Ari Paparo Dot Com

19 New York Start-Ups

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 09:53:03 -0500

I was on the job market for the past couple of months and I took a very expansive approach to the search, taking an average of 5 networking meetings per day, every day, with essentially anyone who would meet with me. And in every meeting I would ask the same question: “What’s going on in New York that’s really cool and exciting?” And you know what, there’s lots of amazing stuff going on in New York!

Now that I have a job, I thought I’d give a shout out to all the companies I’ve chatted with, met, heard about, etc along with my own plain-English description of what they do (along with a little snark). This isn’t a comprehensive guide to NY start-ups, but rather a window into some “movers and shakers,” many of which may not be on your radar.

Adaptly: Platform for buying and analyzing social advertising. A leader in a hot market. Winner: Coolest website navigation.

Art.sy: Pandora for fine art. The only start-up with art historians on staff, they classify works along a comprehensive taxonomy to allow discovery of art within galleries. Winner: Best office view.

Fancy Hands: Outsourced personal assistant chores like “order me a car service to get to JFK”. Winner: Best company name.

Innovid: Online video advertising is exploding, but advertisers and agencies lack tools for measuring and controlling their spend. Innovid gives a single view for all video advertising across the web and mobile. Disclosure: I am an advisor. Winner: Right idea at right time.

Intent Media: Imagine showing ads for your competitors on your own website, and making a coherent business case on why this is a good idea. Sounds crazy, but this is exactly what Intent Media has done in the travel vertical — showing ads for Expedia on Travelocity and vice-versa. Winner: Most dogs in office.

Jirafe: Jirafe offers eCommerce merchants an advanced dashboard for gaining insights into their sales, marketing, and operations. Winner: Worst office (aka, most frugal. Seriously, when they’re not coding the Jirafe team must torture POWs or butcher livestock in their office.)

LiveIntent: Advertising within email newsletters has been a notoriously difficult market and most of that inventory goes under-monetized. LiveIntent has solved this problem and is creating a marketplace for display-style advertising within emails. Winner: Best jerky.

LongTail Video: Which video player is the most common across the web? YouTube? How about the JW Player, an open-sourced video player owned by LongTail Video. LongTail gives away the player for free, then upsells small and medium-sized publishers on video hosting, advertising services, etc. Winner: Best no-brainer exit.

Lua: Collaboration software specifically designed for multiple-location projects like concerts or movie productions. Very slick, very usable application across devices. Winner: Best t-shirt.

Magnetic: Harvests intent and search data from many, many websites and uses it to better target ads across the web. Winner: Best company name.

Percolate: Percolate makes sure that social media messaging is on-brand by analyzing and calibrating the social influences of a brand then recommending items for the social media manager to post. This sounds simple, but is actually quite important to the CMO and the rest of the marketing organization. Winner: Best idea you’re likely to ridicule before you understand why it’s important.

PlaceIQ: Short description: PRIZM for mobile. Longer description: They’ve divided the US into 100 yard squares and can identify consumer characteristics within each square such as income, gender, at-home vs at-work audience, etc. Very useful for mobile advertising. Winner: Most likely to remember the difference between latitude and longitude.

Pricing Engine: Lots of companies help small businesses spend money online, but Pricing Engine tells them how much and where they should be spending money by benchmarking their AdWords and Bing accounts against similarly-situated small businesses. Disclosure: I am an advisor. Winner: Best logo/mascot (mad advertising professor).

Rewind.me: Mobile App that lets you collect all your social data in one place to make it more useful. What restaurants have you or your friends ever checked into in this neighborhood? Winner: Most likely to be a service I personally use.

SailThru: Customized email and onsite offers for media companies and eCommerce. Unlike traditional email providers (e.g. ExactTarget, Responsys), they don’t segment your audience then send different offers to each segments. Instead they personalize the emails in real-time and match the messaging to your latest on-site activity. Winner: Best office hammock.

TayKey: Figure out what topics are trending on the Internet, figure out which type of people are interested in those topics, then very quickly target ads to those topics. Winner: CEO most likely to make you feel old.

TapAd: Target and measure advertising across mobile and desktop screens based on proprietary algorithms. Disclosure: I am an advisor. Winner: Company name most likely to be used in a hip-hop lyric.

Yext: Keeping business listings up to date across Yelp, FourSquare, and everywhere else is a significant problem for retail businesses. Yext does it for you, and is making bank doing so. Winner: Most upbeat boiler room.

YieldBot: Publishers don’t use the majority of their on-site data to target ads. YieldBot finds the relevant data on the site and targets it like search, instead of display. Winner: Best cute little robot give-aways.

