The PostView is a new coulmn written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while and it seems that Eric Franchi expertly beat me to the punch with a nice write up on Digiday - however there are a few other issues that I feel need to be explored in trying to determine what will save display.

There will be some analysts and speculators watching from afar that will profess that the display industry does not need saving. Revenues and investments into display have increased over the last few years, and let's not forget the vast improvements in the underlying technological infrastructure. However, those close enough to the display space, know what lies beneath. They know the practice of "cookie bombing" is widely pervasive, and that any meaningful attempt at leveraging clever targeting tactics on quality content will fall by the wayside.

Lets quickly assess Eric’s comments. Is it time to cut supply? Ultimately, I agree with Eric. The web has become way too cluttered for ads to make an impact anymore. However, from an RTB perspective, cutting supply is even more mission critical, particularly for publishers where advertising is still a primary business model. The reason why CPMs are cheap across the exchanges is because there’s a lot of it. There is a lot of tonnage. This tonnage makes it harder for quality content, with high(er) clearing prices, to rise to the top. Take a look at the video space. There is more demand than the (quality) supply can cope with - hence prices are still a premium across the board.

What about bigger ads? I truly believe fewer, larger real estate will create a healthier ecosystem. Although I’m not naive enough to suspect this will immediately improve the fortunes of publishers overnight, I do feel it starts to add more investable credibility into the marketplace. Is project Devil the answer? I think it’s absolutely the right idea. But of course ideas without the right execution are simply that: ideas.

But what else do we need to think of when assessing the health of the display channel? We need to understand that display is no longer a direct response channel. Retargeting on a click metric is direct response and it has its value as a DR channel (as long as you understand the lift effect of the activity) but other Display is not a performance channel. Post impression windows of anything more than 6 hours, by their very nature, means that the activity is not direct response focussed – a user is not directly responding to an ad. The average dwell time for ads is anything between 2 and 10 seconds. We cannot credit a 300*250 pixel image to cause behavioural change any time after 6 hours (to be honest id go as far to say 1 hour). Who can honestly remember an ad they saw 6 hours ago? Now multiply that upwards to 7 days, 14 days, 30 days – these post impression windows still exist I am told. It is no wonder advertisers put their money into Search and Retargeting first, there is a lack of credibility that this activity makes an impact to the bottom line.

RTB has only exasperated this problem. Technology and algorithms are manipulating and analysing millions of log files every day in attempt to predict what impression (cookie) will result in a conversion within said window. Going back to Eric’s recent article he mentions how “we sometimes forget what it is that we are doing: we are in the business of advertising”. This is a fair statement based on the people I speak to everyday.

RTB did bring something wonderful to us however. The ability to buy and sell media, in real time. I believe that the future of display media will not be Real Time Bidding (cue long gasp from reader). I am convinced though that the future will be Real Time. Advertisers being able to dynamically serve relevant messaging against relevant segments of users they’ve constructed, on high quality content, into large real estate is the future of display. Publishers need to make the leap to make ALL ad inventory available into a next generation, centralised yield optimiser. This means every ad slot with full transparency being passed to a buyer in real time. It does not necessarily mean it will be biddable but it means the inventory can be real time monetised and real time procured.

Hopefully i’ve given you all something to think about. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.