When I ran an ad server team, all we wanted to work on was the server. We delighted in finding ways to make the servers faster, more efficient, more scalable, and more reliable. We focused on selection algorithms, and real-time order updates, handling malformed URLs and all kinds of crazy stuff. Our customers were IT folks and ad traffickers who needed to make sure the ads got delivered. The reporting part was always an afterthought, a necessary evil, something given to the new guy to work on until someone else came along.

Contrast that with the team I have now, where we obsess over integrating multiple data sources, forecasting accurately, and clearly presenting incredibly complex overlapping inventory spaces in ways that mere humans can understand and make decisions about. Reporting is not an afterthought for us, it’s our reason for being. Our success critera are around accuracy, response time, and ease of getting questions answered through ad-hoc queries. Our customers are much more analytical: inventory managers, sales planners, finance people, and anyone else in the organization working to maximize overall ad revenue.

These teams have completely different DNA, so it’s not surprising that a team good at one of them might not be so great at the other. This is why so many publishers are unhappy with the quality of the forecasts they get from their ad server vendor, and one of the reasons so many are signing up with Yieldex. Good predictive analytics are hard to build, and nobody has built the right team, and spent the time and effort to get them right for the digital ad business. Until now.

For most digital publishers, ‘ad operations’ really means ‘revenue operations’ and that means a lot of data analysis. Data is the key to exceeding the expectations of clients, partners, and shareholders. Data tells ops how much revenue is being generated from specific sales channels, ad agencies, advertisers, site sections, and even users. Data enables them to make smarter decisions, not only on behalf of their own company, but for the benefit of their clients: what to sell, who to sell it to, and under what conditions to maximize value for everyone.

At Yieldex, we couldn’t agree more. Many major publishers use both Yieldex and AdMeld as complementary tools to get the “revenue radar” they need to dramatically increase CPMs and revenue. AdMeld co-sponsored our own 2010 Yield Executive Summit, leading the agency panel. Their 2011 AdMeld Partner Forum was a terrific event, and we appreciated the opportunity to attend.

In that spirit, I’m delighted to announce Andrew Nibley as the new CEO of Yieldex. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Andy over the last few months, and I feel that our skills complement each other perfectly to take Yieldex to the next level. More importantly, I like working with him, and we have good chemistry, which is an essential ingredient for any great partnership.

Andy has a terrific background in digital media, having been CEO of five different media companies. Most recently he ran WPP’s Marsteller, a digital agency, and among many other successes was a co-founder of Reuters New Media. He also is an excellent leader of people, and has experience managing rapid growth, and many other skills we will take full advantage of as Yieldex drives tremendous growth in 2011.

I look forward to focusing on my strengths in product vision, strategy, and business development. My favorite part of the day is when I get to solve hard (and valuable) customer problems with cutting-edge technology. Yieldex is well positioned to continue to drive dramatic uplift in revenues for our customer base as we broaden our platform, and I look forward to helping drive that.

I am proud of the success Yieldex has enjoyed so far, and humbly grateful to the team that has worked so hard to make it happen. I am excited that Andy and I are partnering together to continue to drive value for our customers and for Yieldex, through 2011 and beyond!

For more info, see our press release and PaidContent article. Thanks to Ryan Graves and his blog 1+1=3 for the idea for this post.

My one non-negotiable point was the physical keyboard. I have had an iPhone and an iTouch, and I simply can’t stand typing on the virtual keyboard. I need to be able to make a quick, sometimes one-handed reply to an email, and I found the iPhone actually prevented me from replying to email out of sheer frustration. I also hate the unpredictability of the auto-correct, and the fact that I can’t type without looking closely at the screen. I type fast enough on my Blackberry to take notes at conferences, and write relatively long emails, and I just can’t give that up.

Given that, I was pretty excited by the Droid 2, which seemed to meet my specs perfectly. Improved keyboard, cool new Android OS, and Verizon service. So I really wanted to love it. I tried to love it. Really.

Since the keyboard was the main thing, let’s talk about that first. The raised bumps are nice, I can feel the keys, but I still find them hard to detect without looking. A huge problem is the top row, which are hard up against the raised bezel of the screen, so it takes extra effort to squeeze my fingers against the bezel to hit them reliably. Often used keys like the backspace key and the numbers are up there, making it doubly annoying. A few design decisions are strange – the Alt Lock key is right next to the A, so I hit it by accident all the time. The arrow keys are great for quick editing, and the search key is nice, but I couldn’t figure out when to use the OK button and when I could just use Enter. Bottom line: I could not get comfortable or fast typing on the keyboard, even after carrying it for two weeks, and using it exclusively for 3-4 days. I even tried Swype for a while, and I think it’s very cool, but I never got that fast with it either. This was ultimately the deal-breaker.

