Datran Chairman and CEO Patrick Vogt will serve as executive chairman for the new entity while CONTEXTWEB CEO Timothy Murray has been appointed PulsePoint CEO.

“This is a merger born out of a very successful partnership and fueled by demands to better address today’s fragmented digital marketplace,” said Vogt. “We’ve architected technology to leverage data and make it actionable to inform business strategies and drive results. PulsePoint will be the first media tech company with an integrated approach to meet the changing needs of advertisers, brands and publishers with precision technology across all digital media.”

In July, the company introduced the Opera Mobile Audience Network — handing clients analytics on mobile traffic and audience trends — as well as the “bid and ask” system, which allows both advertisers and publishers to name unique prices for inventory based on its real-time value.

Mahi de Silva, executive vice president of consumer mobile, gave us more details about the Open Mobile Ad Exchange and Opera’s new audience intelligence tools.

SILVA: Today, publishers, advertisers, carriers and OEMs know very little about their audience of consumers meaning they are faced with the challenge of maximizing the monetization of their properties through targeting advertising. Unlike desktop browsers, mobile browsers have very poor or no cookie support and the most popular interaction medium on smartphones are mobile apps – which have no persistent cookie support at all.

These limitations represent a fundamental paradigm shift for mobile in understanding user browsing habits and tastes and until now the ecosystem has not had the ability to work with fine-grained consumer intelligence and insights for informed, effective ad targeting and enhanced site monetization for publishers.

How does Opera fit into this picture?

In a nutshell, Opera enables mobile developers, publishers and carriers to easily source, provision, manage and track advertising from virtually any ad network or direct-sourced advertising inventory, including inventory from Apple (iAD) and Google. As the leading trusted third party in mobile advertising, Opera works with mobile publishers, developers, carriers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers to optimize advertising inventory and revenue.

What does Opera’s Open Mobile Ad Exchange offer to mobile advertisers and publishers?

Opera’s Open Mobile Ad Exchange aims to create an open marketplace between publishers and advertisers. Publishers get an easy-to-use platform to manage all aspects of advertising and advertisers get access to a broad range of publishers and their consumers from Opera Mini and other mobile browsers.

With the addition of newly-launched Opera Mobile Audience Network and Bid and Ask auction system, the members of the mobile ad ecosystem can now better understand users and also give publishers and advertisers the chance to bid for ad impressions in real time, thus maximizing their ability to reach their respective goals.

Moving forward, the Opera Mobile Audience Network provides advertisers with fine-grain analytics and intelligence on mobiles audiences including geography, device, carrier and categories of interest. Other parts of the value chain (e.g. publishers and mobile operators) can add to that information in real-time providing a more complete view of the consumer ranging from demographic to contextual and coarse-grain behavioral information — in an aggregated view and privacy neutral manner.

Customers can benefit by receiving timely measurement of mobile Internet traffic and market intelligence created by trend data collection across more than one hundred million mobile users. Ultimately this will mean much better mobile ad targeting and ability for publishers to monetize mobile properties.

This will also increase the value of the mobile audience to advertisers.  For example, advertisers can now target very specific users, say an Android user pertaining to a particular IAB category of interest based in NYC, which they had trouble doing before.

What is the significance of the Bid and Ask system in regards to real-time bidding?

Real-time ad bidding allows advertisers and publishers to better monetize their mobile audience. Publishers can ask for a specific price for their ad inventory based on the unique real-time value offered by their mobile consumers to advertisers.

Similarly, advertisers can place bids for specific types of mobile traffic. Previously, participants could only express the value of their traffic via a traditional media kit, describing their brand, content category, device and impression volumes. Opera’s Open Mobile Ad Exchange is the first to offer a bid ask auction that matches advertising bidders with publishers in real time, based on audience and price requirements.

Much thanks to Marika Knapp, who helped put together this report.

Reading MG’s outstanding piece reminded me of my own piece from last month, “Google on the Playground,” I offered some suggestions for Google on how to seem more like a friend than an enemy. Today, I’ll look more at the relationship with Google from the perspective of advertisers and agencies.

If in pre-Internet marketing, John Wanamaker had no idea which half of his marketing budget was being wasted, today, marketers have a much better idea of what is working, and in so many cases, it is the search engine marketing results from Google which are working. This makes it hard for any marketer to forsake or even reduce Google’s share of their online ad budget.

