OpenX Publisher Conference Guest Post Series

For the second installment of our #OXPC Guest Post Series we were fortunate enough to have Jonathan Miller, who is both Chief Digital Officer, Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group for News Corporation and Chairman of the OpenX Board of Directors, take a few minutes to answer our questions about his views on the online advertising industry.

Jonathan will be speaking at the forthcoming OpenX Publisher Conference on May 14 where attendees will hear his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities within the digital advertising landscape. Request your invitation to the conference here.

1. What would you say are the main challenges facing digital publishers today?

One of the most important challenges is figuring out how to enrich and add value to the audience that publishers deliver and in so doing to stand out from the pack in a meaningful way. This is particularly important as advertisers and marketers have an increasing number of places they can put their spend in order to reach the desired audience.

It’s really important to have a reason for them to come to you, especially in the case of display advertising. One of the big things publishers have to do is have a differentiated ability to appeal to an audience that can be responsive in their environment.

2. You’ve often spoken of the difficulties associated with placing the right ad in front of the right user at the right time. Do you think we’re making progress on this important ad technology front?

While doing this sounds simple, it is, as many of us know, actually quite complex. It requires understanding users – what they respond to, what they’re interested in, what messages the marketers want to get across, and what responses they’re trying to elicit. Display is competing against a wide variety of choices on how to do that and getting the right ad where you want it becomes a very complex problem, and quite a complex math problem.

I think we are making progress, and, when it’s done correctly, it is of clear value to users because they see things that are relevant to them. When it’s not, it really stands out and it degrades the entire experience for the user, both from the perspective of being on whatever site they’re on and their level of engagement.

Ultimately, you want advertising to really mesh with the content and the users’ interests. When that can happen it creates more of a unified experience that is pleasing. I think that continues to be a holy grail, but we are making progress all the time and every incremental bit of progress is associated with value creation.

Part of the way this is improving is that the appropriate data people have is being used in more intelligent ways, and on a more real-time basis, which allows for inventory to be better used. The more real-time and the more data enriched we get the better the services and the better the experience will ultimately be for the user.

3. What have developments and innovation within the online publishing space in the past ten years meant for the digital publishing community?

There are a few things that have been interesting. On the publishing side, as the systems for managing content get better it becomes less expensive to improve your content offering, either to enrich it, to create new sites or to make a better presentation to the consumer. So publishing systems have clearly created better experiences.

On the monetization side, the first positive is that there is monetization for contextual links, search, and now display. Now it’s available to an increasingly wide range of publishers. It’s not just the top of the pyramid that has access to these kinds of monetization.

We’re seeing the abilities of publishers to access technologies around optimization and around enrichment that they just didn’t have before, and in a very low-touch way. That’s part of what makes it accessible much deeper into the stack.

What this points to is that there is now innovation and development on the sell side where frankly it has lagged behind. The buying systems had become far more sophisticated than those on the sell side. Now I think we’re seeing the publishing side begin to catch up and offer the kind of metrics and enrichment of their offers and their inventory that are more valuable. Now the two are beginning to talk to each other.

4.  How is the growth in mobile and video altering the publishing landscape?

Mobile and video are two major developments, but they’re not the same.

With mobile, what’s really key to understand is that it’s not just a web extension. The mistake in mobile that I think can be made is that people look at it as the web, only they take it with them.

The better way to think about it is as a new medium. It has new behaviors, new forms of access, which include things like apps and so on that have to be taken into account as a fundamental property of the mobile environment. I think we’re all learning about monetization in that context.

What do people respond to best? The jury is still out on that one. I don’t think it’s traditional advertising and over the next few years it will continue to be an area of real experimentation and sophistication as marketers learn what consumers respond to.

We have to experiment with new forms of creative and new forms of advertising. If one thinks back, we’ve seen this before with search advertising. Search was born of the web, it was not an extension of anything that came before – it wasn’t born in print. Mobile may be another one of those. I think that the ultimate, most important forms of advertising will turn out to be new forms. The only way to continue to experiment with creative is to experiment with form factor and to see what people respond to.

