Inspired by the large investment in Openads, an open source ad-server solution, Jeff Jarvis lays down his vision on what the advertising world (and that of advertising marketplaces) could look like in the near future. He sees Openads as a part of the web infrastructure, one that will evolve best when it’s open sourced. Compare it to the Apache and Linux success stories for instance, both are building bloks for the internet as we know it. To me his vision is a logical and natural development that will probably/hopefully prevent companies like Google to become (too) dominant in this space.

“An ever-growing proportion of advertising in all media will be sold and served via an electronic marketplaces and the question is, who will own it? Google owns the marketplace but not the serving of others’ ads; Doubleclick gives them that. Rightmedia expands Yahoo’s marketplace with other sites’ remnant inventory and Yahoo already has display sales. Microsoft needs to get into the game and aQuantive is a fit because, via Razorfish, it provides marketing enterprise services. Ad agencies are quaking as their roles — in both media and creative — can be usurped by new and both smaller and larger players, technology, and even consumers themselves, so WPP is hedging with 24/7. It is good that we have potential competition to the growing hegemony of Google.

But I told the reporter that I hope none of them owns the marketplace. That would be dangerous and expensive for both publishers and advertisers. Instead, I want to see an open-source and transparent marketplace with open and standard metrics, standard ad calls that can hook up with any network and any agency, and the easy means to set and negotiate prices (for all kinds of new values — not just pageviews), with or without auction functionality. Could Openads become that? I don’t know yet.”

Dit bericht is geschreven op 13 June, 2007 om 11:41 am en is geplaatst in Advertising, Economics, Infrastructure, Innovation, Open source, Publishing, Standardization, Technology. Je kunt de reacties op dit bericht volgen via deze RSS 2.0 feed. Je kunt een reactie achterlaten, of een trackback via je eigen weblog.