your account manager to get involved. Your buyers will love you for it.
—Maggie Neuwald, Consulting Services
Sean Smith, Engagement Management