Ecommerce Media Plans Lure Ari Paparo To Bazaarvoice

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:38:37 -0500

Ecommerce Media Plans Lure Ari Paparo To Bazaarvoice:

My Q&A on AdExchanger about the opportunities at the intersection of ecommerce and media.

Joining Bazaarvoice as SVP Media Products

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 11:36:07 -0500

Joining Bazaarvoice as SVP Media Products:

AllthingsD covers my new gig. Official press release here.

Ad Tech IPO Voting on Digiday

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 10:06:25 -0500

Ad Tech IPO Voting on Digiday:

Following up on my blog post yesterday, Digiday is running a poll asking readers to vote for the most likely company to IPO. AppNexus and Criteo were leading the votes last I checked.

2013 Ad Tech IPO Predictions

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 09:41:00 -0500

Everyone loves a public offering! It’s a coming out party for your favorite company, a liquidity event for your shareholders, and a fun opportunity to dress up and ring a bell. Within the ad tech sector there are a surprisingly large number of companies talking about going public in 2013, so here’s a handy preview of the year to come based solely on my unbiased opinions*. Let me know what I got wrong in the comments.

Ad tech IPO candidates in reverse-order of likelihood to go public in 2013:

Update: Totally spaced on Marin, so added them in with Kenshoo.

Criteo: Rumored gross revenue of $500 million and very strong global growth put Criteo in the pole-position for most likely to exit. I had heard the S1 was coming in late-Q1, but, as with everything in this market, that’s probably smoke.

Rubicon: CEO Frank Addante recently declared the company profitable and with Pubmatic in decline and AdMeld in rewrite mode Rubicon has the SSP field largely to itself. Rampant rumors have Rubicon being courted by Yahoo!, but in the absence of a deal a public offering could be in the works. Alternatively, they may want to bulk up their offerings with some M&A of their own to make a more attractive candidate for the markets.

Kenshoo/Marin: I’m not an expert in search advertising, but both Kenshoo and Marin appear to be clear leaders in the space and they’re making noise about a filing in 2013. I’ll give them both the benefit of the doubt. UPDATE: Marin has filed (2/14).

Adap.tv: Video is incredibly hot right now and Adapt.tv has one of the strongest stories in the market. They’ve been able to position themselves as a tech company in the emerging video advertising space, as opposed to Tremor and BrightRoll (below), both of whom are more pigeon-holed as ad networks. (Whether this is a fair characterization is totally irrelevant). Hiring Tim Morse as CFO from Yahoo! is clearly a signal of intent to offer. And, as a side note, all the video companies listed here have much more solid fundamentals than Millennial Media, which the public markets, for some unknown reason, continues to value at $1 billion in market cap.

Tremor/BrightRoll: Going to put both video leaders in the same bucket. Fast-growing video ad networks with healthy margins in a hot space. Not clear if either is big enough to get the attention of Wall Street, so may need to wait for 2014 and/or some M&A to shake up winners from the second-tier.

Turn: 2012 was a break-out year for Turn in the DSP space, and I’ve heard they are transacting something like $400 million in media on behalf of their clients, which would compare very favorably with some of the others on this list. My guess is they need another year of growth and internal maturity before filing.

RocketFuel: By all accounts RocketFuel is growing rapidly as a buy-side ad network/DSP, representing, in my guess, among the top 5 sources of programatic demand. I don’t have a lot of visibility on their numbers, but have heard they’re looking at filing in 2013. Take with a grain of salt.

* - I have excluded my former employer, AppNexus, from this blog post since I can’t comment freely about their business without overstepping confidentiality obligations.

Samuel L. Jackson does not care for the latest ad tech...

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 19:35:27 -0500

Samuel L. Jackson does not care for the latest ad tech buzzword.

A Modest Proposal on 'Viewable' Ads

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 19:38:23 -0500

This article originally appeared in AdAge on November 29, 2012.

One the hardest decisions to make as a product manager is whether a feature is really ready to launch. Which brings me to the ongoing drama around the IAB’s push to for display advertising to use “viewable impressions” to replace impressions as the currency for online display advertising. In short, viewable impressions are not ready to be launched and we need an alternative roadmap for the industry. The IAB, to its credit, recently admitted as much, after tests of viewability measurement resulted in widely disparate results. However, the intention remains to drive towards a currency, which is in my opinion is the wrong goal.

The problem that we’re trying to solve is one of microeconomics. The display advertising world has too much supply — one might say, infinite supply — as compared to large, but finite demand. Sellers of ad inventory (aka publishers) can artificially create as much supply as they choose by simply adding more ad slots to each page of content. These new ad slots may be of unquestionably poor value to the advertiser given their position “below the fold” or, in some cases, they may only be viewable with extensive scrolling on behalf of the user. This situation devalues the inventory of the whole market, and especially hurts premium, high-quality publishers whose inventory is being compared to the inventory of low-quaity sites and/or sites with outright fraud.

