Triggit

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!

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.

Eric Picard, one of my favorite writers on the subject of advertising technology, had an interesting piece last week about the supposed oncoming commoditization of media that so many people are talking about these days.

Eric is of the opinion that media is being commoditized and concludes that technology represents the future of media buying. While I completely agree with his conclusion, I think his discussion of the commodification of media is entirely wrong.

Here is the definition of commodity that Eric quotes from Wikipedia:

“A commodity is some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is a product that is the same no matter who produces it, such as petroleum, notebook paper, or milk. In other words, copper is copper. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Stereos, on the other hand, have many levels of quality. And, the better a stereo is [perceived to be], the more it will cost.

Commoditization occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently. As such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and silicon chips.”

According to this definition, for impressions- i.e. media- to be commodity they should all cost the same and be interchangeable. But that is not true. Impressions have a hugely variable value relative to the user, the type of site, the time in the session and many other factors. The ability to show an ad to a high school dropout looking at his hundredth page on Myspace is worth thousands of times less then being able to show an ad to a CEO of a Fortune 500 company looking at a website on how to lease a jet. That differentiation is the exact opposite of what commodity is.

This discussion is really about is the disaggregation of the valuing of the impression from the supposed value adds of the media sales organization and the content’s brand value. For example, CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX sell billions of dollars of ads every year at a huge party they throw called the Upfronts. Their ability to please media buyers with lavish expense accounts and to create the impression that they are super cool adds significant value to the price they are able to charge for their impressions. Understandably big media is terrified of this huge advantage going away. To the extent that machines are in charge of buying impressions based on measurable and repeatable results, a lot of the ephemeral differentiation of media simply disappears. No more big parties, no more expense accounts, no more super expensive sales people. The only thing that is left is the true value of the media to reach the target audience and impress them with the advertiser’s message.

So lets stop calling this the Commodification of media and call it what it really is; the rationalization of media buying.

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