With the punchline out of the way, there were a few other deal-breakers as well. First, the battery life is abysmal. When I was using it as my main phone, with 1-2 hours of talk, lots of email, and some browsing, it lasted only 8 hours. Who works only 8 hours? I can’t charge my phone twice a day, that’s ridiculous.

Another deal-breaker was the fact that I couldn’t search my Exchange email. Not just the email on the server, you can’t even search the email on the *phone*! Completely unacceptable. I also found annoying that I had to tap several times to edit an appointment. Other than that, I thought the Exchange support was decent.

Finally – and this one surprised me – the speed wasn’t actually that fast. Sure, the graphics were nice and all, but actually working on the phone often required annoying waits between task switches. And twice I did that most important of speed comparisons: how long from the time the airplane’s wheels hit the tarmac to the time when emails start hitting your phone? The Blackberry crushed the Droid 2 each time.

Have to say, there were several things I absolutely loved about the Droid 2 as well, and will miss. The voice commands and voice search are terrific. Just being able to say “Navigate to 123 Maple Street” and get turn-by-turn voice nav is an awesome thing. Also, all the apps are great fun to play around with, and I happily wasted several hours trying out lots of apps. The running one in particular was great – listening to Pandora while mapping your run is very cool.

The Verizon data speed is definitely better, and my main regret is that I’m still stuck with crappy AT&T service. So, I’ll keep my Verizon MiFi and use it when necessary, but it’s a hack I don’t like. Wish Verizon had the Torch.

I’m still fairly new to the Torch, but it seems to work pretty well. The keyboard is not quite as awesome as the Bold, but still much better than anything else out there. Love the trackpad and the touch-screen combo, I found all the things I expected to work just *worked*. Not quite as fun or new as the Droid 2, but for getting work done, seems like the right choice for me.

I am only partly joking here. As I’ve written before, RTB continues to skew the power in favor of the buyers. A healthy ecosystem requires a balance of power between buyers and sellers. To help restore the balance, publishers need a complementary system – an SSP – and part of what an SSP should provide is real-time selling.

So, what is real-time selling? We define it as the ability for sellers to set floor prices in real time to make sure they’re getting full value for their inventory, in the same way buyers can set bids in real time based on available information at the time of the impression request.

One of the major selling points of DSPs is they can incorporate information from many sources – agency and advertiser data, third party providers, and the publishers themselves – and use it to decide how much an impression is worth. Somewhat less obvious is that the worth of the impression is actually just a ceiling on what the buyer is willing to pay, and sophisticated bid management programs often bid much lower in an attempt to get the impressions for the lowest value. This means the publisher may get much less than the buyer would have been willing to pay.

This is why publishers need to use all available information to set their floor price for an impression. Some of the information they might want is unavailable – agency or advertiser information, or certain re-targeting cookies – but any third party and publisher data can be incorporated. Then, sophisticated analysis is required to detect segments of inventory where floors should be raised or lowered – the closer to real-time the better. These algorithms will no doubt continue to be refined over the next several years.

Premium publishers have a much more complex problem: they also sell guaranteed impressions over a period of time. As long as those up-front CPM-based buys were much more valuable than the secondary channel, this was easy to solve: serve the guaranteed ads first, them look at the exchange or network. But as the secondary channel begins valuing some impressions more highly, the publisher needs to manage global yield optimization across multiple channels, and the floor-setting algorithms need to incorporate that data as well. This may seem like it’s years off, but several of our customers have asked us about this capability, and we’ve applied for patents in this area.

Lots of three-letter acronyms have been proposed in the last couple of years, and it’s way too early to tell what the final landscape will look like. That said, forward-thinking publishers who are looking at technology platforms to serve them for the next decade or so should be asking about their plans for Real-Time Selling.

This post also appears at AdExchanger.com in “The Sell-Sider,” a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Neal Mohan’s introductory blog post emphasizes the three main principles behind the development of their exchange: simplify the system for buying and selling, deliver better performance, and open up the ecosystem. It’s this last point – openness – that I’d like to explore.

