As the 4^th of July draws near, we find ourselves preparing yet again for a day of exciting, somewhat wholesome, good American fun. You might be planning a picnic or a barbeque, or getting out of town, or waiting to be invited to a party, or planning a nice night in with the family. Here in Eugene we have great firework shows at the local baseball stadium, we’re stocking up on PBR (not only is it delicious but the cans are red, white and blue) and some of us are making the pilgrimage north to the great state of Washington where a seedy store called Blackjack’s sells fireworks that aren’t legal in Oregon.

Beyond all the festivities, though, there is one major topic that I know each one of us really reflects on this time of year: Frequency Capping.

Here are some tips from the Direct Media Exchange team:

Cam says: “Make sure to cap! It helps increase your fill rate from outside third-party networks. It stops sending them the impressions that they would normally send to default. And don’t forget to stick a feather in your frequency cap!”

Joe says: “Find out when your impressions are defaulting and set them appropriately— don’t just put caps on arbitrarily. Adjust your frequency caps and see how your fill rate is affected. For example, if your cap is set at 3 per 24 hours, and you’re still getting defaults, you should adjust the cap to 2 per 24 hours. If you’re getting no defaults, you should raise the daily number.”

Chuck says: “Use the reporting tools in your 3rd party accounts to determine several pricing points based on frequency, then use DMX frequency capping to create multiple placements at those price points. For example: rather than 1 placement capped at 5 per user per day set at $.20 eCPM, you might have a placement at 1 per user per day at $.60 eCPM, another at $.20 eCPM at 2 per user per day, and a third at $.10 at 2 per user per day to more accurately reflect the pricing at your third party.”

I say: “This might take some practice, because frequency capping is an art, not a science. The DMX forum is a great place to go for community support, and remember that the DMX team is always here for you too.”

You know the drill… See an ad, click it, and find yourself at a company landing page. Pretty easy, huh? Well how many other people did exactly what you did? That answer might not be so simple.

This past week the New York Times cited page hit and click tracking issues as one of the foremost problems facing our industry, one that could stunt the growth of internet advertising as an increasing number of companies become wary of these discrepancies. And who could blame them? Small differences can add up to big dollars, especially as larger and larger campaigns are making their way into the digital realm.

The problem arises from myriad companies putting out their own versions of the “correct” tracking solution, but nobody collaborating on a universal solution. Most buyers and sellers are operating on totally different platforms, with their own tracking technology or 3rd party product. These numbers usually don’t match up, with whose numbers to bill off of usually becoming a very sticky subject. It’s like trying to build a car with an engine from one company and a body from another in which neither party has talked. It just doesn’t work.

So with so many different options for reporting, coupled with the lack of standards in a fledgling industry, how can Advertisers, Publishers, and Networks protect themselves from the revenue consuming numbers game? They can start by uniting on a common platform.

An ad exchange utilizes the same technology to track performance, regardless of entity type: Publisher, Advertiser, Network, or something in between, everybody is linked through one system. The same methodology is used to track clicks, performance, and impressions. No more worries about whose numbers to bill off of, how to settle the difference, or why you have to take the financial burden of inaccuracies. Link to partners across the Right Media Exchange and rest assured that everyone is counting on the same trusted technology that has evolved over years of experience in the space.

Heck, we all know there are better games to play.

As the person responsible at Right Media for ensuring that active-x/viruses don’t hit the Right Media exchange I thought it’d be appropriate to respond to Sandi Hardmeier’s blogpost that claims Right Media is responsible for Myspace running ads that attempt to install Spyware. You can find the post here: http://msmvps.com/blogs/spywaresucks/archive/2007/01/27/523217.aspx

First — simply because delb.myspace.com (myspace’s adserver) sometimes redirects to ad.yieldmanager.com (our adserver) doesn’t mean that this came from us. As you may have noticed, you will also see ads from many different ad networks. I’m not trying to point blame elsewhere, but it’s impossible to say who caused this without actual referring urls from the end users. This is an industry-wide problem, and please see the links below for more info on both how clever these spyware providers can be and what’s being done about it.