But even if Google search is generating the best ROI, advertisers and marketers need to ensure that online marketing is not dominated by one or even a handful of solutions.  Advertisers/agencies need to:

1. Diversify their ad spend – It’s never good to put all of your eggs in one basket, and the same is true for an online ad budget. Advertisers should seek out other ad opportunities – namely Yahoo! / Microsoft – but also other ad networks, solutions and exchanges. This is the only way to create competition which will keep pricing competitive.

2. Invest in truly new/emerging technologies – I remember an ad agency executive once telling me how he liked to buy ads for clients in new magazines (this was 20 years ago) because of the novelty factor of advertising in a magazine’s inaugural issue.

On a similar note, agencies and advertisers should reserve a portion of their ad budgets for new and exploratory ad vehicles. This will help new ad solutions get off the ground while providing these entrepreneurs with much needed advertiser and agency insights. And there is buzz value in advertising in emerging technologies and reaching early adopters.

3. Broaden their ad spend by focusing on ROI and not just dollars – Let’s say ad network XYZ gives you only 70% of the ROI of Google Search. Why not offer them 70% of the budget for a comparable campaign? Most ad solutions would accept a smaller budget in order to stay in the media plan, and the advertiser doesn’t feel like they compromised their marketing objectives.

Google didn’t become a frenemy all by itself. Advertisers and agencies gave Google the power to become a frenemy. By correctly managing their relationships with Google and the rest of the companies in the online advertising ecosystem, advertisers and agencies can ensure a fair and competitive industry. Otherwise, the frenemy might become an enemy.

So what are you doing to restore the balance of power in the online advertising ecosystem?

Or put another way… in 2007 I described the world with a simple diagram. Today Terry Kawaja has an industry “LUMAscape” that has logos so small I can’t even read them.

FROM…

TO

Wow. What the hell happened? We used to have this easy world… publishers sold to advertisers, there was one exchange and then a lot of ad-networks with different pitches. How the hell did we get from there to the above hodge podge “ecosystem” that nobody understands.

To help bring some clarity to this world I’d like to kick off a new series… “The RTB Display Ecosystem.” This first post is will primarily be musings on hype… as before we can talk about what’s really happening we all need to step back for a second and realize 90% of what we read is… well… bullshit.

How VCs and Bankers brought hype to the industry

I’m sure by now you’ve seen the below diagram. It’s confusing, cluttered and supposed to explain to the world how the new Display ecosystem works. Hundreds of companies have incorporated this slide in their presentation. I haven’t gone to a single conference where this hasn’t come up multiple times.

Here’s the hard truth people don’t like to hear: the display world is actually not that complicated.

Yes, the ecosystem has evolved. Exchanges are core tenets of display and there certainly has been a ton of innovation in the data space. But that doesn’t make for 20 boxes on a slide. What really happened is that online advertising captured the attention of Silicon Valley… complete with a massive influx of VCs, money, TechCrunch posts and of course… HYPE.

You see, venture capitalists make money off of home runs. The top companies in a category get great exits, and after that valuations drop off very quickly. To actually be able to justify an investment, a VC has to be convinced that the company has a chance at being top in it’s category. Well, this is quite hard to do if the world were simply advertisers, publishers and ad exchanges.

So what do you do? Well… you create a new category, pump millions of dollars in a company marketed as such category, and then hype up this category on TechCrunch as the next greatest thing and rejoice.

Of course, VCs have coffee with each other, hype up their investments to their VC friends (ever heard of an “echo chamber”?), and now they’re all clamoring to invest money in other companies who could vie to be a winner in the category and a new slew of companies get funded.

In 2006 it was impossible to differentiate yourself as an ad network… and thus every ad network rebranded as an exchange. In 2007/2008 nobody could raise money as an “ad exchange” that would compete head-to-head with Google and Yahoo. But “SSP” worked out quite well… even though it’s exactly the same business model (queue funding for Rubicon, Admeld and PubMatic, etc.).

In 2007/2008 you also couldn’t raise money as an ad-network, but there were plenty of companies interested in helping advertisers spend their money… enter the “DSP” category (queue funding for MediaMath, Turn, Invite Media, etc.). What’s funny is that TMP was doing the SSP business before anybody else and Ad.com has been offering “DSP services” since… well, forever!

VCs are also obsessed with investing in “Technology Companies” that build “Scalable Platforms.” You see, Technology is supposed to be sticky. Platforms have ecosystem effects and become $1 billion companies. To adapt, companies have quickly adjusted their positioning to better reflect attributes that will attract high valuations from said Venture Capitalists. Again, ad network isn’t sexy, but a technology — “Demand Side Platform” — is.

