Q. How is Right Media different than DART or Ad.com?
A. The way I usually answer the questions that you’re getting is to use an analogy. Let’s say you have some furniture to sell. You have a few options:
- Go to local furniture stores and negotiate as best as you can - or work on a consignment basis and get a cut
- Hold a yard sale and try to guess at how much you can get
- Advertise the items on eBay and let the market tell you what your furniture is worth
The first option is how traditional ad networks work. It’s the easiest way to get your product sold, but you pay a high premium and have little control. Even without collusion between sellers, there’s little incentive for networks to pay top dollar since market rates are fairly standard.
The second option, holding a yard sale, is a corollary to how DART and other ad servers let you optimize. In theory, you can get a bona fide flea market going in no time - people take a look at your inventory, make you offers, and you take the best ones. In practice - just like at most yard sales - it’s more trouble than it’s worth. The premium customers aren’t trolling yard sales; they’re at the antique dealers. You end up with bargain basement advertisers and a lot of overhead managing them.
The third option in many ways is the most appealing. There’s still some overhead (you pay eBay a fee to list your goods) and some work (promoting your store), but in general, you have access to an incredibly broad market. However, there’s no guarantee that you sell anything, and there’s no guarantee that the price you’ll get is as good as what you would have gotten from a dealer or a yard sale.
A Publisher / Network + Yield Manager is all three of these rolled into one. To keep with the furniture analogy, it’s like having all of the local dealers bring their customers directly to your yard sale, all at once, so you can hold an auction right at your front door with hundreds or thousands of people bidding. If you don’t feel like finding customers, no big deal - the dealers do the hard work. When you do bring in customers, you make more money in two ways: you don’t pay the dealers their finder’s fees, and you increase the competitiveness of the auction, driving the sale price up. Unlike a normal yard sale, you get the digital equivalent of a cajoling auctioneer who’ll squeeze every last dollar out of the bidders.
In advertising terms: the Publisher / Network and its partners act as dealers, bringing tens of thousands of premium, contextual, and behavioral deals to you on every impression. The Yield Manager technology lets you add your run-of-site and remnant deals to these, then runs the efficient auction to determine who to sell the impression to to get the most money. Yield Manager will help your sales force sell and manage these deals, and will help you get the most money from your properties and other dealers like Ad.com that you decide to work with.
