09.22
Imagine a world where website publishers never have to deal with digital display advertisers and those advertisers never have to deal with website publishers, where publishers could sell 100% of their display ad inventory and get paid with a single payment once a month. A world where advertisers have the choice to run campaigns on as many sites as they can, but only have to make one payment a month. That world got a lot closer last week with the launch of the DoubleClicks AdExchange a.k.a DAX.
When DoubleClick was acquired by Google back in April 2007 there was a lot of speculation as to what they were going to do with it. DoubleClick was responsible for delivering more than half the third party display ads in the world and Google had developed the largest text ad marketplace in the world, so together they were bound to create something big.
Last week DoubleClick announced the long awaited roll out of it’s new display ad marketplace with some significant implications for the global digital marketing industry. The most significant feature of the network is that it now brings together Ad Sense, Ad Words and anyone with a DoubleClick Ad Server into one network creating the largest digital display ad network in the world.
So if you are a publisher you can now simply release your inventory to the Ad Sense network auction and a pool of highest bidders. You won’t need to worry about trafficking individual orders or collecting individual payments…Google will take care of that for you. However, to ensure control over yields, larger publishers with their own DoubleClick servers will be able to manage how that inventory is released to the network and how it is priced and monetized.
Advertisers will now be able to go to Ad Words and bid on a huge network of available display ads in all shapes and sizes with granular content, geo and demo targeting. Advertisers will be able to access this network via traditional AdWords controls or via their own DFA (Dart for Advertisers) servers if they have them. Using (and paying for) the DFA solution will allow additional reporting and campaign controls above and beyond the free interface…like we didn’t see that one coming.
The biggest impact to the industry will be the end of the ridiculously outdated and inefficient practice of building media plans then sending separate IO’s to each publisher, then hoping that they all traffic your ads properly and then waiting for each site to send incomparable delivery reports back to you. Over time this dramatic reduction in ad sales and operations processes will allow publishers to reduce or even eliminate ad sales, ad operations and ad finance teams. Advertisers will also be able to reduce staff costs as much less time will be needed to handle the administration of campaign booking and reporting.
This will also give rise to new strategies and methodologies for building campaigns and websites. No longer will media plans need to preemptively speculate on the best mix, automatic yield management will execute that for the client based on immediate market conditions. Publishers will have to create more dynamic content programs with a focus on audience composition over volume as well as embed editorial agility allowing content to be developed quickly to meet market demands.
The most interesting new feature that comes with this network is “Real Time Bidding”. This is how DoubleClick describes it:
Real-time bidder. The Ad Exchange has a new real-time bidder feature that allows buyers to use their own data, optimization and ad serving technologies to bid on their desired inventory on an impression-by-impression basis, choosing only the sites, audiences, or particular type of ad space they want to reach.
For those that were just getting the hang of the quantum complicated dynamics of the PPC text auction, figuring out “Real Time Bidding” is going to create a boom of bleeding nose excel sheets. What we can expect is a whole new world of opportunity for math geeks and consultants as the network begins to gain momentum.
What has been curious about the launch is how quietly this roll out has been handled. Likely because neither Google nor DoubleClick need or want immediate attention for what some might see as another monopoly in the making. The dramatic economic and operational benefits will be extremely difficult for publishers and advertisers to ignore, especially the larger older media publishers facing growing fiscal pressure. The depth to which both organizations are entrenched as utilities within the industry almost ensures that the question is not “if” DAX is going to become the industries single ad platform but “when”.
But as all things this large in the digital marketing industry, there’s no threat transition will happen quickly. Ad inventory is the life blood of many online publishers and shifting their ad processes is a slow painful act that is going to depend on the development of a body of testing which verifies consistency, stability and upward monetization before any big publisher trusts anyone with their ads, even Google. At the same time, over a mere 5 years Google has been able to single-handedly create the largest global marketing revenue shift with PPC Text with no track record…so this one should be a piece of cake.
Over the next few weeks (and months) as more information rolls out I’ll be doing a series of articles on DAX and what it means for both publishers and advertisers, especially in the Canadian Marketplace
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Martin Byrne. Martin Byrne said: From #DMC: DAX and How Google just Changed the Ad World…Again http://bit.ly/38cGIQ [...]
Just so everyone knows “DAX” is not the official name of the platform…but it’s a lot more fun that “Doubleclick Ad Network”
This makes a few very big assumptions: 1. that mainstream publishers will let DAX place ads on their site. Most don’t allow google’s current text ads or the adsense banners. 2. that publishers will make more money from this system than from selling their own inventory. PPC is a sucker’s game for publishers. To paraphrase a recent presentation from ComScore: “PPC is giving your inventory away for pennies. If publishers are dumb enough to sell their inventory on a PPC basis, advertisers should be smart enough to buy it”. Publishers aren’t that dumb. If they are, then they deserve their bankruptcy 3. Advertisers don’t care about where their ads appear. We’ve been able to place banners in the Google inventory for years, this is nothing new. Why aren’t we? Because those banners generally end up on crappy little sites, and too often on questionable content. If you have a problem with that, there is no recourse. That’s not to say that advertisers aren’t using adsense, but it hasn’t replaced direct buys on premium sites either.
Valid points, the intent seems to be to use the contral features of within DoubleClick to allow both Advertisers and Publishers more control and accuracy so that they aren’t just doing run of network.
As for network ads on the sites and revenues, most all of the larger Canadian publishers now backfill inventory with ad network inventory and the dirty secret is that few major publishers are achieving a true eCPM of above $0.50 as few can achieve better than 40% sell through.
The DAX certainly won’d displace premium and sponsored spots, I agree, but for the remaining 80% of inventory that most publishers have a hard time moving, and spend a lot of sales/ops dollars monetizing, this will be a very tempting solution