On Sunday the New York Times wrote about the increasing number of digital publishers who are developing their own ad networks. This will be good for businesses who want to advertise online, but will make buying ads a much, much more complicated process.
“For publishers, setting up exchanges has several advantages: they cut out the middlemen (those third-party ad networks that often sell cheaper remnant ads for teeth-whitening or weight-loss products across a broad range of sites) and they allow the publishers greater control over consumer data.”
This move is bound to make buying online ads more complicated for campaigns and digital firms. In the past, even novice online marketers could go to Google AdWords and create everything they needed themselves.
But if more and more publishers — like CBS, NBC, Weather.com and Forbes — begin setting up their own ad networks, it will take more time and attention to actually target, budget, and buy online ads.
This is great news for campaigns that want to use online advertising effectively! Instead of blanketing the Internet with a limited ad budget, thus diluting the campaign’s effectiveness, advertisers will be able to reach out to specific, targeted audiences via specific, high-traffic websites. If search advertising is a shotgun, this approach is a rifle.
