What is the Biggest AD Portal?

Real Time Bidding & Ad Exchanges are transforming the way media buyers purchase display inventory. What are the biggest flaws or issues that need to be addressed with DSP's, Ad Exchanges & RTB?

• Real Time Bidding & Ad Exchanges are transforming the way media buyers purchase display inventory. What are the biggest flaws or issues that need to be addressed with DSP's, Ad Exchanges & RTB? Very broad question I know, but the industry is so new it would be interesting to hear peoples rants on this topic :)

• Answer:

  The question can probably be split into different issues/flaws for each group: Agencies/Brands DSPs DMPs RTB Exchanges Overall Agencies / Brands Vast amount of tools The vast amount of tools is probably extremely confusing and understanding the value of each is mind boggling. The IAB in some part comes out with white papers etc to help these folks understand the growing list of acronymous used. As a result of the above - buying media is now much more complex that it was years ago. On the flip side more intelligent buying could be argued as a "better" way to to buy. UI based assumptions on technology Ultimately my assumption would be that agencies are making judgement purely on the quality of a UI than they will use rather than the underlying technology. Connections Connections ultimately drive decisons by agencies/brands rather than the technology. Consumer focus I always find it pretty odd that consumer ads are extremely static compared to the way the media has been bought. The best algorithm in the world can place the brand with the user - but very little has been done to date to bring this forward. DSPs Fragmentation The DSP market is extremely fragmented and in part the biggest flaw is probably the amount of duplicate bids in the marketplace - that brands are not aware of. Scale Largely the DSPs suffer from scale issues where they don't get access to "look" at every impression etc. As a byproduct they must filter based on site, category or user targeting group - this isn't particularly effective. Rest/Soap APIs There is a severe lack of usage inbound/outbound on REST/SOAP apis - which can help reduce the load on a bidder like changing filters etc. Inbond refers to the APIs used to plugin and outbound refers to outbound APIs offered by clients. DMPs Little integration options DMPs broker the sale of users information and have very little integration options with DSPs or exchanges directly. Value Brokering the sale of users information into groups seems highly subjective. Also the sale of information seems grossly unethical. RTB Standardization RTB is a very programatic way to buy media, however as alluded to early standardization is a big issue. Unlike formats like VAST it is an intensive process to try and build against every exchange. Bandwidth There is a lot of wastage in bandwidth based on the win-rat. As a result it's concerning as an educated user that my information is shared across so many sources without a media buy. Sporadic Inventory As a by-product of internet usage there are sporadic shifts in inventory - which must make buying seem further complex. Education on demand side There are usually very little controls placed on the process of signing up for RTB - mostly on a technological basis. Education on supply side The supply side is grossly un-educated - which leads to limited inventory being offered via RTB. Technology The technology for doing RTB has been around for years yet very little has advanced in the way of integrated features cross exchange. Request/Response type models could have evolved towards much more complex ways of buying - which are probably being baked into DSPs. Exchanges Volume of Features Largest flaw with exchange is probably the number of features and how they conflict with each other. There is a lot of borrowed elements from other platforms that make the whole process of buying via an exchange seem like your visiting a pawn broker. As a result the larger pawn broker you are the better the quality of inventory you have. Complex Controls On the supply-side many sellers miss out on niche inventory like http://Fab.com/Etsy  ads due to the complex controls they have - this seems odd. There are more controls to book/sell media in an exchange than there are to fly an aircraft internationally - this is odd. God Like Behavior In innovative companies you should be encouraged to make mistakes to drive positive changes. However in the exchange environment your encouraged to follow the rules of the exchange in an extreme manner (like 3rd party calls) or take the road to death valley. There are more rules on one exchange than there are for driving cars in California - this is weird. This level of dictatorship seems so wrong in an environment where you really can't control every single part of the media buy. Sandbox Environment There isn't really a sandbox environment to really test accurately cross platform. As a result new buyers have to just switch on and hope for the best. It would be much better to have a simulated auction based on say the previous 48 hours to bid on. This would force and encourage much more sophisticated modeling techniques used to buy inventory. Vested Interests A lot of exchanges have vested interests for example: Right Media is owned by Yahoo (a large publisher). Google owns (DFA, DFP, Invite, Admeld etc). MSN runs via AppNexus which is both an exchange and an ad-server and offers publisher solutions. Although the value of consolidated product offerings do make sense -how does one make such guarantees that preferential options to those in the same building. Overall Standardization As explained in another post the lack of standardization forces many problems.   Vested corporate interest forces poor choices on the industry and its members - ultimately this slows down the level of innovation as shown with buying video ads. Shifting TV Dollars There is still a huge amount of work to shift TV online - ultimately the process is arguably much easier. Lack of Innovation There are too many forms of replication of the technology companies that work in this space that there is a notion of "me too" rather than some really innovative way of doing something unique. As a direct result choosing any of the above is purely done on a "brand" name basis only rather than the technology powering the platform. /rant Hope this was in some part useful.