paidContent.org - Platform-A Gets Into The Ad Exchange Business With 'BidPlace'

While *Yahoo's Right Media and Google's* AdSense serve as the largest examples of online ad exchanges, AOL's ( NYSE: TWX) Platform-A wants them to make room for another one: later today, the Time Warner company will be introducing BidPlace, billed as a a self-service marketplace exchange which is set to launch during the first half of next year. In an interview with paidContent, Lynda Clarizio, Platform-A's president, says that the exchange is being presented as a way for marketers to better manage their display campaigns. The announcement, coming on the second day of New York's Advertising Week, also comes after months of industry reports showing that display advertising revenues have slowed considerably and the darkening economy has advertisers feeling less certain about the ad format.

Clarizio says that BidPlace is not being created to allay such fears?though she seems to feel it should help. BidPlace has been in the works for some time, Clarizio says, emphasizing it is not a reaction to anything going on in the market right now or that recent warning that Time Warner gave last week about AOL possibly missing its revenue targets due to the ad slowdown.

Excerpts from the interview with Clarizio and Eric Bosco, Platform-A's chief product and U.S. operations officer after the jump.?

Overall, BidPlace will let advertisers submit bids for CPM, CPC and CPA ads on AOL, and across certain partner sites. And naturally, it will reach across Platform-A's third-party network, which the company says reaches roughly 90 percent of the U.S. online market, citing comScore ( NSDQ: SCOR) data. The new program follows several other recent product launches over the past few months, including Platform-A's Spot Marketplace, which sells "non-reserved site or content-specific media"; an iPhone ad optimizer that detects and delivers optimized ads to users browsing the web on the Apple ( NSDQ: AAPL) device; and the addition of the buy.at affiliate network to the widget-based marketing services by Goowy Media. More directly, AOL wants BidPlace to complement PubAccess, an ad inventory management program.

-- The big difference: Bosco: "The thing that I feel really differentiates our offering from what others are going to have in the marketplace is that we're actually exposing all the power of AdLearn optimizer. For example, if you're running a CPA campaign, with a simple set of tags you could have AdLearn discover the best places on our network to place your media and meet your ROI without having to compute all those individually. We feel that some of the other exchange offerings really miss that kind of functionality. With other exchanges, you can bid on inventory, which is a fantastic thing for an advertiser, but how do you know you that have the algorithmic intelligence to bid on the right places?"

-- Display's defense: Last week, Microsoft sought to uphold the honor and distinction of display ads in the face of fairly downbeat reports ( here, here and here) and ad agency cavils. Like Microsoft and Yahoo, AOL has bet a lot on display taking off. So Clarizio sought to challenge the argument that online is great for direct response, but branding is best left to traditional media. Clarizio: "I don't agree that branding is not viable online, that you can't adequately measure it and that there's not a lot of demand from the advertising community. We are happy to tie any metrics to it that people would want. We're happy to measure it against any backend metrics an advertiser desires to drive results." Bosco: "We don't view branding as one thing, but rather we see it as a spectrum that ranges all the way from the high-end impact of a home screen takeover with rich media executions all the way to driving brochure downloads."

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