Well, the report praises “leaders” for the robustness and flexibility of their platform, the granularity of controls for publishers, the reporting levels for buyers and the ability to facilitate offline deals. We are confident that Forrester would score us strongly on all accounts, as it is tenets like “control” and “flexibility” that underpin our approach to building technology.

The report also insists that publishers shoud carefully weigh each of Forrester’s evaluation criteria  in light of their own needs. We would agree: see our own RTB screening guide on the subject. We’ll be glad to feature in the next report, and can’t wait to share with Forrester some of the insights we’ve gained over the years in our unique position as a media technology company that serves both the advertiser and publisher communities.

While each exchange platform may standardize on a different auction type, platforms designed to operate a private marketplace may offer the option to select an auction format depending on the type of deal negotiated with each buyer.

Let’s take a look at the most common auction types (note: all fall into the “sealed-bid” category, meaning bidders enter the auction without knowing how many bids they compete with or their level):

First price auction … whereby the highest bidder wins and pays the amount it bid (similar to a blind-silent auction).

Second price auction (Vickrey auction) …whereby the highest bidder wins, but pays the second-highest bid + the minimum bid value, e.g. $0.01 (similar to eBay).

Fixed CPM/guaranteed auction … whereby the bidder agrees to pay a pre-determined price or guaranteed budget for 100% of a specific type of impression, trumping all other bids (comparable to eBay’s “Buy It Now” option).

For publishers, understanding which format is best suited to their property or a specific deal is an important consideration, as each one will have a different impact on the final price paid for their impressions.

1.    Define up front what action you want users exposed to your ad to take and weight their relative importance. Is the goal to get them to consume the entire spot? To share your video through their social channels? To register for a promotion? To make a purchase online?

2.    Develop a model to calculate what those engagements are worth to you and assign values. For example, if you know that for every 100 users to view your entire spot, your brand generates roughly 10 ticket sales, and every new ticket sale is worth $1 to you, then you might create a model that measures ROI against a cost per view (CPV) goal of $1.

3.    Once you know what you want to measure and how much it’s worth to your brand, look for partners/platforms that can track those engagements on your digital video buys. Because platforms are all different and not all technology works the same way, be sure to conduct extensive testing upfront to iron out any discrepancy issue and also monitor post-launch to ensure metrics remain on track. If you have a preferred platform, look for media vendors that can support third-party tracking to ensure apples-to-apples comparisons of ROI across your entire video buy.

This will give the property’s 400+ web sites access to the increasing number of advertisers determined to buy inventory in this automated way.

See the official Press release >

Read the story in MediaPost >