The Ultimate Online Ad Marketplace Will Come

Fred Wilson brings up a topic he has before and that’s the future of the online advertising industry. His focus in this post is if it’s really a market. What interests me though is this:

Toward total price and performance transparency

And toward a completely open marketplace where anyone can run anyone�s ad campaign.

And in the process, we will build something that is easily a factor of 10 and maybe a factor of 100 of where we are today.

This is right in line with the ad marketplace concept I’ve been playing around with for a while now. I’ve seen the power of a marketplace working with Right Media’s Yield Manager on a daily basis and working with web publishers of all shapes and sizes. We’re getting closer to where I think it needs to go, and hopefully Right Media will get there with Yield Manager or an evolved product.

I’ll explain my vision by looking at it from both a publisher and advertiser point of view.

As an advertiser, you would create an account on this platform, and then add your ads. You could input display image ads or text ads, tag your ad with keywords tags, select your pricing type (CPM, CPC, CPA), the budget you have for each particular creative/campaign, and any targeting or constraints (such as no adult sites).

As your creatives get picked up by publishers and run, you’d be able to monitor your results and budgets. If a publisher is performing poorly, you’d have the option to choose to target that publisher out. Statistical data for each campaign would be of course available by RSS to watch it easily.

The power of this is that it’s like Google Adwords where small publishers can come run campaigns of any budget or size, but get the transparency of where their ads are running and what the results are on an individual publisher basis. It almost guarantees successful performance. If they priced their campaign too high, they could lower the price for the next run when the current budget is expired.

As a publisher, you’d be able to login and view the ads by tag, by pricing type, etc. You could subscribe to the tags by RSS to see new ads as they became available, and just click to add them to your ad rotation. Once you had the initial ad code placements on your site, you wouldn’t need to do anything but click some buttons to add or remove ads from your ad mix.

The ad server would also need some good optimization to display the ads for the publisher that are performing well and paying him the most. This is something we’ve already got down with Yield Manager.

I’d also like a browser plugin or bookmarklet that when I saw an ad I like rom this platform on another site I could just click it to add it to my advertising rotation.

This platform would be transparent, open, use RSS and tagging, and would benefit from advertisers pricing deals well to get the best performing publishers, and publishers competing to get the best ad campaigns with the best budgets.

As Fred says, let’s make it happen.