The solution to this problem is to enable buyers to better differentiate between and transact based on the quality of the ad slots, such that sites that serve non-visible ads are punished and those with visible ads are rewarded. No argument from anyone so far. The proponents of the new viewable impressions currency have made a mom-and-apple-pie argument: how can you charge for impressions that can’t be seen? We’re just bringing the displays business into conformity with other media like TV. Hogwash. TV commercials play whether you’re in front of the set or in the bathroom, or TiVoing through at 30 miles-per-hour. Most print ads are never seen. No one has any idea whether people look at billboards. (Note, I’m using a bit of hyperbole to make a point, measurement nerds please don’t blast me in the comments about all the obscure techniques used throughout the industry. Thanks.)

The problem comes in the practical applications of such a change. The IAB and Media Ratings Council (MRC) have advocated making viewable impressions a new currency for online advertising. But viewable impressions lack some of the key attributes of a currency — they are not standardized, and they cannot be measured consistently between campaigns.

Let’s discuss what it means to be a “currency”. Every media business has a source of measurement truth that both buyers and sellers agree is the billable record for the media. In the US television market, the currency is the Nielsen ratings. In radio, it is Arbitron. In search, it is Google’s record of clicks. In online display in the US, it is currently the advertiser-recorded impressions through whichever ad server they’re using e.g. DFA or Atlas. (Interestingly, in the rest of the world the online display currency is the publisher-recorded impressions.) Whatever the currency, the important points are that a) everyone in the market agrees on the currency; b) the numbers must be consistently right since they will be used for billions of dollars of transactions. It should also be noted that changing a currency is a very big deal.

So, what’s wrong with viewable impressions? Simply put, they can’t be measured consistently enough to serve as a currency. Tech talk ahead…

A standard impression can be measured by either the delivery of a “302 redirect” from an ad server or the delivery of a beacon (pixel) within the ad from the user’s browser. This standard, set by the IAB ten years ago, is remarkably easy to understand and implement. Much of the IAB’s industry efforts have been focused on reducing the potential discrepancies between impression counts on different systems and bringing them to within a 10% threshold. The reason it is possible to bring the counts to within such fine tolerances is that the causes for miscounting or divergent counting are limited and unlikely to vary much between systems. For example, if a publisher system records an impression when delivering the ad tag to the browser, then the advertiser system does so immediately thereafter, discrepancies are going to be limited to the falloff in traffic between two consecutive http requests with very light payload. Sure, discrepancies still happen, but they are mostly based on trafficking errors, browser latency, or differences in fraud detection.

To measure viewable impressions, on the other hand, you need to not only deliver the ad, but also run client-side javascript to evaluate the position of the browser on the page and make a determination of viewablity. There are three ways in which this is an order-of-magnitude different problem than standard impressions: 1) instead of counting on the call for a beacon, you’re dependent on code being delivered and executed on the browser, making both network latency and browser execution latency a much bigger problem; 2) the measurement is dependent on non-trivial logic, which is going to differ significantly between ad providers and browser environments making discrepancies a matter of debate about which system is “right”; 3) the viewable nature of the ad is a fluid construct since over the course of an impression the ad may move in to and out of viewability over the course of the page view, thus adding to both the latency and subjective measurement problems.

Also, none of this works inside Iframes and roughly 40% of all ad impressions are served into IFrames. The IAB is proposing SafeFrame, an alternative to IFrames, but this means that effective deployment of the new currency is dependent on everyone in the industry retagging. Vendors claim to be able to “break-out” of IFrames but these techniques are usually based on browser hacks that are not near 100% reliable.

Also, this standard doesn’t easily work for video ads, native ads, or most mobile ads. These are the three fastest growing sectors of “display”.

Also, viewabiltiy is not a feasible currency in programmatic/RTB markets since realistically the impression can only be evaluated after it is auctioned and served. RTB is the fastest growing method of purchasing display.

Also, the ability to measure viewabliity is threatened by patent lawsuits from ComScore. If those suits are successful then the industry will have handed the currency to one company without extracting any value from that company.

Also, viewability doesn’t take into account traffic generated by bots, which some estimates put at over 20% of online traffic and which could be a bigger source of waste and fraud than below-the-fold impressions.

Also, the international community has made no movement towards adopting this standard, making the currency and technology potentially quite different in the US and the rest of the world.

Also, because the viewability of a campaign is difficult to estimate in advance, publishers will be forced to over-allocate inventory to hit viewable impression budgets, resulting in waste and confusion.

