by Andy Atherton
September 23rd, 2009
I just read a great piece by Michael Zimbalist of the New York Times Company on paidcontent .org. He clearly has a deep and precise understanding of the substantive issues at play in the channel conflict debate. The more other major publishers and the market at large understand the distinctions he’s helping to clarify here, the better off we’ll all be. We’ve certainly done our part to help clarify terminology and to help publishers prevent channel conflict, so it’s great to see smart publishers joining that effort.
by Andy Atherton
September 21st, 2009
An insightful article by Emily Steel in the WSJ this AM, picking up on recent trends and energy in the display market. Ms. Steel includes some broad coverage on Google’s recent announcement of AdX 2.0 and implications for the display ecosystem, along with more depth on industry concerns regarding channel conflict between publishers and networks. A quote from Jeff Levick of AOL ends the article: “All advertising shouldn’t be managed equally and all ads shouldn’t be treated equally”.
I agree with Mr. Levick of course, but the hard part for publishers is to set specific policy and develop supporting infrastructure to make sure tradeoffs are being made appropriately such that that the combined output of direct and indirect sales channels is maximized. This is a mouthful even to say and not at all easy to do. Brand.net takes the issue of channel conflict very seriously and we have been focused on mitigating it since inception, to the point of offering a set of experience-based principles designed to help publishers get started. The bottom line is that with well-designed policies and systems, publishers can enjoy mutually beneficial business relationships with networks in both the short-term and the long-term.
Readers finding this article interesting may also be interested in another recent post in which we attempted to clarify some terminology in hopes of helping readers more easily navigate discussion of some of these trends and issues.
All this energy in the space is fantastic! It’s a very interesting time to be in Display.
by Andy Atherton
September 10th, 2009
For anyone who may not have checked imedia today, I wanted to steer you towards my featured editorial piece on page-level quality. Online media quality is obviously a critical issue for brands, and one that Brand.net has focused on since day one.
Brand.net doesn’t just buy from a carefully screened and curated set of top comScore sites. That’s just where we start. Brand.net doesn’t just report on the pages where your ad was placed adjacent to brand-damaging objectionable content. We keep it from happening in the first place. Our industry-leading SafeScreen™ platform is the gold standard for active, page-level quality management and is included free of charge with every Brand.net buy.
Starting with the best sites and applying active page-level filtering technology to each impression. That’s a real quality solution.
