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Tag Archive for advertising

| October 12, 2012
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Opportunities and Challenges in a Fragmented Mobile Landscape

This is the first in a series of posts walking readers through the mobile advertising space. Stay tuned for more posts over the coming weeks. This is also posted on the Rubicon Project blog.

Fragmented Mobile

Fixing Mobile

Everyone recognizes that mobile advertising is a rapidly growing market. How fast is it growing? eMarketer has current year revenue estimates at $3.9 Billion. According to the Yankee Group mobile ad sales should nearly triple by 2016 to $10 Billion.  I think this estimate is low given the acceleration in market growth we’ve experienced so far this year alone. Revised eMarketer numbers now indicate nearly 100% growth for 2012 over 2011.  Further, eMarketer predicts that mobile will grow to over $23 Billion by 2016. This is much more consistent with Mary Meeker’s prediction of a $20 Billion mobile market.

Given this tremendous market opportunity, we have seen first-hand that numerous publishers are moving to mobile – building mobile applications, optimizing their web content and trying to figure out how to turn that mobile content into a dependable revenue stream. We are glad publishers are jumping in and are excited to be in the mobile space as well. However, we have also witnessed headwinds in this developing market and would like to use this blog to help publishers address these challenges.

The mobile display advertising space has some distinct challenges that fly in the face of the status quo of online display. These challenges conspire to make it more difficult for publishers to advertise across their mobile inventory. A primary complication is that there are three major operating systems (plus Blackberry), each with subtle differences that require research and technology to overcome. Let’s explore how each of these platforms differ.

Apple’s iPhones do not support Flash and ship with third party cookies disabled by default. The lack of Flash strongly affects the user experience and the ability to deliver Flash-based rich media creatives that render in online display (troublesome on iPad, where standard display ads are typically viewed with little loss of fidelity relative to their online counterparts). Additionally, the lack of third party cookies makes it difficult to perform simple audience targeting that we’ve grown accustomed to.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 platform is touted as having twice as much HTML 5 support, but still lags behind Chrome (Android), Safari (iOS) and even Blackberry.  We are hopeful that Windows Phone 8 will support HTML 5 to the point that publishers and advertisers can leverage the same mobile web ads across platforms.  However, there is a possibility that a lack of full HTML 5 support will require custom ad units for this platform. On top of that, Windows Phone 8 may also ship with the new Do Not Track (DNT) flag turned on, severely limiting the ability for publishers to achieve higher rates through traditional tracking and targeting.

Google’s Android platform seems to be the most compliant to the needs of the industry.  Android supports 3rd party cookies, DNT is disabled by default, device IDs are available in the app environment and it even supports Flash.  Of course this all supports Google’s advertising business, but they’re nice enough to keep the platform open for a variety of complementary and competitive third parties. By creating an environment most closely resembling online display, Google has made it easier for publishers to incorporate Android to their mobile experiences.

Where does all of this fragmentation leave us? Many publishers have been successful in traversing this fragmented market. If you are new to mobile, it can be daunting to figure out where to start. A logical starting point is to figure out what mobile devices are most common among your audience and focus on building your mobile presence there (at least initially). That way you limit the number of challenges you have to deal with. Eventually you will have to accommodate users across a variety of devices and platforms, so working with a partner that is platform-agnostic is critical. Look for partners that have a history of ad serving across platforms and formats.

In this series of posts, I hope to help provide some insights to help publishers that are still trying to make sense of the market. What challenges do you face in mobile? What specifically would you like insight and tips on? Comment below and I’ll incorporate into the subsequent posts.

Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| July 16, 2012
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Mobilizing Monetization

For the last six months my primary focus at Rubicon has been on our mobile strategy.  For me, last year was the year of Real-Time Bidding and this year is the year of Mobile.  Here’s an excerpt from my blog post that accompanied the initial launch of our mobile offering today. This post is also published on the Rubicon Project blog

Mobile AdvertisingIn 2013, eMarketer data suggests that the US mobile advertising market will be a two billion dollar business.  Over one third of those dollars will hit display advertising on mobile devices.   This is not a steady state.  The market is growing 45%-60% year over year, and this trend will continue for at least the next few years.

Publishers are having difficulty capitalizing on this trend.  Several sources suggest that only 25% of available display inventory is being sold.  With such low fill rates it’s no wonder that, to this point, mobile display advertising has been on the back burner for many of them.

In 2011 Rubicon conducted a publisher survey on a wide variety of aspects in the digital advertising market.  While many important topics ranked highly as publisher concerns, mobile was at the top of the list.  Our customers were asking us for a solution.

A typical mobile solution currently employed by many publishers involves running direct campaigns with one of several mobile ad-serving platforms.  Most of these systems have tools to target and serve direct campaigns, display reports and send unfilled inventory to a mediation partner.  This partner makes efforts to fill the inventory with the ads on hand, but typically serves blank ads much of the time.