Also, from tests thus far, different vendors are seeing radically different results for viewabliity on the same campaigns.

So here’s my modest proposal. Let’s all agree that viewability AND bot detection are vitally important to the success of the display ecosystem. Let’s establish IAB standards for measuring these, and MRC certification for doing so. But, let’s revise our goal from replacing the currency until we have a solid track record or consistent and agreed-upon measurement over a meaningful period of real-world activity. Moving ahead with a currency too quickly will be a huge setback to display and will reinforce the perception that it is hard to measure and subject to technology for its own sake.

Instead, let’s update the IAB standard Terms & Conditions (“Ts & Cs”) used throughout the industry to require all line items to preform with a minimum X% human-viewability and no more than X% in cross-domain IFrames as measured by any MRC-audited system and require publishers to offer make-goods on those line-items that fall below that threshold. Just as with impressions, in cases where publisher- and advertiser viewablity metrics have large discrepancies, both parties use reasonable efforts to uncover the sources of the discrepancies and come to reasonable solutions to reconcile the discrepancies. If we consistently have these large discrepancies then we know we have a deeper problem with the technology, if we don’t then we’ve created a de facto currency, but with enough fault tolerance to deal with the uncertainty of measurement.

This Ts&Cs approach will make viewability a vital part of the media negotiation but will acknowledge that the technology for measurement is far from exact and too unreliable to be used as a currency at this time. The stated goals of viewability will still be accomplished: publishers will redesign sites to reduce poor-viewable ad slots, advertisers will use view ability as a metric for negotiation, and bad actors will find their inventory increasingly de-valued by the market, resulting in reduced overall supply and increased quality.

I look forward to your feedback.

Long Island Pine Dunes in fall.

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 12:03:13 -0400

Long Island Pine Dunes in fall.

The Steve Jobs of...

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 16:53:06 -0400

Following up on yesterday’s tweet about the Steve Jobs of Yogurt, I was wondering how many Jobsian folks there were out there. Turns out Steve’s genius was hardly unique, nor confined to the area of personal computers and communication.

Some quick results from Google:

Hamdi Ulukaya, the Steve Jobs of Yogurt
Jerry Garcia, the Steve Jobs of Rock ‘n Roll
Peter Carl Faberge, the Steve Jobs of Bejewled Eggs
Ethan Imboden, the Steve Jobs of Vibrators
Kazuo Okada, the Steve Jobs of Japanese Slot Machines
Desiderio Pavoni, the Steve Jobs of Espresso
Alan Klapmeier, the Steve Jobs of Aviation
Nacho Coronel, the Steve Jobs of Meth
Ray Dalio, the Steve Jobs of Investing

And, of course, the McRib, self declared as the Steve Jobs of Sandwiches.

Stumbled across this video of my Apps 2.0 presentation at the...

Sat, 26 May 2012 21:31:19 -0400

Stumbled across this video of my Apps 2.0 presentation at the AppNexus Summit in San Francisco, April 2012.

Should You Use a 2x2 Matrix?

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 08:30:15 -0400

Internet Advertising for Kindergarteners (Part 2)

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:21:21 -0400

In my first post I described an exercise to explain Internet advertising to my son’s kindergarten class. That lesson really on the mechanics of how the ads got to the pages and how the web, in general, works. The next step was to explain how advertising itself works.

The kids know what advertising is. I wish I had videotaped their descriptions (“it’s when they try to trick you into buying something you don’t need”). But how does it work? I started by telling a joke:

ME: There was a man, who lived pretty close to here, and he said a funny joke. Do you want to hear the joke?

KIDS: Yes!

ME: Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half!

KID IN FIRST ROW: That’s weird.

So let’s show the kids how advertising works. First principal: kids like snacks! I brought two kinds of cheese sticks to the class, “regular” and “cheddar”:

I held them up the class and the kids were excited (everyone likes cheese sticks!). I asked for a volunteer who was a good counter. My son raised his hand (so proud!). I then asked the kids to vote on which type of cheese stick they wanted, regular or cheddar. The results were tabulated by my little man and written on the board as follows:

Cheddar: 6
Regular: 6

Then I reached into my bag and pulled out an advertisement…for cheddar cheese!

I think I caught one of the teachers snickering at me at this point. I gave a little voice over extolling the benefits of cheddar cheese. “It is delicious!” “It is aged in a cave!” “It can be orange or yellow or even white!” Let’s pass around the cheddar cheese ad so everyone can see…

“Did I mention that cheddar comes from happy cows?”

“Yes, the cows live on the green fields of Ireland and their only care in the world is how to create the world’s greatest cheddar cheese.” Let’s pass around the pictures of the cows and sheep to the little kids.

