Madison Ave Marketers Move To Wall St With Index For Advertising Pricing

Having spent more than 15 minutes within the “World of Wall Street” and since migrating to the fringes of Madison Avenue, we’re always intrigued to notice how the world of marketing and advertising continues to merge with Wall Street-style advertising buying and selling schemes. As best evidenced by Media Post Communications latest initiative,  this Madmen enterprise seeks to emulate respective roles of financial behemoths Standard & Poor’s aka “S&P” and Dow Jones’ by providing an index that enables tracking of real-time benchmark pricing for ad placements.

The initiative’s goal, profiled by Stuart Elliott in today’s NYT Advertising section starts with a new index called “RTB”, which stands for Real-Time Buying, is to provide a gauge for pricing based on the top 500 on-line publications.

Suffice to say, we’re fluent in the topic of index trading, whether in form of exchange-traded-products (ETFs), futures contracts and/or options on underlying indexes. These products are intended to provide pricing transparency and the means by which ‘investors’ can manage investment portfolios. The world of advertising, according to most industry experts, is bereft of pricing transparency. It is a world that until recently has been stuck in the ’60s, no different than the days gone by in which Wall Street fund managers were dependent on telephones to communicate with brokers who could provide visibility as to latest pricing for stocks and bonds.

The good (or bad) news is that Madmen from Madison Avenue have embraced a broad assortment of trading technology tools and strategies typical to today’s financial markets.. Below excerpt courtesy of Stuart Elliott’s column

“There is so much sophistication being brought into the marketplace,” said Robert D. Liodice, president and chief executive of the largest trade organization for marketers, the Association of National Advertisers, “and through programmatic we are giving ourselves the ability to understand data better to help in our real-time decision-making.” Mr. Liodice said he was told about the MediaPost plans by Joe Mandese, editor of MediaPost, who has been testing the index for more than a year with colleagues like Jeffrey A. Loechner, the company’s president.

MediaPost plans to have the index go live on Thursday. The index, using 100 as a baseline, will be available on the MediaPost website, mediapost.com, as well as in MediaPost newsletters like Real-Time Daily. There will also be 15 subindexes covering websites by categories like entertainment, games, magazines, music, newspapers, portals and sports.

 

Madison Ave Marketers Move To Wall St With Index For Advertising Pricing