Publishers are leaving money on the table by treating much of their inventory as remnant, when a lot of it really should be part of their premium offering. Content that can be expressed in terms of structured data, and advertising that can make use of it – these will form the basis of a new class of premium inventory.
Imagine Yahoo! selling to Hilton a new premium package. This includes pages on the network, that refer to cities, and only those cities, where Hilton has a hotel. Further, imagine those pages then showing ads for the specific Hilton hotel in that city. Then, imagine that sales rep able to put together the same ‘package’ for Waldorf Astoria – far fewer hotels, but no harder to sell or implement.
Sadly, this isn’t the state of art today. Publishers don’t publish and manage their content semantically (and their ad networks don’t provide any value-add), hence their sales force is unable to create compelling premium offerings; as a result technology that would help advertisers take advantage of such an offering isn’t mainstream yet.
While leaders in this field like Dapper are helping individual publishers and advertisers, it’s time for majors like Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft to take a stand (note Google doesn’t contribute premium inventory)
- Publish your content properties semantically, to allow easy bundling of content
- Create simple tools for your sales force to create and sell these premium packages
- Adopt real dynamic ad offerings (please, no lip service) for your advertisers
Why stop there? Be the network that can help your partners be part of this new premium offering, too!
This is the age of Data – use it to your advantage. Create the new Premium.
Amit
Readers: what do you think? I look forward to your comments below!
@akumar overflow 
Amit, this is an important point (and thanks for the plug ;).
Here’s how I think it’s playing out in the field:
first, advertisers are using startup vendors (like yours truly) to transform remanent inventory into effective premium. The publishers get none of the lift.
As this trend will grow, remanent cpms will increase, since advertisers will be able to pay more to get more media.
Some publishers – the ones with rich purchase intent – will start seeing increased cpms on their remanent and as a result will pour more inventory into exchanges.
Exchanges will brunch out of just remanent and include more and more ‘premium’ inventory.
Publishers will finally figure out that their unique, valuable asset is not paheviews bu rather contextual and user intent data. The impressions are just the package. They will move from selling their data close to the chest or selling it on the side for scraps, sell a blended offering of media data. There are already a couple of startups with the mission to leverage that. Then, there will be a strong incentive to augment the site with structured data that everyone can leverage for better targeting and messaging.
All of this (especially the last part) will take time, as you and I know well. But you know that quote that orielly puts in his deck always about the future being just a nonuniform distribution – it’s very true for advertising on te web today..
Sign me in to your army 😉