Rohit Bhargava recently wrote an interesting blog piece about online advertising. He ponders what it would be like if there was a site like Priceline for online advertising (he calls it Adline for fun)? He asks what it would be like if you could enter your flight dates, the demographic details of who you are trying to reach, the type of placement, and the maximum CPM you are willing to pay. Placements would need to be rated on some sort of neutral system so you would not be overpaying for obscured inside page placements, as well as by relative visibility of the site, but the idea is that I could decide to do a five star ad unit on a five star site and set my own CPM. The site could choose to accept or decline my offer. I liked this free-market Ebay-esque approach to online ads. But one of the great Achilles Heel’s of online advertising has always been transparency; this notion that ad networks have historically been opaque to the advertiser basically requiring advertisers and agencies to take them on their word that their ads are out there working. A new bidding system like this would work if every impression was audit-able, if every dollar spent was on the table for scrutiny. Only then would people trust the system enough to put their ad spend on the line.

Tags: advertising, agencies, transparency

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under Industry News, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.