Triggit

Triggit is on Techcrunch today for the launch of our self-serve platform. Thanks for the great article Jason.

AdExchanger covers the story here. Thanks John, keep up the great work,

I have a new post at Ad Exchanger this week that tries to layout the definition of a DSP. Give it a read here.

I have a new essay on AdExchanger today about Real Time Bidding and the promise it holds for addressing media fragmentation. You can find it here. Happy New Year everyone!

It would be hard not to notice that display media buying is changing dramatically.

Interesting new companies are popping up left and right, VCs are making significant bets, and the big boys- Google, Yahoo, the agency holding companies, and the old-line media giants- are making moves in the space. Display advertising once thought to be an unmitigated disaster is now discussed on earnings calls and in boardrooms as the next hot opportunity for growth.

At the core, the changes we have been seeing in the space over the last year are centered on innovations in how we manage, allocate and price display inventory. Transparent exchanges, audience data and real time bidding are significant structural developments that enable the entire industry to innovate and improve. But while we were concentrating on improving, something even more important has happened. The groundwork we have been laying is starting to get to such scale that it has the potential of solving a much bigger problem: media fragmentation. To understand why this is such an important problem, let’s look at the issues fragmentation causes.

The advertising business was built on the ability to create compelling messages and deliver them to targeted audiences at scale. With the advent of digital media and the Internet, the foundation changed. Audience attention is now fragmented across millions of websites reading, writing, watching, socializing and creating. Gone are the days when NBC could deliver your commercial to 90% of the public and enable you to share your message. In digital, the process of planning, RFPs, trafficking, tracking, auditing and paying when the audience is so scattered has become intensely manual, tedious and incredibly expensive. Very simply, the entire advertising industry formula is being broken as a result of media fragmentation and our inability to efficiently and effectively put our messages in front of the right audience at scale in digital media. This fragmentation is holding back billions of dollars currently spent offline from moving online, as it is nearly impossible to allocate the really big budgets in the status quo online.

Fear not, fragmentation’s days could be numbered.

As we have all focused over the past year on the developments in the exchange space and real-time bidding (RTB) as a way to do things better- better targeting, better tracking, better ads- RTB is slowly being accepted as a standard by our industry. Because RTB is an open standard that anyone can adopt, the same network effects that made the Internet what it is today are driving this process of adoption. The virtuous cycle of more media buyers using RTB leading to more media sellers adopting it has begun. With the industry goliath Google enthusiastically supporting RTB, it is hard to believe that this process will not continue to accelerate. This cascade effect of widespread adoption has the potential to dramatically change our entire industry.

As transparent RTB becomes an industry standard, we no longer need to depend on one exchange or media provider being big enough to solve to the problems of media fragmentation and to be able to take the entire budget with sufficient reach and frequency. Instead a demand-side platform (DSP) with RTB capabilities can now plug into all exchanges and media sources. With this method of aggregating inventory, a media buyer can buy across millions of websites and billions of impressions with the click of a mouse and utilize a single system for buying, optimization, reporting and billing. Using one platform eliminates the highly inefficient and non-scalable processes surrounding RFPs, IOs, spreadsheets, trafficking systems, de-duplication nightmares and attribution that we face in the status quo. By making large-scale media buying possible through one source, the process suddenly becomes a hell of a lot simpler, cheaper, more scalable, more transparent and ultimately more effective. We may have the chance to solve the media fragmentation problem caused by digital.

As we spend the next year working though all the bugs, buzz and BS that this platform shift is certain to throw in our faces, let’s remember that we could be on the path to something much bigger then simply making ads a little more targeted and budgets a little more effective. If we can build a system that addresses the problems of media fragmentation there is a very real possibility that our industry could lead the way into the next generation of media buying.

Follow Zach Coelius (@zcoelius), Triggit (@triggit) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Here is the text from our Q&A with Adexchanger.com
AdExchanger.com: So what is Triggit – and where’d the name come from? Are you a buying platform? A media buying services company?
ZC: Triggit provides Real Time Bidding (RTB) technology and services to innovative marketers and their advertising agencies. Specifically, Triggit’s technology individually prices and bids for billions of impressions daily on the real time display exchanges. Triggit’s media partners include such companies as Google, OpenX, Admeld, Pubmatic, Adnexus and more.
At Triggit, marketers use our technologies to allocate their media budgets on the real-time bidding enabled media exchanges. In this process we provide our clients a range of offerings to meet their needs. For sophisticated agencies, ad networks and large ad buyers, Triggit’s self-serve technology platform enables them to leverage their own data, insights and media buying expertise in the exchange buying process. Others want a more hands off approach to their media spend, and for those clients Triggit’s account managers take complete ownership of the campaigns and provide full media buying services as well as technology to achieve unprecedented ROI.

As far as our name goes, Triggit is Scottish for “playful,” and more importantly “URL” for not taken. We picked it a long time ago for a very different business model and have never found a reason to change it. It also happens to be pretty memorable. We like it.

