Jay Sears at SES Chicago

Search Engine Strategies Chicago comprehensive agenda continued yesterday with panels that included ADSDAQ by ContextWeb’s Jay Sears.

On the ad exchange panel (”Ad Exchanges are Changing Everything“), Jay appeared alongside Amy Adams Harding, SVP, Vice President of Advertiser Sales, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange. Bill Wise, VP, Yahoo! Publisher Network (Bill was formerly of RightMedia), was unable to attend due to inclement weather that, no doubt, caught many by surprise. Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch, was the moderator.

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Jay Sears at PubCon

A long list of great panels kicked off the first day at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and included - as previously noted - ADSDAQ by ContextWeb’s Jay Sears.

With Detlev Johnson’s moderation of the “Contextual Ad Programs” panel, Jay discussed the ADSDAQ contextual ad exchange solution for webmasters along with Brian Axe from Google’s product team who discussed Google AdSense and Tony Willis, from Quigo, who brought to light Quigo’s AdSonar product.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim has posted more photos of the event in his Flickr photostream.

A lengthy Q&A session highlighted the panel discussion with questions from web publishers on everything from recent changes to Google’s AdSense to the name-your-own-CPM model of ADSDAQ.

The unstoppable Lisa Barone of the Bruce Clay blog live-blogged the event and offers a detailed report on the panel.

Speakers (from left to right): Ahmet Ozalp, Partner, Atlas Venture Capital; Keith Smith, CEO, Zango; Antti Öhrling, Co-Founder, Blyk; Shanthini Sarkar, SVP of Operations and Product Management, ADSDAQ by ContextWeb; Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-chief, Red Herring and panel moderator

Red Herrring Global 100 Conference, Seattle, Washington, December 4

“What’s the revenue source for new digital distribution models?” Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-chief, Red Herring, asked Ahmet Ozalp of Atlas Venture Capital. “And how will user generated content be monetized?” Ahmet responsed with the obvious (though relevant) answer. The two main revenue sources will continue to be advertising and subscription models. As a VC, he added, he’s interesting in investing in companies that are building out the infrastructure needed to support the digital distribution, along with investing in companies that are part of the new digital distribution medium.

Next, Joel raised an important and sensitive issue: total online ad spend world wide was only 6% of all ad spend in 2006. If users are spending more time online, why are advertisers not allocating more of their budgets for online?

ADSDAQ by ContextWeb’s Shanthi Sarkar made the point that online audience is fragmented. There are few ways for advertisers (especially brand advertisers) to reach their target audience and control their brand. They can buy directly from a single site, but very few sites have large enough reach to meet advertiser’s needs. Audience behavior has also shifted in the past two years. According to eMarketer, users spend 61% of their time online viewing sites other than the top 20 portals, and they’re spending more time on niche content sites. Ad exchanges, such as ADSDAQ, provide advertisers with a way to reach a large audience, while providing them with the ability to control their brand by not displaying their ads on inappropriate content. Because of business models, such as ad exchanges, Mrs. Sarkar predicated that we’ll see more ad dollars being allocated to online.

Pushing further, Joel asked, “In what way can ADSDAQ give this type of control?” Shanthi explained that ADSDAQ’s real-time technology targets at the page level. The targeting capability excludes pages with negative content. Ad exchanges have an advantage over ad networks, as networks manually categorized sites into channels, and ADSDAQ’s real-time, automated technology is dynamic. According to Technorati, 120K new blogs are published daily, which means they’re virtually impossible to manually categorize. Traffic to the new content is highest right after it’s published, so manual categorization can’t compare to the real-time, automated technology in the fast growing world of online.

Joel discussed Blyk’s business model, which involves an exchange for mobile advertising, with Antti Ohrling, and Zango, a gaming advertising group, with Keith Smith. The panel wrapped with Ahmet Ozlap stating that, as a VC, he’s very bullish on the digital distribution models and thinks there are great opportunities to be found.

Next week will be busy for members of the ADSDAQ team with speaking engagements at several important online advertising events.

Here’s a quick hit list:

WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon, Las Vegas, Nevada, December 4

Contextual Ad Programs - Vendors
Contextual advertising continues to grow and evolve. This session will look at ways that site owners can capitalize on current contextual advertising options. Our expert panelists are from the leading contextual advertising programs available today.Moderator: Detlev Johnson

Speakers:
Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager, Google Adsense, Google Inc.
Jay Sears, SVP, Strategic Products and Business Development, ContextWeb
Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and SVP, Product Management, Quigo, Inc.

