What would I change?
Importance of long-term relationships and plans
I think what I would most like to change is something that has already been happening over the last year and a half. Ad networks and their sales staff need to realize that long-term relationships are what sustain a business. Marketers and advertisers are looking for partners to help drive their businesses and become more efficient and effective over time.
Traditionally, ad networks have worked in a black box and were not too keen in revealing their cards or showing interactive planners how they go about allocating their inventory across hundreds of websites. When ad networks first launched, they rarely revealed the websites they represented or would only show a handful of top sites at best. For one, it was to avoid agencies going directly to the websites and two, to also control inventory and disperse impressions as they saw fit, simply to manage their own CPC or CPM thresholds. Most advertisers, including myself, were blind to the actual process and could not control inventory distribution. The ad networks were in control and were more interested in making a profit than meeting campaign goals.
Traditionally, ad networks are a great one-stop shop to get mass eyeballs and drive high reach; equal to that of a mid-sized portal. But results were not always consistent and the quality of the audience always suffered. It appeared for a while that ad networks and their account executives were looking to land the occasional one-off buy, but never to build an ongoing sustainable relationship. And regardless of whether the campaign worked or not, that was okay because there was always another agency or client for them to get another $25-50K test buy. But eventually this model began to fail and the ad networks realized that it was more important to retain current clients for multiple buys rather than finding new ones.
So, what I most would like to change about ad networks is for their sales teams to continue to nurture and cultivate relationships with their clients and advertisers, not only showing them a positive ROI but building a long-term plan to sustain market growth as well.
What makes the perfect ad network?
Of course, in a perfect world, all ad networks would adhere to cost-per-acquisition deals that would benefit all (the networks and clients). This would be accomplished by agencies sharing data about their client's business goals and success metrics and ad networks willing to work together in a performance-based environment.
Now reality, new generation or 2.0 ad networks, such as [x+1] and Specific Media, do a great job working in a white box, revealing their targeting and optimization methodologies to clients and marketers alike. From audience profiling, prism clusters and progressive optimization the perfect ad network would be capable of doing all of these things while also utilizing the most appropriate inventory based on past performance and behavior criteria all on the fly. The trick these days is how best to partner with ad networks to deliver quality while maintaining quantity. The very best ad networks will be able to provide and/or dictate the right mix and balance at each end of the quality-quantity scale.