Requirement 1: an open marketplace

Introduction
BT today: hit or miss
Paradise found: targeting without waste
Requirement 1: an open marketplace
Requirement 2: an open technology platform
Requirement 3: an open mind

When you select a network for your behaviorally targeted campaign, by definition you limit opportunities to reach a target population to that network's base of identifiable visitors on that network's group of participating sites, using that network's technology exclusively.

An open marketplace, by contrast, is one where no single provider sits in the middle of every transaction. Instead, many networks, publishers, advertisers and technology providers all link together in order to give each one equal access to the combined pool.

The largest networks today provide reach and targeting, but only within each one's closed universe, and limited to its selected advertisers and publishers. They straddle and take a piece of every transaction, not revealing true pricing or identifying the parties on either side.

Networks and technology providers offer their own supply (inventory) and demand (advertising), their own targeting technologies (behavioral, contextual, demographic, et cetera), sales relationships, and so on. They must balance campaign requirements with the difficulties inherent in forecasting availability of targetable segment populations. In other words, they can't pick just the bright red cherries; campaigns would be too small to justify the effort and expense.

This is why large networks such as MSN offer a limited number of targetable segments which they use to extend reach to consumers of their most popular content areas. Neither Google nor MSN offers ready access to their platforms by third-party technology providers. Yahoo! -- a customer of and investor in Right Media -- is currently exploring opportunities to target advertising to their users outside its network.

Compare the approach taken by the evolving media exchanges. On the Right Media Exchange, (the company I work for) more than 60 networks and a half-dozen different behavioral targeting providers all compete openly across three to four billion impressions per day. AdECN announced it intends to offer an exchange in the United States pending success of tests in China, and AdBrite offers an "online advertising marketplace" with about 500-million impressions per day.

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