 

Red Herrring Global 100 Conference, Seattle, Washington, December 4

Digital Media
An Obvious Revolution’s Shaky Business Plan
The conversion of mass media to digital has been a fundamental revolution. From videos to photos to publications, digitization has caused a shift in the balance of power from traditional media to online and digital distribution. Print magazines and newspapers have lost advertising and readership to on-line publications and blogs. Unauthorized postings and sharing of copyrighted content have disrupted viewing patterns and concepts of fair use and ownership. The under-20 generation lives by the digital delivery and their switch has exposed the vulnerable business models of the old media. Power and influence are being redistributed from the old brand names to new online entities and blogs. Yet, the business models for this new medium are not clear. Just five percent of all ad spending globally went to the Web last year. Will creativity and quality falter? Can the new business models sustain the rich variety of fare that 21st century consumers expect? Will we fall back to a handful of media brands once the choices become exponential and unreliable?

Speakers:
ADSDAQ by ContextWeb, Shanthini Sarkar
Atlas Venture, Ahmet Ozalp, Partner
Widevine Technologies, Brian Baker, CEO
Zango, Keith Smith, Chief Executive Officer

 

iMedia Agency Summit, La Quinta, California, December 4

The New Ad Exchanges
Panelists: Andrea Ching, Senior Partner, Media Director, Neo@Ogilvy
Anand Subramanian, Chief Executive Officer, ContextWeb, Inc.
Michael Walrath, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, RightMedia Inc.
Leader: Julie Roehm, Marketing

 

Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, December 5

Ad Exchanges Are Changing Everything
According to The Wall Street Journal, “The next big Internet race might turn the buying and selling of advertising space on Web sites into the online equivalent of the pork-bellies pit.” Early ad exchanges where advertisers and Web sites can buy and sell online advertising space have evolved into a broader battle over Internet advertising. The biggest Internet media companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, are focusing attention and money on the emerging business. Marketers stand to win if the market finds ultimate efficiencies in branded media via auctions and exchanges. This session brings together executives from some of the leading ad exchanges to discuss this emerging category.

Moderator:
Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch

Speakers:
Jay Sears, SVP, Strategic Products and Business Development, ADSDAQ by ContextWeb, Inc.
Amy Adams Harding, SVP, Vice President of Advertiser Sales, DoubleClick Advertising Exchange
Bill Wise, VP/GM,
Yahoo Ad Network

 

Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, December 5

PPC Advertising on Influential Blogs and Social Media
While most marketers are familiar with Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter, there are a number of new PPC advertising alternatives on influential blogs and social networking sites. This session will introduce you to some of the more innovative ways to run conversation-level ad targeting on influential and behaviorally and contextually targeted sites.

Moderator:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR

Speakers:
Todd Parsons, Co-Founder and CPO, BuzzLogic
Jay Sears, Senior Vice President Strategic Products and Business Development, ADSDAQ by ContextWeb
Jason Weisberger, COO, Federated Media

In a video interview with TheStreet.com’s Gregg Greenberg entitled “Breaking Down The Battle For Online Ad-Exchanges,” Jay Sears, ContextWeb’s SVP of Strategic Products and Business Development, answered questions on the growing ad exchange market.

Jay discussed several of the key differentiators between ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ and other online ad exchange competitors such as Yahoo’s Right Media and Google’s Doubleclick including ADSDAQ’s focus on being a premium inventory marketplace as opposed to remnant.

In addition, Jay and Gregg address the recent purchases by Microsoft of aQuantive and WPP Group of 24/7 Real Media as well as the involvement in the online ad space of Omnicom, Publicis and Interpublic Group

For more information on benefits of the ADSDAQ online advertising exchange, visit Jay’s previous post here.

I’ll be headed to Search Engine Strategies this afternoon for three consecutive panels on contextual advertising starting this afternoon at 1:30pm.

It is great to see SES give contextual advertising a bit more attention than it has in the past, although I think ContextWeb’s approach of third party served graphical ads from top ad agencies is still not how most advertisers or publishers think of contextual.

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ContextWeb employees have made ‘quite a splash’ over the past week with two mentions in the popular New York City daily tabloid, the New York Post.

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Tony Perkins, founder and CEO of AlwaysOn, Silicon Valley emcee and past overlord of the Red Herring in the days when it was telephone-book thick, went on a Google riff yesterday during the DeSilva + Phillips Media Dealmakers Summit at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. Bringing up the undisclosed revenue sharing / “don’t you worry” stance of Google Adsense to its hundreds of thousands of web publishers, Tony asked “what’s that all about?”

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I’ll be at DeSilva + Phillip’s Dealmakers Summit this Thursday, February 6th with our CEO, Anand Subramanian. Roland DeSilva, Reed Phillips and Jeff Dearth have put together a packed conference agenda with company execs, private equity players, banks, lawyers and press.

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Today, Anand Subramanian, ContextWeb’s CEO, spoke at the AlwaysOn Media NYC Conference with a host of other CEOs, press and interested parties.

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