The funny thing is… it’s hype yet again. Most companies on the LUMAscape slide receive the majority (if not all) of their revenue from media services and not technology fees. Now this line is blurring (more on that later) but what companies are doing is saying they are “technology providers” while behind the scenes they operate exactly like a media company.

An “SSP” technology provider hands out tags to publishers and then pays them a check at the end of the month together with a nice Excel sheet. This is exactly the same business model of many an ad network.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that any of the aforementioned companies aren’t or can’t be great companies. Many of the companies I mention have built terrific technologies and great businesses, and some have followed that up with successful exists. But they did all capitalize on a great marketing opportunity — at the expense of some “old world” companies who were too slow to react.

And this is where VCs and bankers are actually hurting the industry rather than helping. They are reinforcing the importance of new categories that in themselves shouldn’t necessarily exist. Rather than focusing truly on what a company does they repeat and hence validate what companies say they do.

So What’s Next?

Well first, let’s stop the hype cycle and start celebrating real successful businesses for what they have accomplished. Give me more case studies of real results and less BS!

In the coming blog posts, I’m going to lay out the new RTB ecosystem and how all the different parties are interacting. Your feedback is as always invaluable so please leave comments with specific topics you’d love covered.

Cross-published at mikeonads.com. The views expressed in this column are those of Mike Nolet and do not represent the official views of AppNexus.

But now the wire is exploding with news that Google is finalizing a $400 million acquisition of revenue optimizer Admeld. Just a couple of months ago it disseminated through the ranks that revenue optimizer AdMeld passed on an acquisition offer from Google because the $200 million price tag was too low. How nice of Google to double the asking price.

If this deal goes through, it will be hard to imagine anyone being able to compete with Google in the display space. Big G will have its fingerprints on an unbelievable amount of display transactions from both the supply and demand sides.

In addition to optimizing publisher revenue by enabling participation in real-time bidding on various exchanges such as Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange and Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange, Admeld has been providing the technology behind and powering the private ad exchanges of The Weather Channel, IDG and quadrantONE (a partnership between journalism depots The New York Times Company, Hearst, Tribune and Gannett).

An acquisition would allow Google to take over this business and sell the technology to other major publishers. In addition AdSense partners and DoubleClick for Publishers clients would get hooked up with Admeld’s optimization tech.

Those wary of the deal (including regulators who will definitely give it a long hard look) will be skeptical of Google favoring its own exchange in display transactions, but honestly Big G won’t have to in order to bring home serious revenue. There’s plenty of money to be made by optimizing the supply side.

Admeld competitors PubMatic and Rubicon Project are hoping publishers will be suspect of Google’s intentions and choose to work with an independent revenue optimizer instead. True to form, Rubicon CEO Frank Addante sent out a statement offering existing AdMeld customers 90 days of free service.

ADOTAS: How does the Audience Platform build off of Turn’s current technology? What’s new in this offering?

SMOLIN: The Turn Audience Platform is completely separate from Turn’s DSP product. It leverages the massive scalability, real-time data processing, and predictive algorithm technologies we’ve developed for the DSP, and dramatically expands them to provide true cross-channel audience management.

The Turn Audience Platform enables marketers to centralize their offline and online data, access leading audience data providers with a single click, and design audience segments that can be synchronized and used across display, video and mobile media providers. Integrated multi-channel attribution reporting then guides the marketer to understand both which channels are driving performance, along with how to allocate budgets across channels and media providers in order to drive advertising ROI.

How does the Turn Audience Platform differ from the countless other DMP offerings out there? Does scale set it apart?

Scale is absolutely a differentiator for Turn. Prior to our market launch Turn is already processing over 500 billion data events per month for clients like Experian, OMG’s Accuen, and Akamai, making it the largest DMP in the world. Turn also integrates marketers into the industry’s first open ecosystem for audience targeting.

This means having instant access to major audience data providers on a pay-per-use basis, while also being able to maintain direct vendor relationships for custom data solutions or pricing. Why does this matter? Because scale + ecosystem = maximum audience reach.

For clients with data analysts another huge differentiator is the platform’s data warehousing technology. Turn provides clients with direct query builder access into the warehouse, enabling them to generate sophisticated analyses and custom reports that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to generate on other platforms.

Why do you consider it “industry’s first open ecosystem for audience targeting”?

We say “ecosystem” because any data source or vendor can send data in to the Turn Audience Platform, and the platform can send audience segments out to any media provider or content management system. It’s worth noting that at launch over 10 of the industry’s top data providers are already integrated in to this new model.