I think it’s time for a post-campaign survey. Let’s raise our hands again and vote. Who wants regular? And who wants cheddar?

Cheddar: 9
Regular: 2

Advertising works!

Postscript: My wife texted me later in the day to say “Your son is saying you tricked him into liking the wrong cheese”. Indeed.

Internet Advertising for Kindergarteners

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:44:00 -0400

My five year-old’s kindergarten class is studying jobs and they asked parents to come in and explain what they do for a living. I jumped at the chance, but then reality sunk in. The little tykes wouldn’t really get the “Luma Slide” and an explanation like “I build high frequency trading platforms for real time advertising” probably wouldn’t work too well either. So I built a little exercise for the classroom that I thought I would share for everybody in case it comes in handy.

Let’s start by explaining the Internet. Kids all claim to know about the Internet, but I wanted to get across the concept that the web was about computers making requests and responses to one another, as opposed to TV where you just turn on a channel. To do this in a classroom setting I figured the best approach was to get the kids moving around and interacting.

Like most internet business models, my first problem was finding decent content. I went to a party planning store and looked for posters or other images of superheros that could serve as desirable content. The best option was rectangular paper party plates ($3 for 8). I bought a set of Captain America and a set of Happy Feet then took a scissors and removed the raised brim of the plate to make a simple square mini-poster. See photo below:

Content secured, I needed hosting. Two helpful little girls volunteered to be the “Servers” and were given stacks of “Websites”:

Next, I needed to worry about connectivity. My original plan was to have the kids enact every layer of the network (“Daddy, I was DNS today!”). This was too ambitious. I settled for a one-hop solution and explained to the kids that web sites are known by their numbers rather than names. One kid volunteered to be “The Router”. His job was to stand next to the address poster (photo below) and direct kids who wanted Captain America to server #1 and kids who wanted Happy Feet to server #2.

Finally, we needed to pay for our content. I made some banner ads and asked for a volunteer to be the “ad server”. I told him to give each kid the ad he thought they would want the most (behavioral targeting!). The banner ads:

Putting it all together, the diagram below shows how the kids flowed through the exercise:

So how did they like it? Overall, I think it went well. The router thing was fun (for me) but the kids basically overwhelmed the throughput of the volunteer giving out the addresses. We ran out of Captain Americas (apparently girls like him as well), which caused some frowns. But in the end the kids got their content and their banner ads and had a fun time.

The next step was explaining ad effectiveness measurement. ~~I’ll leave that for another post later this week.~~ UPDATE: Read Part 2!

Two Quick Predictions for 2012

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 16:42:16 -0500

I didn’t do predictions in 2011 and wasn’t going to in 2012, but two big trends seem pretty evident and worthy of prediction.

First, in 2012 you’re going to hear some major publishers claim they are making more revenue from online video than from online traditional (“banner”) advertising. It will probably start with pubs in the viral/comedy video space, or any type of quality content that can get viral or SEO distribution.

Second, in 2012 some other publishers, probably in the tech or blog space, will claim to get more traffic from mobile/tablet devices than traditional pc-like devices.

The first prediction is great news for pubs with video content. The second is dire news, unless monetization of mobile quickly catches up with established web-based deals.

Making Rich Media Scale

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:48:43 -0400

This article originally appeared on the AppNexus Blog on August 1, 2011.

In my recent Ad Age piece on the disruptive nature of RTB technologies I took some shots at the rich media business. Specifically, I called it a “tech hairball”. Of all the points in the article, the rich media comments got the most feedback so I want a chance to explain exactly my criticism.

First, some brief background. The term “rich media” refers to display advertising creatives that utilize an ever-expanding collection of features like video, larger file size, social interactions, expansion beyond the banner slot, etc. Within the industry the term generally is associated with a set of vendors including PointRoll, MediaMind and DoubleClick (where I built and managed the rich media products). The fact that the whole business cannot be easily defined except in relation to the vendor offerings should raise eyebrows. Imagine if you couldn’t fully describe what a database was without reference to Oracle or Microsoft — that situation doesn’t exist in mature tech sectors, yet it is the case for the technology behind the most valuable digital ads running in display today.

At heart, the key issue that holds the rich media sector back is that the technical foundation of these ads remains immature and fragmented causing inefficiencies and complexities throughout the value chain. Rich media was invented by EyeBlaster and Unicast over ten years ago, yet virtually no standards have emerged to govern the delivery, reporting, or effectiveness of these creatives. In contrast, the in-stream video world has gone from inception to widespread adoption of the VAST and VPAID standards in less than five years. Mobile rich media is rapidly developing the ORMMA standard, potentially leaving us in a situation where it’s easier to develop cutting-edge mobile ads than browser display ads. Let’s examine the current state of rich media technology along the path of planning->creation->delivery->reporting->effectiveness and see how fragmentation continually limits the growth of the entire display business.