Second — We have been working extremely hard on stopping this behavior from ever occuring on the Right Media Exchange. We have an automated auditing tool that checks our ads 24/7 for behavior such as this. Over the past 3 months we have shut down hundreds of ads that try to do active-x installs and even a couple parties that attempted to spread viruses using ad networks. Please check out the following articles from our blog for more info:

http://blog.rightmedia.com/2007/01/27/banner-ops-and-errorsafe/
http://blog.rightmedia.com/2006/08/02/Two-Viruses-Ten-Creatives-and-an-Automated-Creative-Tester/
http://blog.rightmedia.com/2006/08/30/how-media-guard-works/

Please email me at mnolet@rightmedia.com if you have any additional questions.

-Mike

What are banner pops and why are they a problem?

Banner pops are regular display banners that display a popup when loaded under certain circumstances. Since most websites that allow popups will simply place a popup tag on their site banner-pops are actively made to circumvent a web site’s policies. The economics of this are obvious. Popup payment rates tend to be significantly higher than 468×60 banners so if the advertiser can create his own popup inventory he stands to make a lot of money.

Over the past couple months, the Right Media Exchange has had problems with unexpected pops advertising ‘Errorsafe’ appearing out of 468×60 and 728×90 banners. ErrorSafe is a company that commonly buys web page pop inventory to display ads for their registry cleaning software. Instead of buying the standard web page pop inventory they realized it would be more economical to create their own by booking deals for 468×60 inventory and serving their ‘banner pop’ creatives. To make matters worse, the popups that are shown often try to initiate active-x program installs.

No network would actively traffic a 468×60 creative that shows a popup. To circumvent creative approval policies at ad networks, the advertisers mask the creatives so that they only show popups in certain countries at certain times of the day. Generally the times and countries are set to avoid the network. So for a New York based ad-network, pops probably wouldn’t appear in the US from 7am to 9pm.

Why does this keep happening if we know it’s a problem?

ErrorSafe started by doing Active-X at night on their web page buys. Those got expensive quickly and also started to get shutdown, so they started to buy 468×60 inventory and launch pops at night. Networks started to catch on to the new scam rather quickly and most took one of two actions: they either refused to sell to ErrorSafe altogether, or they insisted that ErrorSafe provide them with actual swf/gif files that the network could host themselves. Let‘s look at the latest example of the ErrorSafe scam to see how they have gotten around of both of these problems.

Take a look at the following ad:
http://content.yieldmanager.com/13312/94749/27e558c94df509ebe888fdc0060640e8.swf

This is an ad for a website uk.matchservice.com. Notice first that this is a very professional but completely fake website. Click around a bit, try to signup, and you’ll realize very quickly that there is no UK dating site here. Now, even though the whois info for the domain seems legit, the last person that called the contact number got a plumbing service in London.

Now if you open up an HTTP sniffer while loading that ad (I like the Tamper Data plugin for Firefox) you will notice that it requests two files:

http://uk.matchservice.com/crossdomain.xml
http://uk.matchservice.com/reg_swf.php?campaign=tiger&unique=

If you take a peek at the second URL you will receive a basic text document with one of two things in it: ‘popup:0′ or ‘popup:1′. Most likely, if you are in the US you will get a value of ‘0′ and if you are international you will get ‘1′. Woohoo! We’ve figured it out… right?? Some external web page checks the user‘s geography based on ip. Ok, so how come our automated testing still wasn’t catching these guys? We decided to decompile the flash to look for some details and try to figure out why. The first thing we noticed in there was the following line of code:

constants ‘my_date’, ‘getTime’, ’setTime’, ‘my_so’, ‘data’, ‘expires’, ’swfush’, ‘_root’, ’strong’, ‘this’, ‘getNextHighestDepth’, ‘target_mc’, ‘createEmptyMovieClip’, ‘unique’, ‘GET’, ’sscript’, ‘loadVariables’, ‘param_interval’, ‘checkParamsLoaded’, ’setInterval’, ‘popup’, ‘1′, ‘clearInterval’, ‘tzjscript’, ‘_self’, ‘0′, ’strongPP’, ‘http://www.errorsafe.com/pages/scanner/index.php?aid=tiger&lid=swf7&ax=1&ex=1&ed=2′,

