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XA.net CEO and founder Rob Leathern will be featured as a panelist during the Introduction to Remarketing session taking place Tuesday, August 17th, 4:15pm – 5:15pm. Search Engine Strategies is part of the larger inaugural Connected Marketing Week, which also includes events produced by the IAB and Online Marketing Summit.

Contact us if you would like to meet up during the week!

Here is a ustream recording of the session

Matt reinforced XA.net’s position that, while RTB is crucially important in the online ad industry for its transparency and efficiency and will continue to grow strongly, advertisers cannot yet abandon traditional tag-based CPM buying models, where the majority of publisher inventory still exists.

XA.net has been one of the pioneers in the DSP space, providing media buying technologies and services to advertisers since 2008. We have built and own all our own technologies for campaign management, realtime bidding and audience management, and love what we do!

Grill the Vendors: Real Time Bidding

According to some predictions, up to a third of network advertising may be moving through real-time bidding systems by the end of this year. This latest technology trend promises to match the right ad to the right person within milliseconds of their entering the page. The technology and the algorithms are complex, but do they always work as advertised? Do agencies and brands know what they are buying…and what they are buying into? Are the RTB systems out there working in the publisher’s best interests or the media buyers? We bring in some of the top competitors in the field for a class OMMA grilling in order to determine how RTB vendors differentiate themselves and answer the hard questions both publishers and media buyers must bring to the table.

If you’re going to be at the event and would like to catch up with us, send us an email.

Register and Get $400 Off OMMA Ad Nets with Code: ADNETSXA

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The conference takes place on Monday, July 19, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, located on 2025 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles. We hope to see you there!

In the piece, Ad Age mentions that the two largest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook, represent more than a fifth of all advertising traffic, but are only drawing an average $.56 CPM compared to the $2.43 CPM average for the internet at large. In fact, the averages for the largest player, Facebook may even be lower than that.

I don’t believe that thinking about the “average” CPM is that helpful – because as we know, impressions are not commodities (if they were,  our lives would be a WHOLE lot easier!). Instead of considering how a handful of large social media sites are pushing down the average CPM, we think social media represents a very exciting opportunity for advertisers for the following reasons:

• There is a low initial starting point in terms of budget to get started with these systems
• Connection-based targeting opportunities offer an intriguing targeting prospect
• Social media ad systems like Facebook’s allow for easy demographic-based buying
• Conversion tracking is now directly possible on some of these social media sites (earlier one had to use redirects)
• Text plus image ads are easier to iterate than graphical banners, meaning many more tests can be run in parallel, more quickly
• Perceptually, low CPMs on social media sites appear to be a good opportunity to start testing ad concepts, and lower some of the barriers for advertising

Tools like XA.net’s Text Ad Creator (with our Facebook advertising API integration) can help automate the creation and optimization of tens or hundreds of different creative/landing page combinations, to allow for more efficient and effective advertising. Contact us to learn more. In terms of connection-based targeting, XA.net can target (with your permission) the fans of your pages or applications using our system — so definitely let us know if you would like us to do that for you!

Rob will be featured on Tuesday, August 17th as a panelist during “Introduction to Remarketing”. In this session industry experts will share their experiences with Remarketing (also known as retargeting) and the impact it has had on advertisers’ overall ROI. The panelists will also address the lack of awareness and the issues that have arisen surrounding Remarketing as a result.

It’s kind of like the Miss Wisconsin beauty pageant. Lots of young women who meet the organizers’ criteria enter the pageant. There is a judging process which ends in the selection of a Miss Wisconsin. Miss Wisconsin (MW) then qualifies to go the Miss America pageant. There is travel, lodging, rehearsals and activities but eventually the big day arrives where MW gets to take the stage in her quest to win the Miss America crown. There can be only one winner but along the way ladies like MW have experienced intermediate glory.

So think of Wisconsin as our real-time bidding system, and what happens there as the Miss Wisconsin pageant. For every impression in an ad exchange or aggregator (Miss America pageant) there can be only one winner, and so every bidder (state) puts forth their absolute best. California, Arizona and Delaware all want to win that pageant – and they’ve all held their own pageants ahead of time to put forth that one winner to go through to the final. Now some might argue that California is bigger and better than many of the other states (budget deficits notwithstanding) and should get more entrants into the Miss America pageant, but hey – this isn’t a representative democracy! One entrant per state only please!

Now think of 10,000 pageants a second and you’re starting to get the idea.

For RTB each bidder is conducting some kind of real-time assessment before deciding which bid to place on a given impression. It could be a complex or simple assessment, but more complex internal real-time decisions (local pageants) mean less time to prepare and compete at nationals.

The online coverage on ESPN3 (full matches) and on ESPNsoccernet (which Buena Vista Internet Group, part of Disney, acquired a majority stake in back in 1999) has been good as well. I went to catch up on some scores today, however, and noticed something that encouraged me to write about a larger phenomenon that still befuddles me, namely that of how video pre-roll advertising is bought and sold.