Planning

“Hey, let’s run a FatBoy on that placement!” For those not intimately aware, FatBoy is a trademark of PointRoll, and roughly corresponds to an expanding ad. I applaud PointRoll’s marketing strategy, which by all accounts has been hugely successful. But once again, imagine how silly this would sound if we were talking about databases in this manner, where the functionality was defined by a single vendor. For the sake of media planners and publisher campaign managers there needs to be a cross-vendor understanding of what the ads do. This lack of clarity on what rich media actually is, has practical effects because the same creative execution can be implemented very differently, and sometimes with different costs, across different vendors. The cost to the industry is wasted time, confusion, rework, etc.

Creative

Almost all rich media creative is based on Adobe’s Flash platform. Each vendor has built its own platform for extending Flash’s capabilities to achieve the various effects when the Flash creative runs in the browser. For example, in order to build an expanding creative, a vendor will build an interface for the Flash designer to expand the creative, and related functions to control the animation of the creative when expansion happens. But each vendor’s API is different, so while a DoubleClick creative might expand by the command conduit.expand(); the PointRoll creative will expand by pr.openPanel(1);. These are the obvious differences, but there are tons of subtle nuances you have to watch out for as a developer, like whether you need to manually stop your videos when an ad closes or not. Anyone in a creative department can attest to the fact that learning and optimizing against each vendor’s API is a massive pain in the neck, and causes the cost of creative development to go up and the quality to go down.

Delivery

There is a fundamental tension between the desire of the creative agency to push the envelope and the desire of the publisher to maintain a clean and orderly website with well-understood performance measures. Unfortunately, this tension is largely administered through ad hoc processes and undocumented controls. Publishers want to control which types of creatives can appear in which ad slots on their page. For a simple example, imagine a publisher wants to only allow 100K of file size per creative on the homepage, but up to 200K would be permissible on deeper content pages. There is simply no effective way to execute this strategy at scale. The current strategy is to load every creative in a browser, check the fiddler logs, and try to decipher how each vendor does “polite download” to limit customer impact. Most publishers still can’t either proactively control what shows on their page, or at the very least figure out precisely what’s being sent behind advertiser tags.

Let’s talk about iFrames. Publishers put their ad tags in iFrames to speed page download (the content of the iFrame loads asynchronously, thus prioritizing the rest of the page over the ad), and to protect their page from malicious creatives that might read the page content or otherwise affect the user experience. Rich media ads, though, need to affect the page content by expanding or otherwise giving the rich out-of-banner experience. The 10-year old solution to this problem is for each vendor to place its own customized “iFrame breakout” file on every publisher’s domain, thus bypassing the security of the iFrame. There’s so much wrong with this, I’m tempted to write a separate blog post. First, you’ve moved from an environment of security to one governed by trust. Second, the ad server needs to know, somehow, which domains have which breakout files. Third, there’s a huge barrier to entry for serving rich media creatives from new vendors, since they’ll have to do all the legwork to install the file on 5,000 sites. All of these problems get worse — much worse — when we move from a direct, sales dominant model to an exchange model since the algorithms will not reliably be able to determine which ad can run successfully on which site. The current plan from most vendors and exchange providers (AppNexus included) is to create lists of site-vendor combinations and target accordingly… Ugh.

In an ad network or exchange environment there are many additional data points we need to know in order to successfully deliver a rich media creative. For example, which direction should the expandable expand? The current solution is to ask the creative designer to develop the ad such that it works in multiple directions, but this is, in practice, inconsistently done. Another option is to choose the most common combinations (skyscrapers generally expand left, leaderboards generally expand down), and only support those in non-direct environments. But even if we knew which direction the ad slot could expand, we would have no way to programmatically know which direction the creative was built to expand, so we’re back to manually checking every creative in a browser. Obviously, that’s not ideal.

Reporting

Reporting is the most egregiously broken area for rich media, especially considering how important this is for evaluating the creative. Consider the clients’ perspective when buying expensive media with highly customized creative features like video or a game. The first question to the agency is “how did the ad perform?” Each vendor has created its own set of metrics to measure “interactivity,” “expansions” and other metrics. Unlike impressions and clicks, there are no standard IAB definitions for these metrics, how to calculate them, how to audit them, etc. As a result, the “interactivity rate” for a PointRoll creative will be different from the same rate on a DoubleClick creative, even if all other variables are the same. Consequently, the metric is devalued and the medium as a whole suffers. Next time you hear someone at a conference complain about “how confusing online metrics are,” think about this example.