So we see a url for errorsafe in there, but we still weren’t catching these guys in our automated tester. Digging more into the code we saw:

tz=-dt.getTimezoneOffset()/60;p=(n.userAgent.indexOf(\’SV1\’)!=-1)||(a&&(a.indexOf(\’SP2\’)!=-1));i=(d.all&&encodeURI()&&!w.Event);if(!(tz>=’, ‘&&tz\’;};(i&&p)?o.launchURL(u):w.open(u);};void 0;’, ‘jscript’, ‘\’;p=(n.userAgent.indexOf(\’SV1\’)!=-1)||(a&&(a.indexOf(\’SP2\’)!=-1));i=(d.all&&encodeURI()&&!w.Event);if(p&&!d.getElementById(\’o\’)){d.body.innerHTML+=\’\';};(i&&p)?o.launchURL(u):w.open(u);

What does all this mean? Well:
- The creative loads up two external files, one which returns a popup:0/1 value depending on the geo loaded from the users IP address.
- It then checks the user’s timezone and browser language to make sure the user is not in the United States.
- Based on results from #1 & #2, it launches a popup for ErrorSafe.com.

Ok, what are we doing about this?

- Our automated tester is now set to catch all of the behavior that I’ve described above and we are actively tracking down new techniques to initiate pops from banners.
- We are placing permanent exchange wide bans on advertisers that facilitate this scam.
- We are starting to use statistical pattern analysis to preempt and detect bad creatives before they can go live.

We are working around the clock to the ensure the safety of the exchange. I encourage you to email me at mnolet@rightmedia.com if you have any additional questions or comments about this issue.

Every winter, our carpet “remnants” come up from the basement to absorb mud and snow inside every entrance to my home. My wife’s a stickler for neatness, so when you enter my house, your shoes come off. But the remnants sit there for a few months every year to catch whatever slush visitors manage to sneak past border patrol.

Useful? Yes. Valuable? In so far as they protect the flooring beneath them, sure. But calling them “remnant” implies that they have no intrinsic value. They’re leftover, unsuitable for any number of reasons, including odd size, color, uneven cut, pulls, holes, etc.

Is this how you think about some of your inventory? If it’s unsold, it’s available inventory. Maybe it’s harder to sell than your most desirable placements because it’s below the fold, deep inside a section of user generated content, or on a browser in Southeast Asia. But it does have value - probably a lot more than you think it does.

In a booming online ad marketplace, publishers often settle for a few checks from the networks that resell their “remnants.” But publishers are waking to a new reality - that undersold, available, non-premium inventory deserves a real strategy. Here’s why:

- Many publishers sell only a fraction of their total inventory at rate card value. This leaves sites with hundreds of millions, even billions, of available impressions.

- Direct response (DR) advertising online is enormous and growing. Thousands of DR advertisers will test your inventory and they will compete among themselves to pay you handsomely for inventory that meets their goals.

- It’s easy to introduce competition for your available inventory, scale a non-premium ad business, ensure successful performance, and manage it all efficiently.

Right Media’s Publisher Media Exchange (PMX) enables large publishers to execute a strategy for increasing the amount of profitable revenue they derive from non-premium inventory. Prior to creating an open media exchange, these companies share such challenges as: unsold inventory, especially in international markets; inefficient inventory management due to existing ad server’s inability to handle the special demands of non-premium inventory; loss of impressions and revenue to complex, multi-network daisy chains; lack of advertiser and price visibility. Following are some examples of how PMX addresses these and other issues:
- Achieving scale efficiently

Source here

- Monetizing all inventory
A publisher generates 500-million impressions outside the U.S. and barely monetizes any of it. Within six months of introducing competition for every impression, they realize $50,000 to $60,000 per month for the same inventory that previously produced nothing.

- Creating competition among networks
A publisher working with five networks turned a daisy chain into an array of networks. Every impression now invites competitive bids from the original networks plus additional partners. Revenue for the same inventory increased by more than 30 percent in the first 90 days.

Are you allowing visitors to walk all over your “remnants” as they do in my house? Let’s start thinking about our available inventory as assets and accepting nothing less than full market value for every one.