Nearly every online marketer is concerned with transparency and brand safety.  These seem to be the biggest roadblocks to brands embracing display.  A quick search on AdExchanger reveals a dozen articles on both subjects in the last few months.  We’ve all talked about it yet there still seems to be more misconceptions than fact surrounding what is possible when it comes to real brand safety.

In April of 2010 Winterberry Group LLC reported that “transparency and brand safety have conspired to inhibit billions in potential online display ad spending.”  Brand safety continues to undermine a broad investment in display advertising by brand advertisers despite the obvious efficiencies being delivered by today’s ad networks.  This is because truly preemptive brand safety is difficult so most have settled for simple post impression verification and are therefore not getting a truly brand safe environment for their message.  But the DSP trend changes all that.

With the advent of contextual display advertising, a host of new advertising opportunities opened up for marketers across every industry.  Whether contextualization is done at the site level (i.e. ESPN.com is about sports) or at the page level (i.e. automotive content on CNN.com), the ability to target ads around content—in addition to demographic and behavioral profiles—is pretty powerful stuff.  But with these big opportunities comes an equal amount of risk.  Imagine an automotive ad next to a news story about a horrific car crash or an ad for a vacation package next to tsunami news coverage of the same destination.  We see it in contextual search as well as display.  It’s enough to make any brand marketer anxious about any sort of online advertising.

The good news is that advances in targeting technologies and demand-side platforms (DSP) with real-time bidding (RTB) are creating truly brand safe environments for brand advertiser.  But like transparency, everyone defines brand safety differently.  There is one feature that separates effective brand safety from all the other forms of impression analysis and delivery verification out there today.  It‘s preemptive brand safety.  Is your trusted flavor of brand safety truly preemptive?  Or is the brand safety you rely on from your DSP really just post impression analysis disguised as safe filtering?  This is another great myth in our industry often perpetuated on purpose only because preemptive is difficult to pull off.

Real brand safety, meaning a demonstrably safe environment for brand advertisers to promote their message online, comes from sanitizing the ad space before the ad is served.  Of course pre-impression analysis for relevance, performance and safety is very difficult to do so it’s the least prevalent form out there.  Evaluating billions of impressions a day for relevance takes a robust platform and deep integration with all of the real-time bid aggregation points.  But it pays huge dividends in both safety and efficiency by guaranteeing quality impressions and eliminating the need for pass-backs.  With truly preemptive brand safety you only buy what is safe with no waste in the equation.

But when pages are not categorized for meaning in advance, ads get served next to inappropriate content and the advertiser simply gets a report indicating that it has happened again.  That isn’t preemptive brand safety, that’s reactive reporting.  It’s the equivalent of closing the gate after the cows get out (and wander down the middle of the highway disrupting traffic and endangering your brand investment).

Everyone knew it would take third-party providers to deliver real brand safety.  Back in March, Jonathan Margulies at Winterberry Group acknowledged as much right here on AdExchanger.  It isn’t in the publisher’s best interest to exclude their own content from advertising—for a publisher the more bidders the better.  The interest in such technology falls on the demand side but most advertisers lack the engineering infrastructure to build such a solution.  In the display advertising landscape, providing preemptive brand safety is the responsibility of the demand-side platforms.  Various platforms provide this ability in varying degrees – from zero to truly preemptive.  Ask the question.  Make sure you are getting the truly preemptive kind that boosts efficiency and return on spend.

Reprinted from AdExchnager.com Data-Driven Thinking column, a media community blog containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Follow LucidMedia on Twitter @lucidmediaVIP and follow AdExchanger.com @adexchanger.com.

It seems like “brand safety” is getting to be like “transparency” in our industry; everyone offers it in one form or another but like transparency, brand safety means different things to different people.  And just like transparency, everyone defines brand safety differently.  There is one thing that separates effective brand safety from all the other forms of impression analysis and delivery verification out there today.  Preemptive.  Is your flavor of brand safety truly preemptive?  Or is the brand safety you are getting from your demand-side platform (DSP) provider post impression analysis?  Is it reactive?  This is another of the industry myths perpetuated by other solutions rushed to market.  Real brand safety, meaning a demonstrably safe environment for a brand advertiser to promote their message online, comes from truly preemptive brand safe filtering.  But in practice pre-impression analysis for applicability and safety is very difficult to do.  Evaluating a billion impressions a day for applicability takes a robust platform and intelligent integration with real-time sources.  But it pays huge dividends in efficiency.  With truly preemptive brand safety the pass back is meaningless.  With truly preemptive brand safety you only buy what is safe and there is no waste.  No wasted targeting, optimization, time, or ad spend.  Make sure your brand safety is preemptive before you put your message out there.

We recently talked John Ebbert, the publisher and managing editor at AdExchanger.com, regarding our big funding news story.  Here are some of the most frequently asked questions.

Q: Please discuss your new round of funding and why you chose MMV.

A:  We had many options available to us in this round but MMV was the ideal funding partner at this stage in our execution plan and capitalization strategy.  MMV is truly dedicated to providing timely and effective growth capital to emerging technology companies like LucidMedia.  They are focused on the North American market and the amount of capital they typically provide ranges from $1.5M to $10.0M which was also a perfect fit for us.

Q: Where do you see the $4.5 million going?  Any critical needs such as “feet on the street”?

A:  We are applying the proceeds from this funding round to expand on our recently launched self-service platform (www.LucidMediaDSP.com) that gives agencies and advertisers more control and enables them to more efficiently manage their display advertising campaigns. The funds are being used to bring additional capabilities to market and to do so sooner so we can better capture the escalating DSP opportunity.  And since we own the full technology stack in our demand-side platform, with the additional funds we are launching new capabilities not as disparate products but as unified new features within our platform.  It allows us to be more nimble and responsive to our advertiser’s requirements.

Q: Are there too many demand-side platforms today and how will LucidMedia differentiate?

A:  There are not really all that many demand-side platforms out there.  Much of the static in the DSP space today is centered around attracting attention in the venture capital circles.  But when it comes to getting in front of an advertiser and demonstrating real capabilities in a real product that you can actually use to deliver value and efficiency, the number of DSPs can be counted on one hand (minus a few fingers).  There are too many companies calling themselves a demand-side platform though.  We have run hundreds of successful campaigns for the majority of Fortune 500 companies out there over the last 18 months that we have been operating as a DSP.  In that time we have proven that several capabilities are unique to what LucidMedia offers.  This includes our proprietary contextual and audience targeting, ability to police a true universal frequency cap (UFC), and real-time assessment (RTA) across all sources.  In addition, our DSP provides dynamic inventory allocation across RTB sources and even premium buys, true preemptive brand safety, and campaign optimization at the page-level.  We also offer custom integrations with all 3rd party data providers, real-time bid (RTB) inventory availability insights by channel, and a server-side cookie store for proprietary audience targeting.

Q:  Anything surprise you about the reported acquisition of Invite Media by Google this week?

A:  No surprises there.  Peter Kafka broke the Google-Invite news a month ago on All Things Digital.  The industry has been holding its collective breath waiting for the big roll up for a long time now.  In March Epic Advertising acquired Connexus Corporation including the Traffic Marketplace and now Google grabs Invite.  This is likely the start of a bigger consolidation in display media.  Our focus is still on executing against the truly exciting opportunities available to us today in the still emerging DSP space.  We believe there is a considerable amount of value to be had here and we are focused squarely on positioning our technology, products, and team as effectively as possible with agencies and advertisers.

digiday:DAILY is a regular content hub and e-newsletter that features the top stories in digital media and marketing with a focus on digital content, advertising, and emerging platforms.   John Gaffney, the award-winning journalists, recently wrote a great review of our self-service launch.  Here’s what he had to say.

DSPs are going DIY. Demand-side platform LucidMedia announced the launch of a self-service version of its formerly managed service software yesterday, hoping to enable agencies and their clients to gain full-control over their targeted digital campaigns.

Ajay Sravanapudi, LucidMedia Founder and CEO, says the self-service switch will give agencies accessing an in-house, “white labeled” solution with a proprietary base of more than 14,000 targeted categories, page-level transparency, and multiple layers of filtering to protect branded advertisers from inappropriate content.  He also says the DSP has not overlooked the publishing side of the business.

“The industry trend of self service DSPs also impacts publishers positively.  Many immediately discount the notion that what is good for the demand side can also be good for the supply side of the equation. But the trend is actually good for the whole display industry,” he says. “Early on, publishers heard that the advent of mega-exchanges would only drive down display media prices.  The story was that premium inventory would be treated as interchangeable across the big networks and traded like commodities.  But the self service DSPs have actually done the opposite.  They have allowed publishers to differentiate their inventory in ways never before thought possible.  What we really faced were insufficient tools for buyers and sellers to truly value impressions properly and that is what the DSPs, and the readily available self service front ends, are doing for publishers.”