Effectiveness

Building on the lack of standard metrics for rich media, very little research has been done to prove that these expensive, highly customized ads are actually more effective than more simple Flash creatives. Personally, I’m convinced they are – I just haven’t seen the data. At DoubleClick, we published a study showing correlations between rich media and Dynamic Logic brand studies, which was terrific. However for such a large portion of the display spend, it’s astounding to me how little justification has been done.

Recommendations

Here’s a partial list of what needs to happen to help rich media scale:

The IAB should establish standard format definitions and names. What is an “interstitial” and what is “polite download”? This shouldn’t be too difficult or controversial and has already been done for video.
A working group consisting of the top vendors should look to standardize their Flash APIs. A tricky project, but incredibly valuable to the creative community.
For the purposes of real-time bidding, the various delivery vendors are working incrementally to develop ways to express the metadata needed for ad requests and delivery. For example, indicating which vendors are supported on a tag prior to requesting the creative. A lot more needs to be done here, especially by the vendors, to allow automated discovery of creative metadata.
The industry needs to adopt the so-called “Friendly iFrame” (PDF) technology developed by AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft. To simplify iFrame environments. I’d like to see the IAB take more of a leadership position on this technical innovation.
The IAB must finally define rich media metrics. It doesn’t make sense that we have standards for impressions but not interactions. Remind me what the “I” stands for again?

As someone with a history in this space, I take some personal responsibility for not pursuing these initiatives myself! Moving forward, I would be happy to help in the development of solutions. I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Don't Look Now: Classic Disruption Is Taking Place In Advertising

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:41:47 -0400

This article originally appeared on AdAge.com on July 22, 2011.

Real Time Bidding is the hottest technology in online advertising, and with good reason. By connecting buyers and sellers in real-time, on an impression basis, RTB has enabled an explosion of technology, experimentation, and measurement, resulting in improved results for buyers and yield for sellers. But even with the hype cycle in full force and growth in a hockey-stick patterns, the importance of RTB as a disruptive innovation is largely underestimated.

Clayton Christensen first identified the concept of the disruptive innovation in the Innovator’s Dilemma. The basic idea is this: a new technology slowly undermines an existing, dominant technology, by starting out cheaper and “worse,” then slowly improving until it is a full replacement for the dominant one, but with newer, more flexible capabilities, and usually a lower cost basis. Classic examples of disruptive technologies include the PC (which disrupted mainframes and minicomputers) and desktop publishing (which disrupted the print industry).

What started as “worse” will soon rule
Ad exchanges were largely invented to enable ad networks to more efficiently and cheaply trade available impressions in order to meet performance goals. The word “performance” is important here — we’re talking about cost-per-click and cost-per-action deals and lead generation. This is the marketplace that, frankly, many of the mainstream members of the display ecosystem don’t consider very sexy or, even, in some cases, reputable. The liquidity this enabled was largely middlemen selling to middlemen, and the advantage of the technology was the avoidance of truly terrible operational options like “daisy-chaining” ad server tags and “pass-backs,” where impressions were passed back forward to an ad network, then passed back if unsold.

So while exchange technology was valuable to those who used it, it was (and still is) considered a low-end innovation, and much “worse” than traditional display buying. Certainly the interactive agencies handling brand campaigns, major product launches, and the like, weren’t getting excited about these buying opportunities a few years ago.

In the second phase of ad exchanges, RTB-powered buying and selling grew like weeds, rapidly displacing most non-RTB, and simultaneously exchange buying displaced a significant portion of direct remnant sales to ad networks. With the leadership of the agency trading desks like Publicis’ Vivaki, ad agencies got the religion and started diverting real budgets from other indirect channels to RTB. This was very exciting! But even today the consensus remains that RTB is a great remnant technology, and will never seriously challenge the world of three-martini lunches, faxed IOs, relationships, and homepage takeovers.

Simply put, it remains “worse” than the incumbent ways of doing business.

Disruptive technology
As ad exchanges went real-time, a whole new set of companies emerged to enable buying and selling in these environments. Products like Google’s RTB, and buying systems like those created by so-called demand-side platforms didn’t take the existing ad serving paradigm to heart, but rather created their interfaces from scratch for the new environment. Some interesting things happened in this build-out. A lot of the assumptions that are at the heart of the display ad technology went out the window. Instead of exchanging ad server tags by email and with manual checks for syntax, this process became an API. Instead of trusting that every buyer met the conflict rules for competitive advertising, the servers started making requests and responses with blacklists and advertiser declarations. These decisions, and many like them, are the building blocks on which this “worse” technology will challenge the old way of doing things to it’s core.

