Ad networks and ad servers often provide a choice of tag types to their publishers/users: iframe or javascript. in the case of ad networks or exchanges, sometimes the choice of tags that the publisher uses is up to them and often it is not… however sometimes they nest these ad tags inside of ad servers that in turn use iframes. So an often convoluted series of “frames within frames” persist.

There are various pros and cons of Iframes (see here for a good overview some of which I summarize here), some pros include: Iframes don’t delay the serving of the page, typically loading in parallel with the other page content, there is no chance of name clashes with Javascript variable names if they are inside an iframe.

Some pretty big cons of iframes would include losing the referrer information of the page, which in turn means you can’t do contextual analysis of the page and more importantly you don’t really know where your ad has been running. Ads can’t communicate between each other if they are on the same page, so the coordination for wrap arounds or other things can be lost. You can’t run expandable ads (though some rich media creative companies like OggiFinoggi have come up with ways to “fake” expansion ads with iframes that is kind of interesting), which some users would say is a great benefit of these, but it complicates further the adserving ecosystem adding more heterogeneity to inventory which is now a mix of iframes and javascript tags and it is then unclear what can serve where.

As a demand-side platform helping advertisers buy optimized media, CPM Advisors (CPMa) runs billions of ad impressions per month across various advertising exchanges and we look at a LOT of impression logs. A lot of lower-cost inventory on some of these sources we have seen is hidden behind iframes, meaning most often the referring URL is that of the ad network serving the ads. As a whole, inventory that is served in iframes has a substantially lower price and underlying value than inventory that appears in javascript tags. The extent of the problem on any particular platform including Right Media is unclear, though I would guess that, excluding Yahoo! on the exchange, iframes might be 70 percent by volume if a fair bit less by number of publishers. There are obvious reasons for this, including that companies who would do nefarious things and generate large volumes of traffic often would hide their referring URLs behind iframes (and often, many nested layers of iframes running in parallel), but I do not believe the fairly young ad market yet correctly takes into account this trade-off.

Now there are exceptions. Some publishers like Amazon.com that work with ad networks grudgingly, purposefully put their ads in two layers of iframes to hide their origin AND to stop unscrupulous partners from “stealing” shopper-related data from their pages presumably – but as my other writings would attest I believe that the “sell the same stuff for different prices” world of online publishing will come to an end in the next several years and then this kind of good-quality-site-hiding-behind-frames behavior should be reduced – with the caveat that data use practices in a non-iframe world will also have to be more closely looked at, which I think will happen regardless. Are impressions a commodity? No, not yet but that wouldn’t be a bad thing if we had a real market to buy and sell impressions or “audience”. Let me put it this way – platinum and lead are both commodities but one sells for $1400 an ounce and the other for $1 a pound.

In tomorrow’s market-driven ad world, transparency will be more the norm and anonymous inventory will have its place, but on average will be discounted in price. Thus we may see what one might call the “iframe tax” – less measurability and accountability means more trust is needed which means more risk which means less money for networks and publishers that use them.

CPM Advisors operates the CPMatic.com advertising platform which allows marketers to buy optimized display advertising, and our system now has 94.3% reach (187.1 million monthly uniques) in the United States according to data from comScore (September 2009 dataset).

Google/Doubleclick has this week enabled pixel-based targeting across their exchange, including the Google Content Network, and we are now able to offer brands and partners the ability to instantly do retargeting (also known as remarketing or remessaging) campaigns across a variety of ad platforms including the entire Google Content Network which numbers about 159.7 monthly unique visitors monthly: CPMatic.com offers self-service retargeting which you can setup and be live on within 10 minutes with a credit card.

Audience-targeted retargeting campaigns have a typical 3x to 20x better ROI than regular site-targeted display ads: we think it’s a great way especially for search marketers to get started with display ad buying.

It took a few days of back and forth with the Google folks to make sure the clicktracking macros were set up correctly, our tags and tracking worked in their system and so on, but we are now live and running a real non-test campaign on the Google/Doubleclick Ad Exchange (2.0). The only reason we mention in hear is because we heard that (1) very few networks/buyers have actually deployed campaigns on the platform so far, (2) only a fairly small number of networks have been approved to serve across the entire Google Content Network so far. As with any system we work with or integrate with, we’re hoping to very quickly learn the ins, outs, tricks and best practices to give the benefit thereof to our advertiser clients! It’s an exciting time for the online display advertising industry, and I look forward to seeing all the old faces next week in New York at ad:tech.

After seeing a tweet from Jonathan Mendez about 22 companies exhibiting at the upcoming ad:tech New York starting with Ad-, we thought we would confirm and paste those names in here. We have “Ad” in the second part of our name, but we often joke that some people think CPMa is a consulting company (we are not) and we are happy not to have Ad- at the start of our name. Here are the companies (with our best efforts at intended capitalization):

Ad-Juster, Adacado, adap.tv, AdBrite, AdBuyer, adfinity, adfunky digital media, Aditall, AdJuggler, adknowledge, AdManage, adMarketplace.com, Adoori, AdOptim, adperio, AdSide, Adsmarket , AdsMe, ADTECH, Adventive, Advertise.com, Advertising Database.

It’s an ad-world!

We recently had an ad network start buying via out CPMatic.com ad buying platform – even though we are already connected to them via the Right Media ad exchange, they have found immense value purchasing from us directly. They started with a $1000 test that quickly turned into $20,000 and more.

