On March 22nd, Admeld will host its third annual Partner Forum. As in years past, the day will feature thought-provoking conversations with top publishing and advertising executives, including Jim Bankoff, Chairman & CEO, SB Nation, Brock Berry, VP AdTaxi Networks at Digital First Media, Megan Pagliuca, General Manager & Vice President of Display Media at Merkle, John Miller, Chairman & CEO, Digital Officer, News Corporation, Zach Rogers, SVP Revenue Operations at CBS, Drew Schutte, Executive Vice President, Chief Integration Officer, Conde’ Nast, James Smith, CRO, Flixster, Jeremy Steinberg, SVP Digital Sales, FOX News, and Mimi Wotring, SVP Strategic Development & Operations, QuadrantONE.

In addition, we’re pleased to announce that Neal Mohan, Google’s VP for Display Advertising, will keynote the event. Neal will speak to the Google display vision, our mission to simplify the way publishers manage their inventory, and a glimpse into the future for both Admeld and DoubleClick.

There’s a lot for publishers to think about in 2012: from cross-channel strategies, to the evolution of private exchanges, to how marketers, agencies, and other buyers are evolving. As always, our goal with the event is to create an intimate environment in which our clients and partners can learn from one another about how to move their businesses forward.

Space at this year’s event will be extremely limited. To see the complete agenda or to request an invitation, visit the 2012 Admeld Partner Forum site.

On January 3, 2012 Forrester Research released an independent report, “The Forrester Wave™: Sell-Side Platforms Q1 2012,” and we’re pleased that they’ve ranked Admeld as a leader.

Download the report here.

The Forrester report states that Admeld is one of two vendors that lead the pack because of our highly granular controls for publishers, our proven ability to support a diverse array of sales opportunities, the breadth of our current offering, and our early innovation around features like private exchanges, variable price floor controls, and advertiser-level bid reporting.

It's successes like this that helped lead to our acquisition by Google in 2011. Our teams are hard at work combining the strengths of Admeld and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to bring publishers the best end-to-end sell side solution.

We couldn’t have gotten here without the support of our publisher partners, so thanks for continuing to put your trust in our team.

Over the past six months, mobile RTB activity has grown significantly across our platform. Though the volumes in mobile are still smaller than “traditional” desktop RTB, mobile is expanding at a much faster rate.

That said, the future of mobile RTB is not without its challenges. One of the largest is that iOS traffic, which represents a large portion of the mobile web, remains cookie-less. Cookies are critical to desktop RTB because they enable buyers to identify unique machines and use data to make educated decisions about serving ads. Cookies are also important on the desktop because they make it easy for users to opt-out.

Though there are alternatives to cookies in mobile, such as using an encrypted version of the phone’s unique device identifier, these methods raise privacy concerns. In fact, for this and other reasons, Apple is expected to retire device IDs completely in their upcoming release of iOS. Other options, such as device fingerprinting, are interesting but today they also pose significant privacy questions.

While the industry works out a scalable and privacy-friendly solution to the lack of mobile cookies, Admeld has built its mobile RTB API to compensate and keep budgets flowing to our clients. With publisher consent, our bid request API can pass relevant opt-in data to buyers at the point of purchase so they can make a smart decision without a unique identifier. Types of opt-in data passed include age or gender supplied by the publisher, the user’s location, or information from the browser header such as OS, screen size, and carrier. 

We are also very excited about a few new data points that will be available to Admeld buyers soon. For mobile applications, we will be able to pass category, age restriction, and consumer "star" ratings in the bid request. The initial feedback we’ve been getting from buyers on this has been extremely positive.

In our view, the challenges of mobile RTB are few compared to its benefits. Many buyers are purchasing large quantities of ads through this method, and though it will never be the only way to buy, it will continue to break new ground in driving greater profits for publishers, better results for advertisers, and more relevant experiences for consumers.

September is a big month for the display space in the UK and Europe, and there are a handful of industry events that should be on every executive’s radar. If you'll be attending one of them, be sure to reach out to us at Admeld so we can connect with you there. 

It’s been about a month-and-a-half since we announced our plans to be acquired by Google, and feedback across the industry has been overwhelmingly positive. Though we’re extremely excited by the prospect of combining our companies’ efforts, the past few weeks have been remarkably “business-as-usual” around the Admeld offices. Our team is focused on what they do best: serving our clients and partners, and pushing the envelope of technical innovation.

We’ve also been working with the Department of Justice, which is required to review the deal because it's over a certain size. In recent weeks, the DOJ has been gathering information in order to gain a deeper understanding of Admeld’s business and the display space in general. By all accounts, this has been a productive process and we’re confident that we’re on track for the deal to be cleared.

