Given at the APA (Association of Publishing Agencies) breakfast, this presentation probably leaves out more than it covers. Borrows from work by my friends @ Infectious Media
This is how advertisers currently buy from Networks. A big bucket of impressions at a pre agreed price – say £0.80p/ 1000
The problem is, only a very small %age of those impressions are of any use or value, but you have to buy the ‘mixed bag’ just to have the chance of getting a few impressions that work for you. In terms of cost per thousand ‘useful’ impressions, the cost is MUCH higher. E.g if CPM is £0.80 but only 10% of the impressions you buy are effective, then true cost per thousand is £8! Networks offer ‘off the shelf’ targeting options to supposedly improve the proportion of valuable impression in the bucket, but they charge you extra for this, and THEY define the targeting. E.g entertainment vertical etc. Rarely does the increased efficiency warrant the price premium.
The problems intensify when buying across multiple networks. There is often lots of duplication, as many networks buy their inventory from the same sources. This can cause real problems with attribution and reach & frequency management, and cost per effective impression and frequency rockets.
Imagine if you could cherry pick only the impressions you wanted, based on your own definition of VALUE, and you could bid for those impressions in a real time auction based on what you know they will deliver to you. And you can manage universal reach
We want to be able to buy across a single platform by intelligently identifying valuable impressions at source (using our own and 3rd party data) across multiple media exchanges, using proprietary optimisation tools and techniques.
and we want to know exactly how much to bid for each type of impression, based on it’s propensity to convert!
All of these impressions are valuable, but some are MORE VALUABLE THAN OTHERS. The impression desk knows this and bids accordingly, based on the rules we set.