Interactive Advertisement Dynamics_020310

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Interactive Advertisement Dynamics An Overview

About the Author

Rani Bisal

Rani Bisal is a Domain expert and a member of the Presales

team for the Advertising & New Media sub-segment for theMedia & Information Services Business Unit at TCS. She has

over 5+ years of experience in domain consulting with wide

range of experience in the Advertising industry, specifically

the Online Media and the Ad Agencies. She has a bachelors

degree in Mechanical Engineering. She can be reached at

[email protected]


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Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3

2 Ad Serving - Basics 4

3. The Evolution 5

4. Ad-Server How it works? 6

5. Key Players 9

6. Conclusion The Way Forward 10

7. References 10


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Introduction

Interactive mediums such as the internet and mobile are increasingly becoming the primary channel for content

consumption today. Christened as new media, this has opened up a unique experience for consumers, fueled by key

factors such as broadband penetration, on-demand information and entertainment, personalization, two-waycommunication channels and consumer affordability. The last factor mentioned, affordability, perhaps holds the key;

it was imperative for online businesses to keep the end user cost to a minimum and hence leverage online

advertisements as their primary revenue stream.

In the early days, advertisers were not too keen to have internet ads as a part of their media plan, since online

advertisements (Ad) were a bunch of pop-ups and banners, which were considered to be a perpetual source of

irritation to consumers. However, with the advent of web 2.0, social networking, online user profiling and identity

management, web analytics established the concept of targeting which in itself matured from demographics,

psychographics and behaviorgraphics. This led to the concept of delivering online advertisements based on theconsumer preferences. A well targeted online advertisement with a good context has been proved to have a much

higher recall and effectiveness as compared to traditional ones and it is offered at a competitive cost.

This relatively new business model as indicated above is being technically achieved through an strategic

implementation of ad-servers solutions, ad networks, digital content management systems, content delivery

networks, web analytics, business intelligence systems and interface to enterprise systems for invoicing and billing.

For effective delivery with the correct context, online advertisement needs a comprehensive technology driven

platform to uniquely identify the demography and user profile, accurately capture and derive the analytics and KPI.Intelligent ad-servers and ad management platforms comprehensively provide all the above mentioned features

and many other facilities.

This paper attempts to briefly outline the ad-server mechanism and how they serve the online advertisement

business.

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Ad Serving - Basics

Online Ad-management is realized through deployment and implementation of commercially available ad-server

solutions. These Ad-servers provide various features like Ad scheduling, delivery, placement and optimization,

tracking, reporting and so on. The business of interactive advertising is driven by IT maturity and sophistication. Withadoption of IT enabled services, the online Ad-servers are able to minimize operational costs and maximize revenues.

Ad-servers and their associated systems enable advertisers to optimize the marketing campaign spend by utilizing

their highly effective targeting and ad performance measurement capabilities. A typical Ad-server implements the

following features or variations of the same:

Ad Inventory Management Based on the media plan feed into the Ad-server, the Ad-server serves the right ad to

the user at the right time on the right space available on the websites zones.

Content Management Uploading the Ad content to a content management system for efficient packaging anddelivery across multiple content channels

Ad Targeting and Trafficking As per various guidelines, one advertisement is served to a specific web page every

time a page is requested by a web site visitor.

Key Statistical Reports The Ad-servers generate various statistics related to the campaign, such as the numbers

of impressions, number of clicks in a session, click streaming, as in post-click and post-impression activities, site

performance metrics and so on. A report on the number of impressions and clicks for each advertising format that

is served also can be shared with the advertisers.

Ad Calendar The interactive online calendars with password protection, accessible from any Web browser,

automate Ad placement for Publishers, eliminating manual error and reducing administration costs.

Ad Scheduling The scheduling system allows publishers to deliver guaranteed numbers of impressions to their

advertisers and increase sales by selling remnant impressions to additional advertisers.