What makes it “open,” though, are additional features that enable marketers to also maintain direct relationships with each data vendor, if they so choose. This is important to both our clients and data partners, and enables them to further customize their relationship in terms of the data access and pricing that is available to the marketer.

In what ways does the platform assist clients in optimizing ad spend? By channel?

When clients use the Turn Audience Platform to manage audience targeting, what they’re doing is defining an audience once and synchronizing it with every cross-channel media provider they want to utilize in a campaign. As part of the process the media providers send back to the Audience Platform all of the relevant ad impression and performance data. This gives the client a unified view of campaign performance. The platform then applies a sophisticated multi-channel attribution analysis to identify how much each channel and media provider is contributing to campaign performance, and recommends how to adjust budgets to improve performance accordingly.

But this process isn’t just limited to “web” spend, and can be used with any addressable media including video, mobile, email and digital TV.

How is the DMP integrated into the Turn Media Platform? Can clients use one and not the other?

Turn’s DMP and DSP are completely separate products. While many of our clients of course use them together and there are benefits of doing so, the real power of a DMP is when a marketer uses it to centralize all of their audience data, targeting and analysis. This is particularly important for agencies who may have to use multiple DSPs on behalf of different brands. The Turn Audience Platform is designed specifically for this use case, and is compatible with every other DSP in the industry.

Will Turn’s platforms be able to access inventory from private ad exchanges, like the one Admeld built for The Weather Channel?

Absolutely. The Turn Audience Platform can be integrated with any DSP, premium publisher or ad network. For auction-based inventory like in a private exchange a marketer should always use a DSP to access the private exchange. This ensures the marketer is getting the benefits or real-time bidding and bid price optimization.

In fact many of our clients do this today, where they design their target audience in the Turn Audience Platform, and then execute the private exchange and open market media buys through the Turn Media Platform. It’s easy, seamless, and works extremely well.

What’s going on with Turn’s international expansion?

We recently opened our European data center and are servicing clients in all of the major European country markets. Things are going very well and the rate of adoption for data-driven audience targeting and RTB-based auction markets for display, video and mobile inventory has been a very pleasant surprise. The European market is growing incredibly quickly.

BrandShield 2.0′s real-time ad-blocking solution can be customized based on both black and white lists of domains, but also at the page level via 75 inappropriate content categories (such as natural disasters, aviation, accidents and financial crises). An ad blocked from one inappropriate page can be redirected to a compliant page on the same domain. Finally, ad-blocking can be further fine-tuned at the geo-level.

The precision of page-level ad-blocking is beneficial to the entire ecosystem. During a six-week test run with three advertisers stretching 244 million impressions, DoubleVerify noted that publishers added 25% more inventory when page-level blocking was used versus domain-level blocking. One entertainment site served 600,000 impressions that would have been blocked by a domain-level service.

“Page level ad blocking will provide advertisers with the highest level of brand safety and compliance, even on sites that contain a mix of different content types, while allowing ad networks and publishers to better monetize ad inventory,” said DoubleVerify CEO Oren Netzer. “To boost transparency and accountability in the industry, we’ve built our solution to specifically address this problem.”

OpenX will put the funds toward OpenX Enterprise, the enterprise publisher revenue-monetizing platform introduced in February. Through combining an ad server and an ad exchange, the platform allows pubs to manage exclusive, guaranteed, non-guaranteed and real-time inventory on a single dashboard. Notable publishers on board include Groupon, Excite Japan and Buisiness Insider

The company will also use the investor cash to build its international presence, so far buoyed by OpenX Market partnerships with Dentsu-cci in Japan and Orange-France Telecom in Europe. On the demand side, OpenX Market revenue is up 600% over the past year.

“We believe that OpenX will become an industry-defining platform in this rapidly growing sector,” said Nino Marakovic, managing director of SAP Ventures. “In addition to our investment, we also plan to leverage our relationships to help OpenX expand its reach.”

“The Internet has enabled advertising that is more segmented and measurable, making it more efficient than traditional advertising channels, such as newspaper classifieds, radio spots, and television commercials,” writes Yossi Matias, senior director and head of Google’s Israel R&D Center. “These measurements have led to better pricing models, which are based on online real-time auctions.”

These wizards will occasionally emerge from the secret Google lair to attend seminars and workshops, where they will amaze the village folk with their findings. Eventually the research will be published for the masses.

With the program currently in beta, exchange buyers will able to use real-time bidding technology in buying YouTube impressions. In time, Google will introduce more video formats for YouTube as well as access to Google Display Network partners across the web.