How do you differentiate from other buying platforms in the space?

Triggit has been building RTB technology since the space first went live with Adnexus and Pubmatic in December of 2008. The technology stack required for individually pricing and bidding on billions of impressions a day is very challenging and different then anything the ad industry has done before. RTB is all we do, and we have gotten very good at it. For instance not only can we take any advertiser’s or third-party’s cookie set and target against it on Google and other exchanges, we can vary the price we pay for each matching placement according to its expected value. We have found that the ability to value and bid on each impression individually, and to do a multi-variate calculation on all the valid data points, results in a significantly more efficient and effective media pricing process. At the end of the day, it is all about results and we stand behind our ability to deliver for any marketer.

Are you buying from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange? Any early results you can share?

Yes. We have been live with RTB on the Google exchange since September. We were really lucky that the technology we built for bidding on Adnexus and Pubmatic was architected in such a way that it was pretty easy for us to integrate Google’s AdX. We are starting to see huge scale now, over 2 million bid requests per minute and growing amazingly fast. Google has built an excellent system and deserves a lot of credit for validating RTB as the standard for the next generation of media buying. We buy across the Google Content Network (GCN) as well as the Ad Exchange and are excited about how quickly Google is exposing more and more GCN content.

Do you think impression-level real-time bidding is a proverbial game changer? Why?

We have seen results from hundreds of campaigns that show impression level bidding with good data behind it results in an exponential increase in ROI. It is basically cherry picking the best impressions for our clients at a huge scale. When we no longer have to buy a million, poorly-targeted impressions just hoping to reach a few of the right users, we can be far more efficient with our client’s media dollars. Essentially, per impression bidding enables us to de-average the price we pay for each ad and have that price more accurately reflect the expected value. In an ecosystem where other bidders on the exchanges still use rules-based line items, with average prices like you see on Right Media, we are able to buy good impressions at lower prices.

On Triggit.com it says that you offer “Fully Transparent Analytics” – what does that mean?

Because proper real-time bidding involves the passing of a transparent URL as well as a user ID, it allows us to share with our clients full site information before and after a campaign. For instance, before a campaign begins we provide our clients with a site list of all the domains we see across the exchanges. The client can then use that list to target specific sites for their campaigns. This pre-campaign transparency allows the client to very carefully manage the content adjacency of their advertisements and to ensure that they are not being run anywhere they don’t like. Once the campaign is live we provide the client with a login that enables them to monitor where every impression, click and conversion is recorded on a fully transparent site-level basis. This transparency is very important for our clients and we feel it is one of the most important innovations that the real-time exchanges have provided.

What are your future plans for Triggit? Perhaps you could start with telling us how many employees you have today and your hiring plans? Will you need more funding to grow the way you want to?

Triggit currently has ten employees and is growing like crazy. We are having a lot of fun and are looking forward to 2010, which we think will be a great year on the exchanges for DSPs.

How important is effective creative in your campaigns? How do you work with clients on creative?

Creative is tremendously important. We work closely with the clients to build libraries of creative that we can optimize for the campaigns. One of the more interesting capabilities of real-time bidding is to use the data that we have about the users and their intent to serve highly targeted creative. For instance, when a user completes a search on a travel site for a flight to New York, we can immediately target the user with creative for New York hotels, tourist attractions and maybe even a helicopter flight into Manhattan.

Is there going to be one winner in the buying platform race?

No. This is the sort of market where there will be a number of companies that develop robust DSP capabilities. Because clients have very different needs there will be DSPs that emerge and develop different specialties for different parts of the market.

How do agencies need adjust their model to keep up with innovation in the digital space in your opinion?

I don’t think there are many people who dispute the fact that media buying is going to become a highly automated data and algorithm driven process going forward. In that sort of world agencies can make a choice. They can either bite the bullet and learn how to build, manage and innovate with technology or they can become dependent on vendors. If they want to retain the important role they play in the media buying process they will have to learn how to start adding value on the technology side. If instead they want to remain focused on their current competencies, they can give up their media buying arms and outsource that function to the next generation of technology-driven companies.

Follow Zach Coelius (@zcoelius), Triggit (@triggit) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

As 2009 comes to a close, those of us in the ad exchange space can look back at year of tremendous changes. Here’s a quick rundown of what we saw this year:

Real Time Bidding:
The year began- and all this madness was created- with Appnexus and Pubmatic releasing their first versions of real time bidding (Fox was first, but that is a different story). Full of promise and bugs, their APIs lit a fire under many companies. ‘If only the industry would adopt the innovation of RTB it would be huge,’ many of us mused. Some of us bet big and early, others decided to sit back and watch; clearly RTB had a chance to do something, but what? Six months passed, and many of us fumbled our way through building all the new technology required to bid on RTB. Then the bombshell dropped. First as whispers and rumors and then later as a full-blown announcement. Google was going to enable RTB for all of their zillions of ad impressions. The world quaked and then everyone got in line and announced their own RTB apis. Real time bidding had become a standard. We rejoiced.