Categorized Ad Groups The group categorization system simplifies and organizes the process of selling Ad

inventories to advertisers by grouping the Ad zones within a website, based on various criteria such as popularity

or subject matter

Some of the advanced Ad-Server features which are optionally implemented are as illustrated below:

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Figure 1: Ad-server Advanced Functionality


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The Evolution

In its very basic form, an Ad-server renders static advertisements on web pages. Once the Ad is served to the end user,

it further tracks the Ads performance through an analytics engine generating a preset collection of KPIs. In earlier

implementations, when a page was requested by a browser, an advertisement request was made through the webserver to the Ad-server of the publisher. The Ad-server would respond with the advertisement content back to the

browser and also internally log the request rendition for further tracking. Below is a pictorial representation of the

earlier ad serving scenario.

The advertiser billing was based on the delivery tracking, maintained at the publisher site. Effectively the advertisers

or agencies had no mechanism to validate the invoice raised by the publisher.

The next level of evolution introduced a tracking system at the advertiser end, which can be used to reconcile the

delivery information just prior to invoicing and payout. With this, the Ad delivery is split into two steps the

advertisement rendering instructions are delivered from the publisher Ad-server, while the actual Ad content is

being delivered from the advertisers (or designated third party) Ad-server. Apart from the provision for

reconciliation, this also provides advertisers flexibility and tighter control on the content being displayed to the end

user. The diagram below illustrates the evolved online delivery model.

Figure 2: Old Ad-Serving Model

Figure 3: Evolved Ad Serving Model

Database

Database

Database

Browser

Browser

Web Server

Web Server

PublisherAd Server

Publisher Ad Server

Advertiser Ad Server

1. Request

1. Request

2. Ad Request

2. Ad Request

5. Ad Request

5. Ad Delivered

4. Ad Instruction

8. Ad Delivered

4. Ad Content

4. Ad Content

3. Log Reporting

3. Log Reporting

3. Log Reporting


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Ad-server How it works?

The Ad-server facilitates the quick and easy delivery of advertisements to the publishers websites. Its interface will

perform the following basic functions to initiate an ad campaign:

1. Create an Advertiser2. Create a Campaign for the advertiser

3. Assign Banners to the campaign

4. Define a Publisher and its online sites

5. Define ad delivery zones (sections) on the publisher sites

6. Link banners to the ad zones on the web pages

To request an Ad from an Ad-server, the publisher has to place a script (XML / JS) on its page. Heres an example an ad

tag:

This snippet of HTML, when placed on a web page, informs the browser to open a small window (150X150 pixels), and

in that window place whatever content is returned from http://ad.samplemanager.com/imp?Z=46860&s=2948&.

When this is loaded in the browser, we will get the following response:

This essentially gives two instructions to the browser:

a) Load the ad display content from content.yieldmanager.com

b) Redirect to target site on clicking the ad displayed (advertiser site)

This is the most basic implementation of a web-page with an Ad-server. Now lets look at the various models in the

market.

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Ad Serving Model: Publisher Side

This is the simplest scenario in which an advertiser gets the Ad inventory from a publisher and sends its content to the

publisher to be delivered onto its online properties.

The key steps illustrated in the diagram above are as follows:

1. Browser requests for an advertisement (embedded on a web page) to web server

2. Web server routes the advertisement request to an Ad-server

3. On successful processing, Ad-server logs the request

4. Ad-server responds back to the Web Server with Ad delivery instructions (XML)

5. Web server responds back to the browser with Ad delivery instructions

6. The browser requests for the display content to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) / 3rd party source

7. Ad content is delivered back to the browser

The entire process of delivering an online advertisement from request to the final response is completed within a few

milliseconds.

Probing a level deeper, the processing logic for an online advertisement at the Ad-server on receipt of a request is as

depicted in the figure below.