Real-time bidding offers some openness for the buyers: they are delivered each impression, with the floor price, URL, and cookie, and have a fixed amount of time to bid. They are then notified if they win and a request is made to deliver the advertisement. What’s surprising is that unlike a standard auction, at eBay for example, if they lose, the potential buyer has no idea what the winning bid was. Google gets to keep all that information.

Even more incredible is the fact the publishers also aren’t told the winning bid amount. They get an aggregate value for their earnings, but can’t see the value of each impression. This is as if you auctioned 10 things on eBay, and at the end, eBay sent you $100, but refused to tell you what item 1 sold for vs item 2 or item 3.

This information asymmetry is largely to the benefit of Google, but also skews to the buyers. Savvy buying systems can tweak bids up and down in real-time to do crude discovery of the “true” value of different kinds of inventory and how it varies over time. Publishers have no such ability to discover their inventory value at an impression level. Worse yet, while buyers can bid different prices for each impression, publishers have no ability to re-set floor values on each impression to push the bids up. Of course, they would need new tools to do this (SSP, anyone?), but it is much harder without data.

One final point on how the system is stacked against the publishers: any buyer can participate in any of the exchanges, and indeed many of them do. But since Google does not give publishers their impression values, it is very hard for publishers to find out if some of their inventory would perform better on a different exchange. And to add insult to injury, Google makes it almost impossible for non-DFP publishers to participate at all.

Publishers should be wary of using any ad exchange until they get real openness, and the tools – like an SSP – they need to ensure the deck isn’t stacked against them.

This post also appears at AdExchanger.com in “The Sell-Sider,” a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

Similarly, in startups, we talk about “good problems” and “bad problems”. Bad problems are the ones nobody wants: unhappy customers, products that don’t work, or markets that don’t materialize. Good problems are ones that sure seem like they’d be nice to have: too many customers sign up at once, investors want to put in too much money, etc. Just like bad hurts and good hurts, bad problems generally require outside intervention to fix, while good problems work themselves out through positive progress. Everybody says they want the good problems, but they are still problems – and they still require a hell of a lot of work to get through.

Publishers need 3 things to maximize the value of their inventory on an exchange:

1. Inventory value. Publishers need to get back from their exchanges the value of their inventory, on an impression-by-impression basis. Just getting high-level average CPMs by section or zone isn’t good enough, this masks the high-value impressions that may exist within those sections.
2. Third-party data. Your buyers are using data to understand the value of your inventory, you need to have the data to fight back. You should be setting floors on your inventory based these data segments, so buyers can’t just cherry-pick your inventory at an overall low value, and you can’t do this without the data.
3. An analytic system to maximize yield. You will need a system that can capture an analyze all this data – terabytes of it – and spit out a set of floor prices by inventory segment. In an ideal world, this system operates in real-time, re-setting floors based on the most recent data. I call this real-time selling – the antidote to real-time bidding.

Not all of these items are easily attainable. The first item is not generally available from exchanges, so publishers need to demand it. The second is becoming more available, from vendors such as Audience Science, BlueKai, and eXelate. The third will be provided by Yieldex, among others. Forward thinking publishers, who put this stack together, should be able to dramatically increase revenue from their unsold inventory.

This article was also published on AdExchanger.com.

You can’t really run Windows applications on your iPhone without cheating somehow, so I cheated. I loaded the free LogMeIn client to my desktop PC at home, and bought the $30 LogMeIn Ignition iPhone app. This worked amazingly well – I was able to log in to my desktop and control RideMax just as if I was sitting there. And it was especially great when I ran it while waiting in line at the Alice in Wonderland ride (which was a last-minute addition by my 4-year-old) to figure out if we should do Splash Mountain or Space Mountain next. I’m confident the program saved us at least an hour of line time, and re-running it during the day was a key factor.

One complicating factor for me is my iPhone is a 2G and I’ve canceled the AT&T service so it’s essentially a first gen iPod Touch. To get online, I used the nifty Verizon Mifi that I have for my laptop. The technique is described in more detail in this Verizon iPhone article. So I was running LogMeIn on the iPhone to control RideMax on my home desktop, connected via wifi to the Mifi, which connected via the Verizon 3G network and the internet to my home DSL, and through my internal network to my desktop. There were lots of moving pieces, but in this case they all actually worked together nicely, and the result was a great day at Disneyland with the kids.