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News: Real-Time Bidding API from ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ Exchange

You’ll be hearing a lot more about real time impression based bidding in 2009 and beyond and we are pleased that ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ Exchange is a vanguard in offering a real-time bidding API. Our full announcement follows just below.

Just last week in its Ad Exchange and Ad Network Issue, Ad Age featured the various “Demand Side” networks being run by the various agency giants (including WPP’s B3 Network, MDC’s Varick Media Management, Publicis’ VivaKi, Omnicom’s Trading Platform and Havas’ Adnetik). These agencies, ad networks and other arbitrageurs are looking to the ad exchanges to provide this real time bidding capability.

What do you think about the move to real time impression level bidding? Leave a comment below. You can also follow future ContextWeb news by subscribing to our blog via email or following us on Twitter.

Our news:

ContextWeb, Inc.’s ADSDAQ Ad Exchange Launches Real-Time Inventory Bidding for Agencies, Ad Networks

API Bid-Response Round Trip Takes Under 100 Milliseconds

NEW YORK (April 29, 2009) ContextWeb, Inc., operator of the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange, has released real-time impression-based bidding, the first among major ad exchanges. The API (application programming interface) allows digital advertising agencies, ad networks and other arbitrageurs to purchase media via real-time impression-based bidding on the ADSDAQ Exchange.

“Digital agencies, ad networks and other arbitrageurs have asked ContextWeb for real-time impression-based bidding,” says Anand Subramanian, CEO of ContextWeb, Inc.  “With ADSDAQ’s Real Time API buyers can marry their own proprietary client data with impression attributes available from the exchange to make the appropriate bid at the page level.”

All of the leading ad holding companies including WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic and others have developed “demand generation platforms” in order to connect with various sources of digital ad inventory. The new platforms are designed to conduct real-time valuation of impressions; layer proprietary data held by the agency or marketer and dynamically allocate impression level media to specific clients and creative units.

With ADSDAQ’s Real Time API,  the ADSDAQ Exchange will offer pre-filtered ad impressions to the buyer with HTTP parameters and a referrer URL or Publisher ID, the User’s IP address, anonymized cookie ID of the user and any ad unit restrictions (restricted advertisers, creative types, product verticals).

The buyer will then analyze the impression in real-time, layer any additional proprietary targeting data and submit a bid. ContextWeb will compare all bids in the system and the bid winner will receive the impression.  If a bidder is not awarded the impression, they will receive a reason code for the loss including bid (too low), blocked (advertiser is blocked by the publisher) or ad performance (ad performance is too low for the bid price).

Impressions will contain a variety of attributes including basic information such as pricing models available [CPM, CPC, CPA]; user information such as IP address of the user, user agent [browser and OS]; and publisher information such as ContextWeb contextual category ID for the publisher page, publisher referring URL or Publisher ID; page language; placement information such as size: width x height; placement location in x/y coordinates; creative restrictions: expandable ads (yes/no), top 5 keywords matched to account settings; and finally iframe (true/false).

Digital agencies, ad networks and other arbitrageurs interested in ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ’s Real Time API can contact the company and download the technical specifications at http://realtime.contextweb.com.

ContextWeb, Inc. (http://exchange.contextweb.com) was founded in 2000 and launched the ADSDAQ Exchange in 2005.  It is the only online exchange where both advertisers and publishers have complete control. The exchange’s patent-pending, page-level contextual technology offers advertisers efficient pricing and extensive reach, making inventory on the exchange “brand-safe” and comparable to a site-specific or portal buy. The ADSDAQ Exchange ranks among the top 20 ad-supported properties, according to comScore Media Metrix, and reaches +119 million monthly unique visitors (March 2009). The exchange includes more than 400 advertisers, including all of the top 10 marketing organizations, and more than 9,000 publishers. In 2008, Deloitte’s New York Region Technology Fast 50 recognized ContextWeb as the 16th fastest growing company in the New York area. The company’s investors include leading venture capital firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson (”DFJ”), DFJ Gotham Ventures, Updata Partners, Investor Growth Capital and Gold Hill Capital.

UPDATE: see the MediaPost story ContextWeb Launches Real-Time Bidding; see the MarketingVox story ADSDAQ to Provide Real-Time Impression-Based Bidding Service.

-- Jay Sears

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