During our mobile research in the first quarter of 2012 we found that a true monetization platform that handled mobile inventory properly for buyers and sellers was lacking in the market.  Some SSPs were offering mobile monetization, but the inventory they brought to the market was not always optimized for display on mobile devices.  Other vendors were offering an exclusively mobile solution, which required publishers to log into yet another system.

In the second quarter, the Rubicon Project acquired a small mobile company out of San Francisco and immediately set itself on a path to bring a holistic monetization solution for publishers that addressed display advertising in both online and mobile mediums.  Rubicon is making high quality, mobile optimized inventory available and attracting high quality demand partners to buy it.  Rubicon’s REVV for Mobile solution will bring higher fill rates to publishers at higher rates.

It was important to address both publisher needs and demand partner concerns.  REVV will isolate and validate mobile optimized inventory for buyers, which will bring greater buyer confidence and higher prices for the inventory.  Publishers will also have an opportunity to take advantage of our new mobile ad server for scheduling their direct campaigns as well as build highly interactive ad units that take advantage of the rich features of today’s smartphones.

With these powerful tools, REVV for Mobile will empower publishers to finally take advantage of the rapidly growing mobile advertising market.  Buyers and sellers will find the liquidity they’re looking for to transact safe advertising deals in mobile, just like they do in online display.

Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , , ,
| March 13, 2012
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Daily and Global Cap Primer

This is the second part in a series on The Basics of Online Advertising. I’ll be posting a new entry each week for the next four or five weeks.

What are the Daily and Global Caps?

The Daily Cap is the limit of the number times an ad is shown throughout the day. With branded campaigns these are usually in the 10s or 100s of thousands. When used on a performance campaign it can vary based on the confidence in performance for the given targeting parameters. When the cap is achieved the ad stops serving. The next day the ad starts serving again until it reaches the daily cap once more.

The Global Cap is a bit of a misnomer. It behaves as the limiter for the entire campaigns impressions from beginning to end. Once the global the ad stops serving, period. It doesn’t start up again the next day. In ideal circumstances the global and daily cap are harmonious so that the daily cap was restrictive enough, but not overly restrictive such that the global cap was reached or nearly reached on the end date of the campaign. Mathematically speaking – an ideal daily cap is equal to the global cap divided by the number of days in the campaign.

What happens if a campaign falls behind as a result of the daily cap? Read more

Category: Free Ideas | Tags: , , ,
| March 12, 2012
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Using Proportional Control for Better Campaign Pacing

My post was originally published on the Rubicon Project blog. It was written with contributions from Dr. Neal Richter and Jonathan Zhuang.

Pacing algorithms come in a few basic forms at the Rubicon Project. The most basic is one called “as fast as possible” which can hardly be shown to do anything that resembles pacing. The Pacing controller is supposed to spread out impressions served for a campaign throughout the day. In general it takes the goal of impressions to serve in a given day as input and calculates a serving schedule for the campaign.

Estimated Curve of Available Impressions

A naive pacing algorithm will break the day up into 24 segments, let’s call them hours. It will allocate equal amounts of campaign impression for each hour and then recommend the campaign get impressions until the hour’s allocation is exhausted. This algorithm has a couple of pretty big flaws. Primarily it tends to serve the campaigns at the beginning of each hour and then once the allocated impressions are used up it stops serving until the next hour. The second flaw is that it has no understanding of the traffic distribution throughout the day. The 1AM hour doesn’t have the same amount of traffic coming in as the 10AM hour. If the inventory is relatively scarce the campaign will under-serve during the early hours, catch up during the peak hours, and then under-serve again in the later hours. Ultimately campaigns using this algorithm may not achieve their goals at the end of the day and it won’t serve evenly in a given hour. Read more

Category: Working On It | Tags: , , , ,
| February 29, 2012
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In a world without cookies

I’m hoping your mental audio kicked in with an interpretation of a movie trailer with a Don LaFontaine voiceover when you read the title. I wrote this post in response to a lot of articles written from a position of fear from the advertising industry at the prospect of web browsers shipping with 3rd party cookies disabled. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and should not be construed as the opinions of my employer, associations or other groups I happen to belong to.

There’s a lot of highly visible worry in the news lately about online advertising losing the ability to set 3rd party cookies in a web browser. This technology is used to perform a variety of seemingly critical tasks: retargeting, audience targeting, frequency capping, user identification for RTB and probably a hundred other things – most of which I try not to know in detail.

The biggest concern seems to be that this growing part of the industry gets turned upside down if more browser companies decide to ship their products with 3rd party cookie disabled by default. Apple did this with their Safari browser which has been one component responsible for slowing down advertiser adoption of iOS devices. But advertisers have alternatives (like: display ads in other browsers, keywords, and online video ads) that they’re more comfortable with anyway, so there’s no telling how much of an impact the lack of 3rd party cookies on iPhones and iPads really has on the growth of the mobile ad revenue stream. Read more

Category: Free Ideas, Working On It | Tags: , , ,
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