Glam announced yesterday that it intends to enter the ad server market. Glam Adapt is being touted by the company as the Ad Server 3.0 - moving display advertising beyond the click and measuring on engagement. They'd like the industry to see it as the brand advertiser's ad server. Hmmm. What are the features? Well the first feature of the new Glam Adapt is the ability to buy audience at scale. Remember the ad net has over 160 global users in its network - and has an advertising-friendly female audience. Glam Adapt has a number of multi-targeting features, including behavioural, contextual, geo, retail data and cookie-based targeting. The new platform will have deeper audience insights, offering advertisers more tools to turn audience data into actionable insights.

This all sounds very familiar. Doesn't every buy-side vendor offer something similar? True. But new API's enables easier integration for DSPs. It also is offering some inventory through RTB. This is significant, as Glam has decent inventory. Selling ad servers to agencies is not easy, especially when Google has such a stranglehold over the market. My bet is that it’s not going after DoubleClick at all. Glam already has an exchange - and I reckon that Glam Adapt is just an upgrade with new spanking new features. This move is a good way for the company to sell more of its premium audience to buy-side traders - a shift to self-service automated trading. The inventory sources are becoming more plentiful and the quality of ad impressions becoming better by the week. The market continues to evolve. [Glam Media]

And now the lovely GlamAdapt grpah, explaining the evolution of the ad server: