Have you noticed lately that everyone in this ad network business says they offer great, transparent, handpicked inventory?  Everyone calls it Premium.  But in the end it winds up being self-certification and adding no real value beyond perceived value.  And now LucidMedia has launched a Verified Inventory program.  We are saying our inventory is safe for brands and that we can accurately target 14,000 specific content categories. You can find out more about brand protection in this Adotas article called A Display Advertising Safety Net. So how is this any different from all the other networks out there?  The difference is in the how, not the what or the why.  The what (verifying inventory) and the why (for brand safety) is the same across the board.  Every network says their media is checked for brand safety.  And everyone has the same reason.  Get more big advertiser spend.  That’s the common what and why in the industry.  It’s the how that is unique to this new program.  We launched this program not because we do it like everyone else, we have this program because we do it differently.  To be specific, we use the most robust and patented form of natural language processing at the pre-impression page level to better determine true meaning.  But how is that different?  Most networks spot check a top level domain list as their way of making their inventory brand safe.  You begin to see the degrees of brand protection available to advertisers and the intricate subtleties that make it confusing.  There’s a huge difference in the degree of safety provided between the two methods.  And every other network usually says they categorize for accurate relevance matching of ads to content because everyone knows that engagement and relevance are directly related.  But what most other networks really do is ask the publisher to self-certify their inventory and then they push it out in those same self-certified categories.  But we look at the words and phrases on the page in real-time and tag it with a far more accurate and granular category before we serve it.  Everyone has the same what and why but it’s the varying degrees of how that makes our program different.  But we go so much further too.  We even filter out pages with objectionable concepts as defined by our clients.  We also categorize our inventory into 14 different classes of media to filter against or target to a specific type of pages like a blogs, news sites, enthusiast site, or shopping sites.  So the story here is not that we are doing the same thing, the real story is in the lengths we go to verify our inventory versus what everyone else does.  They are two very different stories.  And that is why we created the Verified Program, because we do it differently and with a much higher degree of quality.

Adotas recently posted an interesting, albeit oddly written article on the value of the ad exchange. The real story seems to be the value of the vertical ad networks—with which I cannot agree more—but their analogy between mutual fund managers and ad exchanges is a fascinating one. They equate the ad exchange to a specialized mutual fund manager who can add real value to your portfolio and that is very true for the new breed of ad exchanges out there today. The scenario buy that they walk through truly highlights the value that an ad exchange can bring to a media planner. They point out that when an advertiser wants to maximize ROAS they need their media buyer (their agency folk) to create a balanced “portfolio” mixing direct investment in large targeted sites with the specialized engagement of the vertical ad networks and the broad reach from the many low cost remnant networks. The share of voice and audience is highest on the expensive premium sites, highly relevant on the vertical ad networks (vertical search sites for instance) and yet there is massive reach to be had across the broad remnant networks. It is the mix that is critical to getting the job done. This is how you nail the ROAS for a big branding campaign where audience engagement is a critical factor—and this is just what the exchanges are good at delivering. They have the mix all ready to go, you just need your media planner, your mutual fund manager, to recommend and execute that perfectly balanced portfolio and your investment will pay off. What an exciting time for interactive media!