Understand how ad exchanges can offer reassurances to publishers and advertisers alike, as technology aims to control the surge in website numbers globally.

Despite the current gloomy economic forecasts, the surge in marketing budgets being diverted into digital continues unfettered, and quite rightly so. Digital media offers marketers a rapid, highly targeted, interactive, measurable and cost effective route to target consumers, something that becomes even more important in times of uncertainty.

With huge volumes of webpages being created daily, bringing with it a similar surge of new inventory, online publishers are seeking to maximise their yields right across their properties by monetising both their premium and unsold inventory. At the same time, all this inventory helps to feed online advertisers' thirst to source new opportunities to target their audience.

This growth is taking place in an environment of continuing media and audience fragmentation. However, it is the increasing complexities of reaching audiences that has driven the emergence of online advertising exchanges to provide efficiencies and reduce the complexities in an incredibly dynamic environment.

With hundreds of millions of websites and huge volumes of online advertising being communicated around the world everyday, however, publishers and advertisers alike want the reassurance that the technologies they are employing can properly protect their brand.

A common -- but unfounded -- fear is that exchanges somehow do not provide the full controls needed to protect brands, which negates the obvious commercial benefits associated with exchange membership. This couldn't be further from the truth. A true exchange platform supports (or should support) the business needs of its members by offering efficiencies alongside protection.

Many of the tools in place on an exchange have often evolved over time to help ensure a safe environment for members, and encourage trust and trading.

Today there are a host of controls that exchanges offer that are designed to provide this protection.

Business partnerships in your hands
On an exchange, who you choose to work with and how you choose to work with them should be no different to how you operate off-exchange.

For example, when you join the Right Media Exchange, you have full control over who you develop relationships with across the platform. You can see who is on the exchange, decide who initially you wish to develop a direct relationship with and use the exchange to quickly establish those relationships.

As with any business relationship, you should negotiate acceptable terms and ensure these new potential partners have the right fit for your business; once comfortable with everything, link up and begin trading.

What this means, above all, is that in an exchange environment, you are in control of all your relationships: you decide who you work with and who you don't want to work with, based on what you determine is best for your business.

Control and targeting
As well as defining who you want to have direct relationships with, you need to have the ability to define what is, and what is not, acceptable for your brand (or your client's brand), be you a publisher or advertiser.

Whether you're focused on brand building or direct response, are a publisher, advertiser or network, exchanges help support your business objectives. For advertisers they provide the tools to define accurately the correct targeting criteria based on the type of sites/audiences you wish to reach. For publishers, they allow you to define the types of advertising you are prepared to accept on your site whilst, conversely, allowing you to define what will not be acceptable to your business and brand.

Some exchanges are offering universal targeting, enabling companies that have a very precise audience criteria the ability to determine this key targeting profile just once on the exchange, safe in the knowledge this will then automatically apply to any future exchange activity.

Once again, how you need to operate your business on an exchange is placed in your hands.

The challenge of subjectivity
By the global nature of the web and the increasingly international nature of online businesses, online exchanges themselves should be global. However, this exposure across different markets and cultures highlights the issue of subjectivity around how creatives may be classified for a global audience.  

Companies are looking at different ways to address this issue. We, for example, have established a 'Universal Exchange Classification' system for creatives.  By aligning all buyers and sellers to a single set of creative definitions, all exchange members work from a single set of standards.

Additionally, a constantly running 'Creative Tester' detects problematic ads, which contain malicious content, thus preventing them from entering the exchange and protecting the exchange's integrity for the benefit of all members. 

The right protection to grow your business
For any online business, brand sanctity is a real concern. Exchanges offer a wide range of tools that enable publishers and advertisers targeting and protection controls to maintain this. Without this level of control, the dramatic level of growth in exchanges would not have been possible.

The irrational fear -- often borne out of a lack of understanding -- that exchanges somehow instigate a 'wild west', uncontrolled environment is totally unfounded: all the tools are there.

We are beginning to see the rapid growth of the exchange concept result in it now moving more into the mainstream media market. This is very much a testament to the benefits they offer publishers and advertisers who are beginning to make full use of them to profit from their online activity while helping safeguard their brands.

Roger Williams is director, international marketing for Right Media.