Jeremy Bloom

RTB has revolutionized the way ad space is bought and sold, sparking discussions around this topic, but avoiding some of the critical problems. Having an honest conversation about RTB advantages and shortcomings can eliminate existing issues and allow this sector to evolve.

RTB aims to benefit advertisers, who experience cheaper CPM rates for premium inventory, creating a greater ROI, which means they can pay the right price for an impression targeting the right audience. However, many brands pay more to plan media buys in advance and like the transparency that they get when purchasing inventory directly from publishers.

Publishers can benefit significantly by selling premium inventory on a last-minute basis thereby monetizing what might not have sold otherwise. They also have access to advertisers beyond their sales team’s reach, but if demand decreases CPM prices will too, and without an intermediary to negotiate better payouts they can lose revenue. Consequently, publishers may inflate figures or impression values to garner greater CPM prices, or hesitate to sell premium inventory to DSPs, fearing the cannibalization of business as clients discover they can obtain similar inventory at reduced prices.

Essentially, media buyers and publishers need to find a balance for leveraging RTB transactions.

RTB aims to benefit advertisers, who experience cheaper CPM rates for premium inventory, creating a greater ROI, which means they can pay the right price for an impression targeting the right audience. Many brands pay more to plan media buys in advance and like the transparency that they get when purchasing inventory directly from publishers. Using RTB, marketers can capitalize on the best of both direct and digital marketing through the following aspects:

RTB gives media buyers the ability to measuring performance-based goals rather than relying on clicks as a quality metric, while also validating display ads as concrete contributors to sales and revenue. When marketers are able to pay per impression rather than fixed rates for blanket inventory, they receive a higher ROI. In addition, RTB allows marketers to continually track and compare performances between creative variations, which make it possible to effectively target specific audience segments and ensure higher conversion rates with your audiences. With capabilities like heat map analytics to improve each ad’s call-to-action, CTR, and post click engagement marketers are able to serve specific creative variations and improve conversion rates in real-time. In conclusion, when leveraged correctly, RTB can benefit both parties involved, allowing consumers to be served more relevant ads and consequently resulting in higher conversion rated and ROI for brands.

Cross-channel media management drastically improves operational efficiency for marketing deployment and monitoring. It also allows media managers to optimize campaigns in real-time as well as manage publisher data. When leveraging cross channel paid-media spend, there are three main aspects a marketer must consider:

Automating marketing processes ensures accuracy, efficacy, consistency and quality when managing a variety of marketing campaigns in multiple channels, especially when using different marketing methods or aiming towards several goals. Within this capability, marketers are able to understand cross-channel interplay and optimize their campaigns based on observer correlation versus an educated guess. Marketers are also able to understand which combinations of campaigns, methods and channels actually worked best and why, providing them with valuable insight when planning the next campaign.

Marketers can reduce time spent aggregating data for media plans by consolidating fulfillment sources to enable efficient campaign data before, during and after it is executed. Not only does this save considerable time spent aggregating data for media plans, but it also eliminates human error.

Tracking prospects across channels and over time ensures ad relevance and allows marketers to capitalize on buyer demand through the purchase lifecycle. This also allows customers to have a seamless experience across channels while maximizing conversion and engagement potential. With this capability, marketers are also able to augment strategies in real-time as buyers’ behaviors change. With the constant adoption of new marketing channels, advertisers must understand which method to leverage to best reach their prospects. Attendees of this session will learn the three key steps of leveraging a cross-channel marketing strategy to maximize efficiency and increase ROI.

Wherever you have a captive audience, there’s an opportunity to make money. And there’s always some genius that finds a way to capitalize on specific audience venues: sports stadiums, mobile apps, even gas pumps and bus benches. In the rapidly evolving industries of advertising and ad tech, new ad formats, channels and types of messaging spring up on a daily basis. In the coming months we’ll see this trend blossom towards monetization. Older digital formats like banner display ads will receive a boon from monetization solutions like Lijit, recently acquired by Federated Media, to both optimize their portfolio of publisher partners and provide additional value to advertisers. During this session attendees will learn about companies that are creating monetization systems through mobile apps (like Trulia) and native advertising. CEO of Sharethrough Dan Greenberg refers to native advertising as “a form of media that’s built into the actual visual design and where the ads are part of the content,” while Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer defines it as “advertising that takes advantage of a platform in the ways consumers are actually using it.” The most prominent current examples are Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and Premium Ads and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, but look to a greater number of media sources and networks like LinkedIn and Pinterest to partner with native ad platforms like Sharethrough to offer advertisers a valuable method to deliver good content without interrupting consistent user experiences.