Video is almost as explosive as mobile. The proliferation of bandwidth, of cameras for user-generated video, and the lowering cost to produce higher quality of video, all of these things are leading to an explosion of video. Video is clearly a very powerful marketing medium and, while there are many who would have preferred other forms to emerge, it seems like the pre-roll is the abiding unit in the emerging video world. I think we’ll continue to see a very significant increase in video advertising. Marketers are getting much more comfortable with the idea of both pre-rolls and being in front of other content.

Measurement here is key. It is getting standardization around what exactly is “a video viewed”. Is it a video started or is it a video that is completed? I think that it will continue to grow very strongly, particularly as standards and practices become more established, and ultimately will fully explode when one can manage marketing campaigns between traditional television and online video.

5. How have online measurement standards shifted in recent years and where do you see them going in the future?

In terms of measurement, there will be a lot of debate over the next few years over the exact metrics that emerge to challenge the CPM as the standard bearer for measurement for all things of value. Essentially, the shift will be around different measurements of engagement. What marketers are going to want to know, and, in fact, what publishers are going to want to know is how engaged are the people who come to their sites. A key factor will be growth and ultimately standardization around deeper measures of engagement, and not just impressions or even click-throughs. What those are will be in debate for a while, but I’m pretty convinced that’s the direction it’s going to go because that will also allow encompassing of the social web.

The questions around the social web are how much does it capture intent, and how much does it capture monetizable engagement. The answers are going to force the discussion back on the web at large because so much of the time and so many of the developments are about the socialization of the web itself.

You can’t get money out of the social web until you can figure out intent inside people’s Facebook pages. I can figure out what they like because they tell me, they hit the Like button, but that’s different than intent.

What is intent in the social web? What is a real measure of engagement that leads to monetization? How do you come up with the measurement that relates to when people either have intent or are open to messaging?

The social web is going to force answers because everything’s going to have a social component, so unless you figure this out you won’t be able to monetize it. Just getting impressions may not be the measure. I’m following things like Promoted Tweets and Tumblr’s new unit, and everyone is trying to figure out Facebook pages. We haven’t had a breakthrough yet, but there has to be one because it’s too much of people’s time and engagement, so it has to happen.

All users should upgrade to this version and perform a security audit to help ensure they keep their system secure.

Before upgrading:

• Check for any rogue admin users (http://<your_admin_domain>/www/admin/admin-access.php).
• You can also check for any recently changed files, if you have shell access, you can use the “find” command to look for any files modified recently
• e.g. “find /path/to/openx/www /path/to/openx/plugins -mtime -7″ will find any files in those folders which were modified within the last 7 days.
• If you find any unexpected files recently modified (especially .php files) remove them before performing the upgrade.

More information on performing a security audit can be found in this post.

To upgrade your system:

• Downloaded OpenX Source 2.8.9 from here
• Follow the upgrade guide to upgrade your system.
• Once you have upgraded, you can remove write access to your config files (/path/to/openx/var/*.conf.php), to help keep your system secure.

Reporting Improvements

Publishers will now be able to produce reports that summarize the performance of individual sites, ad units, days, ad sizes and buyers. Additionally, new ‘order pacing’ report functionality for companion ads will display the correct number of total billable impressions. Finally, publishers are now able to download reports as they appear in their customized UI, thus excluding any columns they don’t necessarily want to include, enabling direct reporting of the information you need.

Event-Level Feeds

For publishers using one or more event level feed, it’s now possible for you to selectively enable each feed type (request, impressions, clicks, and conversions) and to set each to hourly or minute-by-minute levels of granularity.

Privacy Controls

Users who have enabled a universal privacy setting, known as do-not-track (DNT), will be treated as if they have actively opted out of any behavioral-style targeting. This includes any publisher or advertiser specific behavioral tracking but does not impact features such as frequency capping or conversion tracking. OpenX is committed to user privacy and now OpenX Enterprise users will have the option to obfuscate the user’s IP address once it has been used for ad selection, to safeguard any personally identifiable information (PII) associated with the end user.

