Microsoft “not participating directly” in Canadian deal
There have long been rumours, but portals AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have now officially announced an American partnership that will amalgamate their non-reserved display space.
It’s an effort to gain a bigger share of display ad dollars increasingly going to Facebook and Google, but according to a release, “Yahoo and AOL will have an agreement that extends to Canada. Microsoft’s Canada business is not participating directly in the agreement.”
Yahoo EVP-Americas Ross Levinsohn said the agreement “will help revolutionize the buying and selling of premium online ad inventory.”
Starting in early 2012, the three companies say they will integrate their real-time bidding technologies to provide buyers access to scaled, premium inventory in one spot.
Though the partnership had been rumored for a while, some parties had been surprised by AOL’s willingness to participate and open up its inventory to competitors’ platforms after historically being unwilling to do so. But Advertising.com is the largest buyer of Yahoo inventory, according to Kurt Unkel, SVP, director at Vivaki Nerve Center, and he said it’s quite possible that Yahoo would have turned off access to that inventory had AOL not participated.
“I think AOL was at the table simply because maybe that possibility was thrown on the table at the start,” he said earlier this week.
AOL Chief Revenue Officer Ned Brody said that fear of losing preexisting access to inventory did not play a part in the decision to join up with the other two companies.
Brody said the hope is that the partnership will allow AOL to better scale its rich-media Devil ad units, which AOL is working to have adopted outside of its own media properties.
Quentin George, chief innovation officer for IPG Mediabrands, said this announcement is a good first step toward simplifying the buying of premium inventory.
“All of the holding companies have been very explicit in articulating how favorable it would be for us to have persistent access to that quality and scale of inventory,” he said. “It just offers a really compelling level of concentration of quality inventory that just removes a lot of friction in the system.”
Still, he said, all publishers need to do a better job of delineating between what inventory is sold directly, and which is sold on an auction basis through exchanges. “We still need to understand what inventory gets dynamically provisioned and what gets sold face to face.”
“At the end of day, they need to be able to have more a sophisticated answer to what gets sold through which mechanism,” he added. “Because in the past, the adage was simply that the more premium the content is, the more face-to-face it needs to get sold. I don’t think that maxim holds true any more. ”
To read the original story in Advertising Age, click here.