Figure 4 : Publisher Ad Serving Model

1. Request2. Ad Request

6. Ad Request

3. Log Reporting

4. Ad Instruction5. Ad Instructions

Delivered

7. Ad Delivered

Browser Web Server

Database

Publisher Ad Server

3rd Party Ad Server(CDNs)


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The key steps executed by the Ad-server are:

1. A unique code specific to a web page (or a group) is placed on the Ad-server.

2. It routes this unique code to the Ad picker module to choose an Ad for delivery.

3. Ad picker maps the browser request to targeting groups based on geography, demography, and so on.

4. The Ad-server verifies all business rules associated with each campaign assigned to the unique browser identifier.

5. Compare yield across the various options for each Ad that match the delivery criteria (which is the best possible

delivery, given the criteria set)

6. The selected Ad is delivered back to the browser through the web server

7. The delivery and performance metrics are transmitted to the reporting and billing systems.

The publisher Ad-server encompasses several other features such inventory prediction, yield optimization, sales

interfaces, order management, billing and reporting interfaces, and so on, that makes a campaign management

successful.

Ad Serving Model: Advertiser/Agency Side

The advertisers or the Ad agencies have similar Ad management system as the publishers. The features include Ad

rendition, tracking key metrics, campaign management, workflow automation, CRM and integrated reporting

systems. An integrated Ad management platform enables significant automation in terms of order management,

trafficking, media planning, reconciliation and others. Moreover, a centralized reporting with comparative analytics

and KPI data provides key insights into the Ad spend and campaign effectiveness.

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Figure 5 : Ad-server Backend Functionality

1. Request 2. Ad Request 3. Log Reporting

4. Ad Instruction5. Ad InstructionDelivered


Browser

WebServer

Publisher Ad Server

Database

6. Ad Request

8. Ad Delivered

Ad DeliveredEngine Ad Picker

BehavioralTargetingDatabase

Reporting&

Billing

CreativeAsset

Management

InventoryPrediction &

Management

CampaignBusiness

Rules

YieldOptimization


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Figure 6 : Advertisers Ad Serving model


1. Request 2. Ad Request

6. Ad Request

3. Log Reporting

Database

4. Ad Instruction5. Ad InstructionsDelivered

7. Ad InstructionsDelivered

Browser

Web Server Publisher Ad Server

Advertiser / Ad AgencyAd Server

(CDNs)

9. Ad Delivered

8. Ad Request

Key Players

Here are few of the key global players in the Ad serving technologies and services.

Atlas

Doubleclick

Right MediaYield Manager

OpenXHiroMedia

ADTECH

Bluestreak

Google Ad Manager

Smart Ad-server

Expo9

Solbright

Accipiter Ad Manager

24/7 RealMedia's Open Ad Stream (OAS)Mediaturf

MOJO Ad-server Platform

AdSapient

Interactive Avenue

DGM India

Eplanning

Pointroll

My Ad Market

CheckM8Eyebalster

Ad Jugler

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Conclusion The Way Forward

References

With so many features in hand that offers pure technology products and services, its clear that the primary function

of the Ad-servers is no longer restricted to simply delivering and reporting about an Ad unit. Rather, it is in bridging

the gap between the advertisers and their targeted consumers more effectively and helping the publishers to bettermonetize their valuable inventory. Hence, the business model of purely paying for serving an Ad on websites is

rapidly fading into the past. The global digital media companies will view basic Ad serving as an enabler for their

higher value offerings and will begin to offer it at a little or no cost to the advertisers and publishers, with a self service

access.

The revolutionary changes like no-fee Ad serving are indicating a positive aspect for the future of technology

innovation in the Ad industry which signals, Ad serving is no more a commodity services rather, it is now a targeting

tool for advertisers, Ad optimizer for publishers, and an effective end to end Ad management platform for an Ad

campaign.

Finally, this transformation is going to lead to a better online experience for the whole advertisement ecosystem.

http://www.adoperationsonline.com/category/ad-serving/

AdRelevance, 2008. Impressions by Technology for Simple Flash, GIF/JPG and Rich Media only.

http://www.ignitee.com/newsletters/13/MTC_13.htm

IAB Measurement Guidelines

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/Web_beacon.html

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Interactive Advertisement Dynamics_020310