That said, today we learned that the DOJ will be issuing a “second request” for information. Though we’re disappointed by this decision because it will delay our efforts to bring even more innovative services to our clients and partners, we recognize it takes time to analyze any industry as competitive and dynamic as this.

Google has written some thoughts about the deal in a post on their blog, which I recommend reading. I hope to have more information for you soon as the DOJ updates us on their process. As always, thanks for your support.
 

Since The Weather Channel launched the industry’s first private ad exchange through Admeld in November of last year, these new platforms have been a hot discussion point on the industry’s blogs, at its conferences, and in its board rooms. Given the pace this industry moves, it’s understandable why many publishers are still exploring what private exchanges are, what they’re capable of, and what they mean for the future of selling media. Hopefully the below glossary will help clarify some of these questions, or at least move the conversation forward.

Private Exchange
A private exchange is an exclusive ad marketplace that gives premium publishers complete control over how they sell their inventory. In contrast with the direct ad network relationships of the past, private exchange publishers have full transparency into the buyers and advertisers, and can restrict access to each impression. Typically, buyers on private exchanges leverage programmatic means such as Real Time Bidding (RTB).

Price Floor
Most private exchanges enable publishers to set price floors, or minimum prices, for buyers to purchase specific portions of their inventory and audience. Because Admeld enables publishers to set floors against specific DSPs, advertisers, agencies, and dozens of other criteria, they are particularly powerful tools in eliminating channel conflict.

Prioritized Bidding
Just one term for what the industry is calling “guaranteed RTB” or “private ad slots”. Prioritized bidding is a technology that enables publishers to grant preferred access to specific buyers under specific circumstances.

Using prioritized bidding, publishers are able to give select buyers “first look” on certain inventory slices and/or audiences in return for a specified price point and/or a significant level of spend. Publishers are allowed to set buyers on the same priority to compete for this specialized inventory, thus “first look” is not limited to one buyer. Certain publishers only offer full transparency or more granular audience targeting within their first look capabilities.

Direct Market
A direct market provides the ability to buy inventory futures, i.e. a “direct deal” sourced by a publisher’s sales force. In the past, this was how most inventory was sold; today, this is largely limited to premium content. In a direct market, private exchanges have an impact by allowing more inventory to be made available through RTB among select advertisers.

Commit
The allocation of advertising dollars to a particular publisher or group of publishers by an agency trading desk (ATD) or advertiser. Typically, the commitment is defined by a specified duration, audience, action or inventory slice.

In July of 1999 I began leading my first online advertising services team. I distinctly remember that first week: troubleshooting what seemed like an endless series of issues, all of which threatened my publishers’ brands. It was challenging, but relatively straightforward because the ecosystem was relatively simple.

Over the next few years, the proliferation of buyers - ad networks, exchanges and others - made it extremely difficult to answer simple questions about each ad: what was it’s source, who bought it, what did they pay? And by the time I met Brian Adams, Admeld’s CTO, in 2008, life was even more complex.

In my first meeting with Brian, he mentioned this tool he was working on that would change the way publishers viewed and managed brand protection, and a few months later, Firemeld was released. Firemeld was the first tool of its kind in our industry, and we designed it not only to answer all the above questions for our publishers, but to help our internal teams to monitor the health of every one of our clients’ sites.

Today, Firemeld continues to evolve. With the growing industry focus on RTB, today we are upgrading it with a set of real time tools. Firemeld 3.0 gives publishers transparency into the RTB auctions behind each ad, including the bids, the floor price, and the advertisers’ name.  Stay tuned as we continue to move this tool forward.
 

One of the most exciting things about hosting an event like the Admeld Partner Forum is getting the opportunity to speak with industry leaders about the key developments and challenges they see in the online ad space. At this year's event we managed to speak with a few folks – in front of a camera no less – to get their take on the how they see things shaping up in 2011.

There are a lot of interesting insights in this video collection from a variety of perspectives. From Kurt Edwards of Future Networks on the Publisher side, to Marta Martinez of MediaMath on the DSP side, and Tom Shields of Yieldex on the Yield Management/SSP side, each shares their views on issues such as transparency, developments in RTB, and technology efficiencies on both the buy and sell side.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

The rest of the video content from the Partner Forum can be found here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

You may have noticed things look a little different around here. Over the past few months, we’ve been working hard to remake our brand so it’s closer to who we are as a company. Our old look and feel, while near to our hearts, seemed more appropriate for us in 2007, when we were four people working out of the old KickApps offices on 38th Street.

In terms of the website, we’ve also taken efforts to build a platform we think will grow with us. Though we’ve made an effort to seed it with good content at launch, in the coming months we plan to take advantage of all this space to bring you more in the way of thought leadership, whitepapers, and in the case of the blog—a view on what’s on our minds.