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.

The IAB Annual Members Meeting in New York on November 29 was jam-packed with exciting developments and upbeat forecasts. Not only did the industry record its first ever $4-billion quarter (story here), but ad revenues for the first three quarters of 2006 are nearly equal to the total for all of 2005. When the counting’s done, 2006 online ad revenues will exceed $16-billion, nearly triple the tally at the bottom of the dot-com bust in 2002.

Speakers offered many reasons for our good fortune, but they also worried about our ability as an industry to support continuing rapid growth with outdated systems and processes and without measurement standards.

On the upside, nearly every major advertiser will increase commitment to online advertising again next year. Online as a whole still commands less than ten percent of total ad spending, in spite of the fact that consumers spend more than 25 percent of their media consumption time online. Individual advertisers are accelerating their internet spending dramatically, however. HP, for example, dedicated more than 20 percent of its worldwide ad budget to internet this year, while more than doubling the number of sites bought. (more…)

Currently, networks or advertisers sign up publishers, send them ad tags, and watch for impressions to grow. As networks or advertisers, how can you ensure the quality of inventory you get? How do you make sure that your ads only show up on content that you have approved? How do you make sure that publishers will only place ad tags where they say they will? What if you knew the URLs from which ad requests were made so you could track where your inventory was coming from? What if you could analyze how much is coming from each of those URLs? That’s what Right Media’s validated URLs (vURLs) does for our networks and advertisers.

(more…)

It’s becoming more apparent every day that advertisers, publishers and networks want a more open and fair way to buy and sell online media.

Two great examples in the last couple of days include “Google & eBay in Ad Industry Shootout” about the race to create “ADSDAQ” for trading media; and “Advertisers, Agencies Float $50 Million Plan For Media Trading System.” Also, two people prominent in our business have proposed creating a trade group dedicated to openness, fairness and standards for citizens’ media. At Right Media, we offer Jeff Jarvis and Jarvis Coffin a hearty hurray!

Jeff Jarvis issued a rallying cry to liberate citizens’ media from the tyranny of friction in the ad marketplace. His New England co-conspirator, BURST! Media’s Jarvis Coffin, has taken a principled stand favoring openness, measurement standards and research for all who oppose “Google’s growing hegemony over advertising.”

Right Media CEO Mike Walrath calls this revolution a chance to build a better new media worldview in which the market is “liquid and transparent, and more access to information benefit[s] the buyer, seller and value-adding intermediary who embrace an open marketplace for advertising.”  http://www.rightmedia.com/articles/92/1/The-Media-Revolution.

The Right Media Exchange already provides an open environment in which numerous advertisers and more than sixty ad networks – much like Mr. Coffin’s – compete among themselves to buy more than 60-billion impressions monthly on blogs, small websites and media giant sites alike. It’s a wide open auction-based marketplace that already does what Mr. Jarvis called for: It provides advertisers and media the ability  to “gain control and increase their effectiveness and their value,” free of the walled-in system approach favored by Google and other closed networks.

You can count Right Media in as a charter member of the trade group being established for citizens’ media. Among other contributions, we will make available our Media Guard advertising creative auditing system that assures publishers that any subscribing network will only deliver ads that meet their specific criteria for content. No more unfortunate juxtapositions of racy ads on kids’ pages or seizure-inducing animations on quiet content pages.

The media revolution is here. Forward-looking companies such as Right Media and BURST!Media plan to be among its leaders. We encourage everyone who has a stake to tear down your walls and let liberty and prosperity flourish.

As the Yield Manager market place grows, we find that how we support our clients has to evolve. And we’re hearing great feedback about the changes we’ve recently made.  

Our original strategy was to assign an account manager to each account. The account manager was responsible for training and technical support for their clients.  It didn’t take long to realize that model was not scalable, nor did it allow us to truly understand our clients’ needs.

We recently changed support models by breaking out our support functions into teams.  Often, new clients may be assigned a team of their own, one person from each of the following groups, with members tapering off as they’re no longer needed.

Client Strategy Management:  Each new account is now assigned a Client Strategy Manager.  As the title implies, CSMs work with client decision makers to understand their corporate issues, goals, and needs, and provide best practices and consultative support for meeting those goals within the YM Maketplace. Often this requires discussions on how Yield Manager is different from typical ad servers, how doing business the “old” way may not meet their goals in the open marketplace environment. Every client introduces new best practices for the marketplace. All clients are not the same. We take the time to listen and understand each client’s business so we can guide them toward success. We also listen to learn how their needs can help drive the development of our products.  Understanding each client’s business also allows us to recommend good partners to each other as well as share those best practices learned through another client’s success. 

Solutions/Product Management: Our clients’ business needs drive the growth and development of our product.  We tend toward fast and frequent development cycles, so communication between Solutions and the other functions, as well as Solutions and clients direct, is constant and critical. We’re constantly developing new products, improving upon existing ones, and contending with new issues brought to our attention by the marketplace (our clients). Don’t be surprised if you’re contacted by our Solutions or Product Management team members to participate in beta testing or client feedback on project or program ideas.

Technical Support:  We now have a technical support group who is solely responsible for evaluating technical issues, bugs, and feature enhancement requests. This allows our former account managers to focus on forming a strategic alliance with clients while giving better technical support to clients through resources who are dedicated to this function. Support team members funnel issues directly to our solutions and technical teams. Clients submit technical support tickets directly to our support team.

Training: We have a new Director of Training, several trainers, and a documentation team working to build out new online training modules which can be customized for individual clients’ needs. You’ll find these online modules in the Knowledge Base (accessible via your usual YM login).  Trainers are also available for specific topics not yet covered in the Knowledge Base or by individual modules. Please search for topics of interest in the Knowledge Base when you need training information. If the Knowledge Base doesn’t cover it, please contact your Client Strategy Manager who can point you in the right direction or schedule training with a trainer to suit your needs.

So far, we’ve received great feedback on this model. Our best resources are our people. The people making up each of our support functions can now focus on what they’re good at and our clients are getting better service.  Client Strategy Managers focus on creating a partnership with clients. Support and Product Managers focus on creating technical solutions to clients’ business problems. Tech Support focus on providing faster answers and getting technical issues into the development cycle quicker. Trainers focus on making self-help modules available 24/7 and providing more advanced training sessions as needed.

Together, these functions create a more efficient support system by pushing information to and from clients in more timely manner.  Stay tuned for expanded programs from all of these functions.