The World Cup page has results for all the games played today – there were four games – arranged via tabs on the top of the screen. When clicking on the tabs which contain the results of the games, you are taken to a page underneath each tab that has a report of the game on the left and a video of the highlights on the right. The highlights video has a 15-second pre-roll ad, followed by a 7 second “this expert analysis is brought to you by” sponsor section featuring the same advertiser, however, before you can watch the game highlights (40-50 seconds). Here’s a screenshot of the unit:

Ok. so I don’t have a problem with paying the freight for the highlights, happy to check out the ad for “Knight and Day”, the new Tom Cruise movie. Even thought the soccer ball juggling thing was cute (that’s on the site you click through to, not in the ad itself). But here’s what I have a problem with – seeing the ad, again, and again, and again.

The same ad was shown to me every time, every time I clicked on a different game result – before I could see highlights I had to watch the ad again. I understand that this was a sponsorship deal and the advertiser paid a lot of money for it and wanted to get their money’s worth, but really — showing the same loud, interruptive video preroll ad multiple times is unlikely to curry favor with fans trying to quickly catch up on the highlights. Show it once then perhaps show something else, or skip the ad in favor of a little thing saying “brought to you by” (no we have to sit through the sponsor message AND the trailer ad both, every time).

Guys, we have frequency caps on ads for a reason. You can even do things like show me the ad, then not show me the same ad for 20 minutes (or whatever). But it doesn’t seem like you care…

A few things here – 1) there isn’t enough on-site inventory for these big media buys and so publishers are looking for more inventory and so have to replace almost everything they can with a single advertiser’s creatives, but 2) Video and creative assets cost money and as we’ve seen, online audience-based advertising has underinvestment in creative resources and so inevitably the same, small number of ads are reused again and again (I saw the trailer on their website – it was 2.22 minutes long…. there are quite a few ways you can cut different 15 second slots out of it – but that would be expensive and effortful). Aside from video you could even do different things with various static messages too. 3) It’s hard to know what the impact of the annoyance factor is — especially considering that I might go see this movie anyway, the ROI on these campaigns let alone assessing what “waste” there might or might not be doing things this way could be hard to fathom. But difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and I really think there is true upside to just knowing in general whether this thing is a good idea.

I’d suggest publishers and big advertisers (and their agencies) give a little forethought to the user experience when designing some of these types of campaigns – I’ve seen lots of other examples of too few creative assets chasing a small number of users who end up getting deluged with the same video ads again and again. Companies in the ad industry though, should be working together to come up with the proof points on whether these are good or bad ideas and to what extent – I’d respect (not like) it if they could show me the research that pointed to this working for them, but my hunch is that they’re not doing it for that reason.

Update: Jumped into the half-time show on ESPN3 during the Italy game on 6/24 and saw the same “Knight and Day” ad twice (movie opened 6/23) in the first pod of the half-time show, one after another, then saw the same two again, one after the other in the second ad pod towards the end. Really, is this intentional – does the advertiser want this?

This month, we continue to follow the growth of Facebook and the countries with the highest percentage of their population with accounts. According to XA.net’s analysis of Facebook’s figures, the social interaction hub has grown its worldwide audience to 465.6 million people (as of June 1st), growing 42% since November 2009 (326.9 million). We found some interesting trends forming in the data, too:

When You’re Hot, You’re Hot. When You’re Not, You’re Not

The Top 15 countries with the deepest Facebook audience penetration (Chart 1) also showed a good deal of penetration growth, indicating that Facebook audience’s continuing viral growth. On average, the penetration growth for the top 15 Facebook countries (by audience penetration) was 9%, while the remaining countries only showed an average penetration growth of 5%.

Iceland remains the most Facebook’ed country, with 60% of its population on Facebook, almost 20% more than the United States’ 41% penetration.

Fastest Growers

The Top 15 fastest growing Facebook audiences almost all doubled in size since November 2009, with Romania more than tripling their audience size to 1.3 million users. While audience growth has continued its phenomenal pace, Facebook’s worldwide penetration is only at 10%, showing they still have a lot of room for further growth!

Indonesia, Mexico, and India all show tremendous opportunity for continued penetration growth: All three countries are amongst the fastest growing and largest audiences, but only have 11%  (Indonesia, Mexico) and 1% (India) penetration into their respective populations.

Large countries like China, Japan, and Russia have 1% or less of their population on Facebook, also leaving room for tremendous growth.

Size Matters- United States Still the Largest Facebook Country

The US still maintains the largest Facebook audience with 125.5 million people, followed by the United Kingdom with 27 million, and Indonesia with almost 25 million users as of June 1st, 2010. The US Facebook audience grew by 29% since November 2009, but its audience only represents 41% of the total population, ranking it 10th in the world by penetration (Chart 1).

Indonesia continued a sharp growth trajectory, and became the 3rd largest Facebook audience overall, jumping past Canada, Italy, France, and Turkey in Facebook population size. Mexico more than doubled its Facebook audience, landing it in the 9th position of the Top 15. India broke into the Top 15 largest Facebook audiences, displacing Chile from the list.

XA.net’s API Produces Results for Facebook Advertising

As one of Facebook’s first API-enabled advertising partners, XA.net can help you effectively manage and optimize your Facebook ad campaigns via its multivariate text ad platform.

Find out more today: contact our account management team to start advertising on Facebook.

Check out the full set of Facebook audience data.