User Interface (UI)

Improved creative asset management now means that the account level management screens include additional columns of information about each new creative (file size, ad width, type, etc). The UI will also now include the name of the ad exchange that the publisher belongs to, eg. ‘OpenX Market’.

Real-Time Bidding (RTB): New Attributes in Market Bid Requests

The Market Bid Request API will now include a ‘device’ object that contains attributes that are specific to the end-user’s device. The device object also contains a ‘geo’ object that includes several new geographic attributes such as GPS lat/lon and city, enabling ads to be targeted to the right user at any chosen location.

Join the next OpenX Enterprise demo on Wednesday, May 16 at 11:00am (PST) to learn how you can take advantage of these new product enhancements. (Existing Enterprise users may join one of the regular training seminars; please check with your account manager for details.)

OpenX Publisher Conference Guest Post Series

As he prepares for the conference, Greg took some time out of his schedule to answer the following questions about the recent developments he’s seen in online advertising.

Greg Coleman, President of Criteo, will be speaking at the forthcoming OpenX Publisher Conference on May 14 where attendees will hear his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities within the digital advertising landscape.

1. What would you say are the main challenges facing digital advertisers today?

On any given day, there are past, present, and future challenges faced by digital advertisers.  In the ‘past’, advertisers review how sales occur within a given time period and understand, retrospectively, which marketing efforts led to those sales in order to attribute marketing credit to those efforts.  As the number of marketing channels proliferate, the ability to provide proper attribution to those channels becomes more difficult.  In the ‘present’, the staggering amount of data that digital marketers have access to means that there is a real need to understand how to contextualize the data, and frankly to understand what’s relevant and what’s not.  For example, what’s the value of a facebook ‘like?’  And in the ‘future’, marketers need to understand how to allocate their marketing dollars in a world where attention is more and more fractional, and split over many screens, sometimes simultaneously.  But these issues are all on a marketer’s mind, all the time.

2. What have developments and innovation within the online publishing space in the past ten years meant for the digital advertising community?

We’ve gone from direct sales forces to ad networks to ad exchanges to demand and supply-side networks pretty rapidly over the last 10 years, all of which have greatly benefited advertisers when trying to place an advertising message in front of the right person at the right time.   Instead of looking at inventory on a binary, “premium” versus “remnant” axis, marketers instead can utilize sales forces, networks, exchanges and demand-side platforms, all at the same time, to effectively drive down the cost of marketing campaigns while greatly improving their efficiency.  Having this amount of choice has turned advertising from a ‘cost’ equation to more of a ‘value’ equation, in that they can let these systems allocate their marketing dollars in the best way possible.

3. How has the advent of automated buying and Real-Time Bidding (RTB) technologies transformed the potential of buy-side professionals to reach their chosen audiences with greater ease?

It’s really shifted our business into a math and science discipline.  It’s moved us from a “best guess” business to a fact and data-based business.  Instead of buying run of site, or a particular demographic, or utilizing behavioral targeting to take a ‘best guess’ on an advertiser’s target market, RTB instead allows advertisers to find the sweet spot between data and inventory.  Because the systems behind RTB are literally bidding on an impression-by-impression basis, advertisers can now define their target audiences in stunningly precise ways, leading to more efficient, more effective ad campaigns.

4. How have online measurement standards shifted in recent years and where do you see them going in the future?

We’ve done a better job at understanding that our business is really about driving engagement and we’re doing a better job of defining what engagement really is.  We’ve fine-tuned the definition.  Engagement used to be known as a “click”, then it became a click or a view, and now it encompasses a much, much broader universe of user interactions.  For example, in the direct marketing space, where we are trying to drive sales, marketers can reasonably understand which actions lead to a sale, and those actions might include clicking on an ad, doing a search, watching a video, doing a more precise, branded search, and then making a purchase.  Brand advertisers now have the tools to understand  how to achieve lift in important metrics like awareness, association, favorability and intent.

