Good Explanation Of Real-Time Bidding In Online Display Advertising

It can get confusing to try to stay on top of every twist and turn in the online display advertising marketplace.  To help this out, whenever I spot a bit of clarity in the chaos, I like to share it.  Today's item will be of interest to those looking to buy advertising space on websites - known in the industry as media buying.

At DoubleClick's advertiser blog, I spotted an interesting and pretty clear description of what "real-time" display advertising means.  It's a bidding process that uses technology to continually improve the chances that the ad will be clicked using intelligence about the user's recent history on a website.   Here's how Neal Mohan, DoubleClick's VP of Product Management puts it:

For example, using real time bidding, a retailer running a display ad campaign for a shoe sale can bid $5 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for ad impressions on a particular news website, but specify that it will bid $10 CPM and show an ad for running shoes if it knows that browser has previously visited the athletics part of its website. Details of the ad impression are passed to the retailer’s bidding platform in real time by the exchange, and the auction takes into account the retailer’s increased bid. This technology lets advertisers and agencies continuously tailor and hone their display ad campaigns, and alter their bids and ads, to reach potential customers they want to attract.

This kind of real-time bidding capability isn't found everywhere.  You'll notice that the blog post concerns the acquisition by DoubleClick of Invite Media, who developed a technology platform to allow this real-time bidding.  As Mohan puts it, "we're still at the beginning" of a wave of technology innovations - including AdBean, naturally - all geared toward letting online display advertisers reach the audiences they want and leave behind the ones they don't.