sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Yesterday I presented at the AdMonsters EU Leadership Forum in London. AdMonsters is an international group of people working in online advertising operations and the group included people from a wide range of online publishers and agencies, including Channel 4, the Guardian, News International, AOL, Harvest Digital and Digitas.

My presentation is on Slideshare and here:

I had a great time, especially enjoying the presentation by Fru Hazlitt, MD of GCap London. Presenting was fun too. I recorded the audio, so I’ll replace the Slideshare with a movie of the slides plus audio soon.

My presentation explored the origins and possible solutions (including the one mooted by IASH) to the problem of how to safely place ads next to user generated content. Essentially, I think a combination of behavioural targeting, automated content analysis and manual publisher classification is probably needed, and that a code of practise based solution like IASH’s won’t solve the problems to the satisfaction of advertisers who need innovation and results.

There’s some reporting in the press at the moment about the appearance of big-name brand advertising on some very dubious websites. Don’t click here if you’re sensitive, but this site shows videos taken by members of the public, of real fights in the street, and somehow some very big names have been advertising there. Obviously this isn’t what those brands or their ad agencies intended, so how did it happen?

The answer is almost certainly that the ad agencies bought some ad space on a network. Networks are companies that sell the advertising space on large numbers of websites. Some have their own technology delivering ads, some are simply sales organisations that use other companies for the delivery of the ads.

What’s been happening is that these networks have been selling space to each other, so an agency’s purchase of ad space on a big high-profile network might have ended up being delivered by someone else entirely: and before you know it, your expensive brand is all over a streetfighting website. The practise is called “blind chain buying” and a lot of people in the ad industry want to stop it.

So this morning I was at a meeting where a presentation was given by some people who represent the Internet Advertising Sales House, which is a body of concerned ad networks, who want to introduce some good practice into the ad network world.

Read more »