Advertisers

For Most Advertisers or Ad Buyers, Before Ad Exchanges, It Was Difficult to Identify the Most Optimized Ad Inventory to Buy

It was hard to value the ad space because of limited visibility or transparency that was offered by the ad networks, other than Google, who at least provided some level of transparency with data mining adwords reports.

Up Until 18 Months Ago, This Put Media Buying Through Ad Networks Out of Reach for Most Small Advertisers.

Ad packages meant paying large sums of money, at minimum spends, often buying banners blind in terms of intelligence behind a purchase other than a leap of faith in an ad rep, who's paid on sales performance and under enormous pressure to meet quotas.

Likewise it was difficult to optimize your own creative to drive optimum CTR's.

Inefficient forecasting by ad network executives often led to over or under selling, which created a great deal of friction between large media buyers and ad networks.

Buying or selling in this environment was not the place for a small, even a medium sized advertiser.

It was the domain of professionals, which is why Google surged ahead as the world's premier ad network, catering to small and medium sized advertisers on their self serve advertising platform.

Meanwhile, Other Ad Networks Found It Increasingly Harder to Compare Competing Advertiser Offers...

...leading to the other ad networks working together to fulfill their own ad contracts (known as insertion orders).

An ad network would often have, say 3 advertisers, all making offers against similar ad inventory, willing to pay different rates for similar ads, under different revenue models.

It was difficult for ad reps to manage these indifferences, over and under selling, manually.

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