In the future, it feels like brand marketers are trying to borrow from best practices in direct marketing and retailers are trying to borrow best practices from brand marketers.  I think in the next few years you’ll see advertisers simply look at digital marketing as a single ‘program’ where they understand that there’s a funnel, customers can be at any spot in that funnel, and they’ll be able to utilize digital marketing solutions that can, in real-time, determine where each user sits in that funnel and show them the appropriate ad.

Hear Greg Coleman speak on May 14 at the OpenX Publisher Conference on Innovations with Automated Trading: Opportunities for Advertisers. Request your invite to the event here.

Revenue Serving – making you more money

OpenX Enterprise gives publishers a direct and integrated platform to manage all of their inventory in one place. This truly sets OpenX Enterprise ahead of competitor ad servers that don’t offer such an integrated solution. Additionally, OpenX Market, our RTB-enabled global exchange, seamlessly integrated into your server, provides monetization of – and extra demand for – your ad inventory with the simple flick of a switch. Overall, you have much better control of your guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory with OpenX Market to ensure you are generating maximum revenue for each impression in a competitive marketplace based on eCPM.

Click here to sign-up for the demo

Flexibility and Ownership

OpenX Enterprise offers publishers the ability to serve from their sub-domain, aligning their cookie and first party audience data directly to them, making it portable and fully owned. Furthermore, OpenX Enterprise allows you to easily map the ad server to your organization, and your inventory to the ad server, allowing you to sell and operate more effectively. This also means you can target based on all aspects of your content such as sections, content topics and content type.

Operational Advantages

OpenX Enterprise is a solution that has been designed from the ground up with a multichannel approach to serving display, mobile, video and email advertisements from one platform. This makes ad serving with OpenX Enterprise scalable across all your available inventory. As we built the platform we addressed several other critical trafficking and optimizing needs unaddressed by most other ad servers.

Additionally, since our acquisition of LiftDNA earlier this year, we have a yield optimization approach that is fully integrated within the publishers’ ad server, helping to maximize revenue with the use of auto optimization.

Hear more about these, and other reasons you should take a closer look at OpenX Enterprise, by joining my demo this Wednesday 11.00 AM Pacific.

With 10 million unique users and 220 million impressions per month, Patient Conversation Media recently upgraded its ad server to OpenX Enterprise and plugged into OpenX Market, a global ad exchange. Their eCPM for trusted health content inventory has been soaring ever since. To learn more, Amy Deavoll spoke with Daniel Chow, Director of Advertising Operations at Patient Conversation Media.

Click to read the case study

Amy Deavoll [AD]: Tell us about Patient Conversation Media.
Daniel Chow [DC]: Patient Conversation Media’s mission is to reduce health care expense by 5%. We have built a nationally recognized and trusted network of virtual health solutions. Our sites merge patient education, tele-therapy and appointment services to provide what we call eHealth
3.0. This helps patients and physicians improve the overall health care experience.

AD: Your flagship sites are 1-800-Therapist.com and DailyRX.com – what type of traffic do your sites receive?
DC: They receive more than 6 million unique visitors per month. We received over 10 million unique visitors across our entire network of sites in January 2012, which translates to around 220 million monthly impressions.

AD: Patient Conversation Media started out using OpenX OnRamp, then upgraded to OpenX Enterprise. What prompted the switch?
DC: In general, we wanted to make our advertising more relevant to the individual health information seeker. And we needed to take our digital advertising strategy to the next level, especially since we started selling direct. The ability to target ads to specific conditions and keywords is important to our advertising partners, and OpenX Enterprise allows us to do that quite easily.

AD: Prior to OpenX Market, how did you sell your non-guaranteed inventory?
DC: We had a lot of relationships with remnant networks, so we basically had a daisy chain. One of the key benefits of upgrading to OpenX Enterprise is that we were able to get rid of that daisy chain and send our non-guaranteed revenue to OpenX Market.

Learn how Patient Conversation increased their CPMs over 68% with OpenX Market

Daniel Chow, Director of Advertising Operations at Patient Conversation Media

AD: How is OpenX Market working for you?
DC: Our CPMs for general health inventory have gone up an average of 68% after switching to OpenX Market. That’s just the average – sometimes it really spikes. For instance at the end of 2011, we were up 150% thanks to OpenX Market. Plus, our ads are delivered to each user more quickly, which of course leads to better performance.

