It’s around 1.5 years ago that we at Clicktron Media started investigating our options to offer Real Time Bidding (RTB) services to our clients. Real Time Bidding refers to the action of bidding on auctionable advertising placements (banners, pop unders, etc.) on a variety of websites that are grouped in to a Demand Side Platform (DSP) or Supply Side Platform (SSP).
Real Time Bidding is such a hot topic because it enables on one hand advertisers to have access to premium inventory advertising space without having to undergo long negotiations or high fixed start-up costs, and on the other hand it gives publishers the opportunity to maximize their revenue streams by selling advertising space to the highest bidder.
The biggest RTB platforms out there – and that we work with – are Adform, Appnexus and Right Media (mainly for Desktop traffic) and Ajillion Max, Trademob and Inmobi for Mobile (app) advertising. These platforms group major exchanges into a customer-friendly interface and provide a lot of targeting and optimization tools to improve the results of your campaigns.
The characteristics described above are some of the main advantages of working with RTB platforms, but there are also some disadvantages such as the fact that RTB as a channel is still very much CPC and CPM focused, which means it is tailored for branding campaigns but not (for the majority) of performance campaigns that calculate the effective Cost per Lead (CPL) or cost per Acquisition (CPA) of every euro spend on media buys.
We would also like it that RTB platforms in the future start offering non-conventional advertising placements via their bidding platforms (i.e. now they are mainly focused on ‘traditional’ banner formats) such as content locks, pop unders & overs, textlinks, PPV toolbar ads, in-video ads, etc.