For ad networks that work in the RMX system, there are a few problems and things you cannot do currently some of which that were possible in earlier iterations of the system. 1) if firms are connected via the exchange, they cannot directly buy/sell behaviorally-targeted campaigns, 2) controls for directing campaigns to specific publishers are sometimes cumbersome and are very general, 3) there is a limit on the ‘depth’ of serving connections allowed, meaning that you cannot buy on another site or network via a partner even if it would make economic sense, due to limitations in the RMX adserving capabilities, and 4) we can of course apply our proprietary optimization techniques to make campaigns work.

We have had several networks buying media from us, and we certainly encourage them to set up an account and initiate it. While our system allows for the upload of ad tags for campaigns, please do note that we very closely scrutinize ad tags to prevent any issues from being introduced into the ecosystem. If you have any questions please contact us.

I read with interest recently that the brightest spot in the earnings release for New York Times was the performance of it’s About.com unit.

About.com has a lot of inventory and to monetize, and has been an aggressive user of various ad exchanges including the Doubleclick Ad Exchange where it is disclosed as one of the participating publishers. That is not to say that is the reason for their good performance of course, just an interesting data point. Online revenues dropped for the other parts of the company but not as much as the problems on the offline side of the business:

The company posted a loss of $35.6 million for the quarter. On an operating basis, the company reported a profit of $80.6 million ($0.16 cents a share). Total revenues were down 16.9 percent. Revenues at the About Group unit were up 7.2 percent, but on the digital front in total, it was a different story. Website dollars dropped 7.2 percent. The main point of the NYTCo’s digital struggles in Q3 were centered at the News Media Group, which posted an 18.5 percent decline in online ad revenue. On the print side, the digital declines don’t seem nearly as bad.  Advertising revenues fell almost 30 percent for the News Media Group, as print ads declined 31.2 percent.

Publishers need to start thinking about how they can extend the reach of their inventory into various online exchanges, including those that will be enabled for real-time bidding. As our CEO Rob Leathern mentions in this piece on AdExchanger, publishers will only be able to have a voice and shape the online advertising environment and hence their revenue picture by having a seat at the advertising exchange / real-time bidding table. Part of this will relate to participating as providers of data into these ecosystems, about attaching that data to their inventory but there will also be innovations that none of us can yet predict that need strong publisher participation to help make happen.

Having a name like CPM Advisors (we often like to go by CPMa if you hadn’t noticed) and being a company that for the most part, buys CPM advertising inventory to optimize for marketers’ at a CPA level, we obviously get into the CPM vs. CPA discussion a LOT. Several of us have a leadgen/CPA background which I think puts us in a good perspective to think about how we make something work for someone who has a goal that is on the more tangible side. Having run an ad network, bought media, sold media, etc. and been on both sides of the publisher-advertiser continuum (and in-between) I think we also realize the large effect that deal structure has on incentives to perform and make deals work.

As someone selling media, CPM seems great but for the buyer it’s not the best experience. The seller need do nothing, really, for any particular deal. They collect money regardless of performance. Obviously in the overall sense, as word gets around that their CPMs are too high relative to performance, people will not buy from them, but in the micro case the onus is on the buyer to know the underlying characteristics of the media and make an assessment about whether to buy it or not. On the other hand, CPA gives the power to the buyer. They determine an activity or metric and the price they can pay for it, it’s performance-based, and absent any issues with fake leads or anything like that (not to be addressed here) they are happy. The incentive for the seller now is to collaborate and cooperate with the buyer and try to get the ads to work better to improve the likelihood of conversion. Some things are in their control – they can choose where to place the ad, when, what sub-segment of audience to target and so on, and if they are smart or have a very targeted audience they can sometimes make a lot more money than they could in the CPM case. But it takes work, and all-too often the incentives for the advertiser to care and make things work better are not there.

Run display ads with one of the big CPA networks. What do you see? Awesome Flash-based ads with great production values? No. More often it is crappy JPG and GIF-based ads with little interactivity or pizzazz to them. Part of this is a legacy issue related to making it simple for CPA pubs to pull these creatives down onto their site but REALLY in the age of pretty-much free adserving, sub-10c/Gig CDNs and the like you’re telling me you can’t get ad tags or flash onto a publisher’s page? It’s not that these ads don’t exist – the same advertisers are running the flash-based good stuff in their own often-CPM-based ad campaigns while their poor affiliates are sitting with the second rate JPG ads. The incentives are not properly aligned.

We need a new hybrid performance-model that gives incentives for the sellers and the buyers of media to come together to make campaigns work. We’ll be sharing some of our ideas on this with the industry soon, but we encourage idea sharing from others. This also means we need to empower publishers and media sellers with tools to better match their inventory with likely performing ad campaigns in a non-black-box way (some of their insights ARE useful, but with so many CPA options out there it’s a bit overwhelming for the average site owner). BUT the first thing I’d say is if you’re an advertiser using CPA or affiliate channels, bring your best creative game AND demand and actually use data and feedback they can give you about what’s working and what’ s not. Every impression is an opportunity to gather data, and make a sale. Put the crappy JPGs to bed and build a better marketing ecosystem for yourself.

CPM Advisors’ CEO, Rob Leathern, will speak at the Content Revenue Strategies (CRS) show being put on concurrently with Ad:Tech New York at the Javits Center, New York.

CRS is for small to mid-sized publishers looking for insider tips on how to maximize AdSense revenue, increase revenue opportunities via contextual optimization technologies, advertising network exchanges and the latest affiliate/lead generation alternatives.

Display Advertising for Search Marketers: Banners Aren’t Just for Branding Anymore
MODERATOR:
- Dax Hamman, VP, Display Media, iCrossing

PANELISTS:
- Roy de Souza, CEO, Zedo
- Rob Leathern, Founder and CEO, CPM Advisors
- Div Bhansali, Director, Self-Service Products, AOL Advertising