AD: Have you experienced efficiencies using OpenX Enterprise and OpenX Market together?
DC: Absolutely, especially since OpenX Market is thoroughly integrated with OpenX Enterprise, all we need to do is set a price floor and forget about it.

OpenX Enterprise has a very simple interface. For instance, it’s very easy for us to target our advertising, manage multiple campaigns across multiple networks, and deliver the same campaign across those networks.

We’re also pretty excited about the interface because we quickly determine the status of our campaigns at any given time.

And the real-time reporting is fantastic. We look at those reports multiple times a day.

AD: How would you describe OpenX support?
DC: The OpenX Support team is superb. For any problem we’ve had, our support team responds immediately. They jump right on it!

AD: Any advice for other publishers looking to better monetize their inventory?
DC: I can sum it up in two words: OpenX Market. Access to this ad exchange via OpenX Enterprise is superb: just turn it on and watch your revenues grow.

And the simple interface enables us to make quicker and better informed decisions. We expected to hire additional staff, but have yet to do so as these efficiencies have allowed us to keep our costs down. That gives us a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Check out the case study with Patient Conversation.

When the Samsung AdHub Market launches in the second half of 2012, what will it actually look like and how will advertisers and smartphone or tablet users benefit from this powerful new exchange?

The infographic above explains the process from the point the mobile user loads content on their screen through to the point where the OpenX exchange technology chooses the winning ad from a select group of advertisers and loads it on the screen. With OpenX’s real-time technology, all this takes place in the space of 180 milliseconds.

The result is that advertisers are able to reach their marketing goals with greater precision and ease, and Samsung Electronics and its mobile developers can have greater control over the quality of the ads appearing due to the closed marketplace environment. Users will also benefit from more relevant, high quality ads as part of their mobile browsing experience.

If you’re an advertiser and are interested in participating in Samsung AdHub Market, Powered by OpenX, and accessing the unique supply that will be available in it, please get in touch with our demand team.

OpenX (booth #2611) will be in attendance, offering demonstrations and insight into our own significant and newsworthy developments from the past twelve months. Our recent acquisition of SSP LiftDNA means that OpenX is now the world’s first fully integrated ad revenue platform.

OpenX booth at ad:tech (#2611)

We’ll also be hosting an exclusive dinner with leaders in both the publisher and advertiser worlds tonight (Monday) to discuss the challenges that are being faced in online advertising today, with perspectives on solutions that have worked.

If you’re attending ad:tech, you can come and have your questions at booth #2611 or Tweet us to meet us if you’d like to schedule a specific time to speak with someone. If you can’t make it along to our booth this week but would like to know more about the effect OpenX Enterprise and our fully integrated ad revenue platform could have on your publishing business, sign-up for the live online demo this Wednesday morning (11.00am Pacific), hosted by VP Publisher Sales, East Region, Leon Gurevich.

When SB Nation needed to scale its high-impact Sponsored Post ad units, the company built a specialized campaign tool that streamlines the way they’re created, managed, and trafficked.

Example of a sponsored post on SB Nation

While the tool improved efficiency and saved time for developers, it couldn’t track, report nor link the posts to banner ad campaigns. Vox Media decided to take advantage of OpenX’s customizable APIs and integrate their homegrown tool for Sponsored Posts into OpenX Enterprise, their ad server.

“Now we can create and manage custom advertisements in our campaign tool, but we use an API to create a line item on OpenX Enterprise to produce delivery and impact reports. It’s all done automatically,” explained Dusty Matthews, Vox Media’s Product Developer.

The integration also allows Vox Media to schedule companion ads. “When we create a Sponsored Post in our campaign tool, it’s assigned an ID. We can target that Sponsored Post ID through OpenX’s variable targeting so that the Sponsored Post and companion banner ads are served on the same page,” said Dusty.

Leveraging OpenX’s reporting for its campaign tool saved Vox Media time and development resources, enabling Dusty and his team to tackle new projects and innovations.