MediaPost reports that display ad impressions have doubled year over year.  And people keep saying the banner ad is dead? It is amazing how much inventory web email applications generate, with it being 42.3% of total inventory, and Yahoo Mail accounting for 30.3% of total inventory on their own.  Also interesting to see Myspace rocket up to #2 with 15.6% of all ads.

One that is now apparent with the Yield Manager marketplace that RMX Direct ties into is that it’s a community marketplace. There are relationships between publishers, networks, and advertisers. Over time, I think we’ll start to add more community and social features into the platform.

As we develop RMXD, we’ve had the desire to add social features to it as well. In this case though, these would be features that allow publishers to interact with each other, and with their networks to some extent. The question we’ve been dealing with though, is what kind of social features make sense? Do publishers want to share their data with each other? Is it interesting to know how publishers with similar sites are performing? Do publishers want to leave each other comments and interact directly? Message boards? Is it helpful to know aggregate statistics like “the average eCPM for the Gaming Category”? Is it useful to know total stats for the entire RMXD product?

If anyone has any thoughts here, be sure to leave a comment. The more input the better as we internally talk about these things.

What exactly constitutes excessive cleavage? What is the difference between a woman reclining to relax and a woman in a supine, sexually suggestive position? I bet few people have ever discussed that at any business meeting, but here at Right Media these issues have been a hot topic (no pun intended). As we build Media Guard – Creative Review and create processes and guidelines, these interesting questions require us to consider community standards, the opinions of our clients and partners, and our own experience.

It’s never easy to define what others will see as obscene or objectionable. Not only does it vary country by country, but it also varies state by state. Often as our work progresses I am reminded of the frustrated Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 definition of obscene material, “I know it when I see it.� Unfortunately we cannot be as free-wheeling as Stewart suggests – we need a fair and clearly defined process. Additionally, we are not going to make the final decision about what is an annoying creative or what is acceptable to a publisher. Instead we are going to categorize creatives in as detailed a manner as possible, and then allow the publishers to select what types of creatives they want to allow on the website. Of course, the reality is that no matter how hard we try to make a formal set of classifications, we are always going to be subject to human judgment – what exactly is excessive cleavage? That’s where we, the Media Guard team of auditors, come in. Our job is to properly and uniformly classify the creatives, building a set of examples and “definitions� to make sure others can understand what is meant by each category and we take the responsibility very seriously.

Of course we don’t spend all day discussing the difference between an animated bikini and a real one. We also consider how granular our classifications should be, so that the categories will be useful to publishers as a method to accept or ban creatives. For example should we classify creatives with looping audio separately from creatives with a short noise? (yes.) Or should we have a category for creatives whose content is different from their landing page and does it matter what the content of the landing page is in those instances? (yes and yes.)

In determining these categories we bring not only our practical business knowledge to the table, we also bring our extensive experience as internet users. We too have tried to close a creative while surfing only to have it spawn a dozen pop-ups that also need to be closed. We don’t like it any more than the average internet user and know that publishers might want to exclude ads like that from appearing on their sites. That’s why we have a category for it in our audit list, and classify a creative as such if we discover that it uses such tactics.

As our Media Guard project progresses and we talk to our partners and colleagues we realize what an awesome responsibility we are undertaking. Mike Walrath called our team the “guardians of the free world�. I think he was only half-kidding.

The recent article in The Wall Street Journal by Julia Angwin, “Web Ads Appear On Racy Sites Despite Checks,� caused a lot of conversation at Right Media this week. A lot of that discussion centered on Media Guard, which will allow advertisers to keep their content off of sites that do not meet their content requirements. This functionality will be part of the second phase of the Media Guard development, Media Guard – Site Review (MG-SR).

Building out MG-SR and the processes around it will be a daunting task, and one that we are already thinking about. How will we be able to classify the content of all the sites that are in the Yield Manager Marketplace? As an example, how do we classify all of the user-generated content on MySpace, which can be changed and updated at anytime? Do we just classify all user-generated content as such, with no additional classification and effectively make those pages caveat emptor (which we assume will lead most conservative advertisers to choose not to run on pages thus classified)? Will this take so much content essentially non-classified that it ruins the goal of MG-SR? Of particular interest, a recent article in The Economist, “Murdoch’s Space�, discusses some of the issues that MySpace is addressing to be sure it is attractive to advertisers.

I thought that the WSJ article dealt with some much bigger issues than pure content classification, such as network re-selling and advertisers being disintermediated in the buying process, which are beyond the scope of Media Guard. But by tackling these issues of content classification, with MG-SR, we should be able to solve some of the major end problems (ads on inappropriate sites) that advertisers face.

Of course there is a lot more to say about this topic and how we tackle these problems that advertisers face and develop the best solution for them, but for now we are currently focused on getting MG- CR into a live mode - an exciting time! We have several “auditors� who have started and are getting close to the first major lock-down of the classifications for creatives. Then we will move into a beta test with some live ads to get comfortable with the flow and timing. Then after moving into live mode for all creatives, we can really start to focus on creating MG-SR and solving some the problems that advertisers face.