This Wednesday a few members will set out to rep for the DMX team at Twiistup. The unique conference is held in Santa Monica at the swanky Viceroy Hotel and it features influential bloggers, investors, techies, and fellow industry pros. We’re excited to be a sponsor and we’re looking forward to rubbing elbows with some of our publishers and network friends.

If you’re a publisher, a Right Media Exchange client or friend, or simply in Santa Monica and want to learn more about DMX, then we want to meet you! Shoot me an email at kkitchel@rightmedia.com.

Do you know this man?

This is Jon Young, our Inside Sales Executive for Direct Media Exchange; he will be walking the floor at the Affiliate Summit February 24-26, 2008 in warm Las Vegas, Nevada. If you have questions like “what’s an ad exchange?” or “what’s DMX”, this is the man to talk to.

Look for his face; he’s a great resource around here for publishers who are curious about Direct Media Exchange.

See you there!

We met bloggers. We used the term ‘networking’ profusely. We took pictures.

We (well, at least Cam and I) wore pajamas at the Hard Rock Hotel Pajama Party.

It was fun to meet publishers and show them some of the cool tools we all use to build traffic and better monetize blogs and sites: MyBlogLog, Direct Media Exchange, and the newly acquired network Blue Lithium–just to name a few. Yahoo! was in the running (ranked number one at one point) for the ‘people’s choice’ award for best booth (we lost out in the end, but it was thrilling all the same).

And, of course, there is the video ‘footage’ : our on-the-floor ‘educational sessions’ where we let the attendees teach us. Remember: always listen to your users…

Part 1: John Chow and other attendees
Part 2: Debbie Weil and other attendees

And if “still frames” are more your thing, check out M2’s Flickr set from the conference here.

Thanks to everyone who made this conference–and our attending it–possible!

As we started to plot out our first member conference a couple months ago, we spent a long time considering what makes these things more impactful. Topical sessions with great panelists? Without question. Solid networking opportunities? Absolutely. Ample social time with activities, great food and a few killer parties? Definitely. An amazing location that’s detached enough from the daily grind? A major plus.

Right Media Open (RMO), which starts on October 22, will have all of that. Moreover, if we agree that the most powerful conference reveals plenty of ideas and perspectives that you didn’t know before, it follows that we would try to figure out ways to facilitate those revelations. Industry leaders discussing the state of the market and their businesses, and prognosticating a bit, are critical parts of that, as are the side conversations over coffee. But it’s just as critical for participants to engage in spontaneous (and hopefully somewhat controversial) debate, and it’s from that kind of debate that we often get some real pearls.

It happens enough by itself, but what can we do to help bring some of that out? Mimosas for breakfast? Couldn’t hurt, but there are other, less headache-inducing ways as well:

- Try to create an environment of openness (just as we’ve created for the Exchange itself).
Now before those beads of sweat start streaming down your forehead, let’s be clear: we don’t want anyone giving away any family secrets, either in debate at RMO or in the course of business in the marketplace. The ability to choose exactly how much you want to reveal about your business is as core a component of “openness” as anything. But that said, if we can perpetuate the notion that frank communication is a catalyst to growth in our industry, then the conversation really gets moving and sparks start to fly. Yep, that’s why we named this conference “Right Media Open.”

- Get primary competitors together.
While a respectful dialogue is a given, the combination of key market competitors and the aforementioned open environment should yield some fascinating, lively debate. We’re thinking it will at RMO, when David Rosenblatt (CEO, DoubleClick), Scott Howe (president, DRIVEpm) and me sit on a panel to discuss our varying takes on the Exchange movement, what we’ve built and where we all think it’s going.

So here’s to an impactful Right Media Open. If you’d like to request an invitation, email us at jodonoghue@rightmedia.com.

Wired Editor Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail spawned one of the most talked about issues on the commercial web: how the scale of the internet allows business such as Amazon and Ebay to generate huge profits out of the “long tail.”

How does the long tail opportunity translate to the ad business? The web is full of small publisher websites and blogs that cover every imaginable range of topics. This is both a great opportunity for advertisers and ad networks, and also a fairly large challenge. How do you effectively find these sites? How do you know which ones are quality? How do you scale supporting them and paying them their money every month if they’re making small amounts? How do you optimize across them?

As a small publisher in this long tail world, how do you get advertisers to notice you? What if you don’t meet the lofty size qualifications of some ad networks? How can you make money if no one will give you the time of day?

The questions are a bit daunting, but there are many success stories to draw from. There are more ways than ever for advertisers, ad networks, and long tail publishers to work together to everyone’s benefit.

In the panel “Taking Advantage of the Tail” at our upcoming Right Media Open, we’ll discuss these issues with a group of experts in this space who have great success stories to share:

Steve Jenkins - CheatCodes.com
Steve is a longtime internet entrepreneur whose advertising success with CheatCodes.com provides great publisher insight for the panel.

Jim Mansfield - PhoneZoo.com
Jim leads the advertising effort at PhoneZoo.com, one of the most innovative ringtone sites on the web. Another example of a niche publisher who’s doing well in the advertising industry.

David Zapetal - CPX Interactive
CPX Interactive has seen explosive growth over the past few years, and much of it is a result of how aggressively they work with tail publishers and scale their operations to handle that growth.

Patrick Gavin - Text Link Ads
Patrick Gavin is practically synonymous with tail publishers. As the founder of Text Link Ads he’s made working with tail publishers the core of that business, and he also helped start another tail-friendly network, AuctionAds.

There may also be another addition or two to the panel, so it should be a fun and educational time for all. Are you taking advantage of the tail for your business?