Demand Side Platforms:
When we all started building technology for the buyside no one knew what to call us. Early on there were only a few of us in the space, and all of us were doing such different enough things that it was hard to find a common definition. We all struggled just to convince people advertisers even need technology to manage ad buying. The market didn’t quite know what to make of the off these new companies. Then one day it just happened. We were demand side platforms and that was it. Some of us bridled at the rather awkward name and tried to change it, but to no avail. As usual, once the space had been named the VC money started to pour in. We all became a row on someone’s spread sheet and had to start fielding the questions about how we compared to company X or Y. Suddenly a market that had been friendly became competitive. Let the demand side platform battle begin (see, it is rather awkward isn’t it?).

Data, Data, Data:
It started with data and it will end with data. Unlike search, where the users so kindly type into a little box what they are looking for, display requires that we leverage data if we are to figure out what ad to show and to whom. Without the data you are dead in our industry. Like arms dealers, the data brokers see the on coming battle for display as a tremendous opportunity to arm the combatants and profit in the process. The next year or two will be lucrative for the data space.

Publishers?
The publishers have been a little late to the game. Like Rip Van Winkle they have woken to find a new world shaping up around them where massive exchanges and trading platforms automate the media buying process. “But what about my RFP” they ask? “What about my superstar sales people”? “You mean algorithms are going to compare me to my competitor”? “I can’t use those expensive steak dinners to get onto the media plan”? “I am no longer special”? “The little publishers are no longer going to make one tenth as much as we do”? We better form a committee to fight this!

Predictions: If 2010 is anything like 2009, it will be quite a ride. Here are my predictions

1. Once Google makes all of AdSense available to RTB (and it is pretty close now) the media buying world is going to change very quickly.

2. eCPMs will increase for good publishers whose inventory is transparently available through RTB. This will lead to a flood of publishers dumping their second tier ad network partners and selling all their impressions through the exchanges. A lot of ad networks are going to go out of business. A lot of publishers are going to start to get paid what they deserve.

3. Brand advertisers will start to make the plunge. Now that it is finally possible to transparently buy display at scale we will see some really big budgets start to move into display.

4. The VCs will keep putting a lot of capital into the space. This will mean a lot of well-funded companies aggressively innovating and making the space better for everyone. It is going to get a little crazy.

5. The agencies will start playing chess. One of them will bite the bullet and buy a demand side platform if for no other reason than that they are afraid someone else will do it first. This will lead to an aggressive fight between the VCs who want to build big companies and the agencies who want to protect their turf.

6. Microsoft will buy someone. Anyone. They are late and slow into this space and can’t afford to let Google own display too.

7. The government will continue to scare us with the threat of ignorant regulation.

8. Some people we know will get really, really, rich.

9. Some won’t.

10. We are all going to have a ton of fun.

After leaving a mildly snarking and completely wrong comment on one of Eric Picard’s recent posts, he very politely suggested I go back and reread his old stuff. Wow, rereading his stuff makes it even more insightful. Give his stuff a read and see what you think. Notice the dates, he started talking about this stuff years ago.

http://www.imediaconnection.com//content//24672.asp
http://www.clickz.com/3627091
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX08/BCT04
http://www.clickz.com/3626556
http://www.clickz.com/3630335
http://www.imediaconnection.com/printpage/printpage.aspx?id=23592
http://www.clickz.com/3626306
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/23024.asp

Tod Sacerdoti has a great article on AdAge today where he discussed publishers using what he calls ad networks to extent their reach. We have been powering publisher and networks that do this on the exchanges for quite some time now and it is a very interesting twist on the market. Now that large volumes of media are easily and transparently accessible through real time bidding, it totally changes the game. Publishers can no longer just think of themselves as destinations but instead must learn how to use the data they develop about their audience to become sellers of audience instead of just sellers of their own media. The content is no longer the whole game.

We will be out in NYC next week for Ad Tech. Let us know if you would like to connect. We are looking forward to catching up with old friends and meeting new ones.

Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch has a nice write up of Triggit today on the Techcrunch Blog. As usual he did a great job. Thanks Jason

Today Triggit is very proud to disclose an awesome group of investors who joined us in our efforts to remake online advertising.

These investors are a group of highly accomplished internet entrepreneurs including:
Larry Braitman, Founder of Adify and Flycast
Brett and Scott Crosby, Co-founders of Google Analytics
Reid Hoffman: Founder of Linkedin, investor in over 60 companies including Facebook
Joi Ito, Investor in Technorati , Six Apart and
Manu Kumar, Founder of Sneaker Labs
Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus and former CTO of Right Media
Ben Narison, Founder of Fashionmall.com
Russ Siegelman, Partner at Kleiner Perkins and Founder of MSN
Asher Waldfogel, Founder of Peakstream and Toll Bridge Technologies
Digital Garage Japan
Triple Point Capital
Bay Partners

It has been amazing to work with such an accomplished group and their insights and advice have been priceless.

Thank you gentlemen.