According to various studies the cost of buying online display advertising is roughly 2x to 10x that of other media. This overhead problem is blamed on the micro-targeted nature of online, where there are a near-infinite venues on which to buy, multiplied by numerous strategies of how to buy. This causes fragmentation of buying and selling, which, since the display market workflow was largely based on operational tactics borrowed from traditional media, doesn’t scale. The proposed solution to this problem has been to layer on interoperability layers like the IAB’s eBusiness initiative which automate the communication of the complexity across buyers and sellers. But what if a couple of years from now all the complexity just…goes…away? What if we don’t need to communicate the complexity. But rather we manage the complexity on an impression-by-impression basis using our own algorithms. If you just read that last sentence and said to yourself “no way, it will never work like that, it’s too complex” you just committed the first sin of evaluating a disruptive innovation.

Here’s another example: rich media. The rich media business in display advertising is a poster child for dysfunction and lack of scale. Every vendor’s poorly-documented and relatively arbitrary product architecture is held together by bandages and bubble gum, yet these ads represent some of the most lucrative impressions online. This technology hairball simply won’t work in the RTB environment. So there are two options; either rich media ads won’t run in RTB (the current situation), or the more rigid and defined structure of the RTB environment will force standardization and declaration of rich media experiences, cutting through the gordian knot.

Lower costs
Most disruptive innovations exhibit lower long-term marginal costs than incumbents. Does RTB cost less than traditional ad serving? On the one hand, you have traditional ad servers, with fully-loaded cost structures designed for relatively simple decision making, which then have to rework their technology stack to the complexity of RTB. On the other hand, you have a brand new stack built from the ground up for RTB that then addresses the traditional market by operating on a vastly simpler decision making scale for selected clients. Which of these two stacks do you think will have even lower marginal costs as it scales to even larger volumes?

But what about homepage takeovers and martinis?
Homepages are always the argument people make with me about the limits of RTB. Let me be clear, I’m not suggesting that the human relationships, creativity, packaging, and overall high-touch associated with display advertising will be replaced by RTB. But, there’s no reason why RTB technologies couldn’t be used to execute a homepage campaign that was sold in the more traditional way. Gone will be the IOs and T&Cs, replaced with pre-defined private deal parameters. Gone will be the emailed tags, replaced by APIs. Gone will be the broken pages because of last minute trafficking errors, replaced with verified and audited creatives within a documented environment. And gone will be discrepancies and piddling fights over counting and data ownership, replaced with well-defined interfaces for counting and anonymizing data.

Whither the media buyer?
The Media Buyer’s role in RTB becomes much more important than ever before. But instead of evaluating sites and line-items on the budget, the media buyer needs to adapt to a world where each clients’ strategy may be wholly different, and where little counts other than the data. Brand buying moves from monthly panel-based statistics about top sites to historical views of past results and projections of those available through different buying strategies. Publishers need to step up with the data as well to differentiate and win the deal in an environment where supply is near unlimited.

The fact that RTB is quickly taking over remnant inventory is, in fact, the first step in a major disruption to the entire online display ecosystem. The new technology stack will replace, in full, the current way of doing things, and sooner than many expect. The next time you hear a comment about RTB being only for the “least valuable” inventory, think twice about what the speaker is really saying, and try to imagine it playing out a little differently.

Q&A: Ari Paparo of AppNexus on real-time bidding and yield optimization | Econsultancy

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 09:53:56 -0400

Q&A: Ari Paparo of AppNexus on real-time bidding and yield optimization | Econsultancy

no|wrap.de - Flasm

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 01:48:45 -0400

no|wrap.de - Flasm:

auto-decompile SWFs

Disruptive Innovation in Advertising: My Byline in Ad Age

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 10:14:13 -0400

Disruptive Innovation in Advertising: My Byline in Ad Age

Chrome Waiting on Cache Error on Mac Solution

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:57:13 -0400

For the past three months my Chrome browser has occasionally crapped out and stopped loading any pages at all while displaying the infamous “waiting for cache…” status message. The only fix that consistently works is to delete the cache from the tools menu, but this process can take 15 minutes to a half hour.

Some message boards recommend killing the cache files directly, but only for a PC. On a Mac, I couldn’t find anyone with useful information on how to permanently fix. Everyone seems to recommend deleting the cache located at ~Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/, but this directory doesn’t actually include the cache!

On a Mac, the solution is to delete all the files in the following directory:

~Library/Caches/Google/Chrome/Default/Cache

I just did it and it works like a charm. I’m writing this article in the hope that future sufferers can find the answer faster than I had to.