Sravanapudi also believes publishers that are creating real value and results for advertisers can now be compensated for this service through the agency self service platforms like LucidMediaDSP.  Agencies will have a new level of unified, actionable optics and insights, he says. Tools like billing and reconciliation are integrated making proper attribution a reality, allowing for true differentiation and proper valuation of the publisher’s impressions.

Among the features:

* Real-time Assessment (RTA): LucidMedia’s RTA provides immediate insights into real-time bidding availability covering up to 95% reach potential in the US;

* Real-time bid (RTB) inventory availability:  Agencies and advertisers can get real-time insights by channel and by demographics, delivering the most flexible optimization available;

* Dynamic inventory allocation:Inventory from all real-time bid sources, as well as spot buys, is automatically allocated to campaigns, enabling more efficient ad operations teams and higher returns;

* Page-level semantic transparency: Provides deep insights into what drives the desired campaign outcomes and maximum campaign performance;

* Proprietary content and audience targeting technologies: A universal frequency cap (UFC) and server-side database provide maximum control and leverage.

This weekend while many of you were sitting down to a quiet meal, LucidMedia was celebrating an historic milestone. One year ago LucidMedia processed our first real-time bid (RTB) impression. At precisely 6:45PM Eastern Time February 21st 2009 LucidMedia turned on the RTB engine in our demand-side platform (DSP) and began acquiring impressions in real-time. We have since processed tens of billions of impressions and the scale continues to grow. We are quite proud to be one of the pioneering companies behind the current real-time bid inventory acquisition wave that is sweeping our industry. And although we are a relatively new company, we are one of the first demand-side platforms operating today in what is rapidly becoming a crowded space. We saw very early, late in 2007 in fact, that advertisers needed more control and the DSP model was the future. Back then we did not call it a DSP though. It was simply a better kind of ad network where inter-mediation was streamlined, transparency was paramount, and brand safety was the dominant capability. Now it is the future of the ad network.

LucidMedia just announced the availability of ADvisor DSP, our mature demand-side platform designed to help interactive agencies transition into buy-side networks. The solution was deployed internally in January of 2009 effectively making it the industry’s first production RTB-enabled demand-side platform. We have since processed more than 100B impressions and delivered hundreds of successful campaigns with the platform. Here’s a permalink to the big news.

The new TNS Media Intelligence Report is out and Adotas has jumped on it with their Display Advertising Shows Signs of Life e-newsletter today. The reports indicates that for the first quarter of 2009, the total measured advertising expenditures they track dropped 14.2% versus a year ago, down to $30.18B. This follows a 9.2 percent decline in Q4 2008 as the advertising recession accelerated in the new year. While that may not seem like good news, consider they indicate that internet display-specific advertising spend is actually up 8.2% over the same time period last year which I believe is better than expected considering all the frozen budgets, wait and see attitudes, and narrowed lines of sight. Although it is lower than the original double-digit growth predicted last year, it is still growth–and very healthy growth at that. Wipe away all the historical (and semi-hysterical) predictions of double digit growth ad infinitum and look at 8.2% growth on its own–among a sea of declining numbers–and you have a very clear sign. So why is display standing out like a shining star pointing the way ahead in our rocky sector of space? A lot of the growth they are reporting is being driven by the new free market exchange models that are moving onto the plateau of productivity and at the same time relegating the old ad network models to the trough of disillusionment. From this emergence, not only is publisher yield inching back upwards, advertisers are finally smelling the real meat of return on their spend. That alone has been happening for almost a year now and is not the whole story behind this successful metric. The promise of data has recently begun to materialize through all kinds of platforms with their new insights and relevant analytics. It is this confluence of forces, the emergence of the exchange model and the promise of data being realized through the platforms that is drawing advertisers to invest in display at a healthy clip. And when the exchange playing field congeals a bit further, and at the same time a few of the platform players begin to dominate inside the agencies, we will see a whole new display advertising sector. Gone will be banners and CPMs and premium and remnant. We will have a truly value priced free market exchange of media in real time that rewards the publisher and empowers the advertiser. We’ll have less layers and less middlemen and less latency. We’ll have more return, more clarity, more accountability, and real transparency. If one thing is certain, it will be nothing like the display business of last year.