Right Media is still kind of a big deal in the European exchange space. It delivers 250 billion impressions globlly every month - and is used by a host of trading desks, DSPs and ad networks to access inventory. Sue Hunt, Head of Sales and Services, Right Media, sat down with ExchangeWire recently to discuss re-positioning as a premium exchange, real-time buying on the platform and how Right Media is helping publishers monetise data through its Audience Sharing feature.

It seems that Right Media has not outwardly responded to shifts in the advertising market of late and perception of its inventory quality. What has RMX been doing to improve its image among the buy and sell-side?

SH: Right Media represents the first and largest premium exchange platform, delivering over 250bn impressions globally every month. We provide a real time auction environment for the biggest agencies, publishers, networks and data partners in the world to buy and sell brand safe advertising. Over the last year, we have had more than 68% growth across our European business, which I feel is a fair testament of how we’re seen by the media agencies and publishers in the region.

We achieved this with our business development representatives across all of Yahoo!’s European offices, and have invested in dedicated service teams in France, Spain, Germany and the UK, who provide training, strategic support and consultation for our customers. Our offering is tailored to the customer, to ensure we enable the growth and optimization of their media trading and provide an appropriate, premium service to meet their needs and business objectives.

Right Media has a lot of competition on the European sell-side? Why would a publisher use your platform instead of the SSPs, Adx et al?

SH: Right Media provides the customer with the platform and tools to create their own managed network, and the opportunity to link and trade directly with selected partners across the exchange. Publishers can decide which buyers they wish to allow in the auction, what level of visibility they want to provide, and set their minimum CPM expectations. We have agreements in place with all the major agency groups, so bring direct access to premium brands and trading desk budgets.

Our technology maximizes, and enhances, their eCPM yields, whilst delivering value to the buyer against their chosen ROI metric.

Publishers can maximize and own the value of their audience, whilst still maintaining brand safety standards with the creative management controls that Right Media offers. The open API allows our partners to streamline their workflow and enhance campaign optimisation and reporting capabilities. With dynamic exchange rate, enhanced trust and safety controls, and mobile platform developments all rolling out this year, Right Media brings a comprehensive product suite which we are confident will contribute to increased publisher yields and revenue.

There seems a big disconnect between remnant and premium inventory, and the part exchanges can play. Should pubs be managing yield across all their inventory channels? How should they go about this?

SH: Right Media enables publishers to own and monetize their audience and inventory, with complete visibility of their advertisers/demand. Our dynamic CPM functionality enables them to support CPM, CPA and CPC media buys without compromising their direct sales channel, whilst the optimisation engine delivers campaigns to both direct response and display metrics enabling them to offer to auction any class of unsold inventory that might otherwise go under-monetized.

There's been a trend in the industry to decouple data and inventory, enabling pubs to sell data directly. What is RightMedia doing in this area?

SH: Our view is that data and yield are correlated, and to that end Right Media has introduced Audience Sharing - a solution in which segment owners can seamlessly share their audience segments with media buyers across the Right Media Exchange. Our display advertising marketplace of segment owners and segment users helps provide more efficient targeting options and better ROI for marketers, increased CPM for publishers and a more relevant online experience for consumers. We have agreements in place with some of the largest data providers in the market, integrating their offering directly into the interface, and are seeking to expand this offering with EMEA specific partnerships.

Are most buyers (DSPs, ad netowrks, direct advertisers) able to access the number of sellers on the RightMedia exchange?

We have customers in every sector of the industry; media owners, agencies, networks, technology platforms and data providers. If a vendor brings additional value to our partners, we would happily discuss and evaluate their participation in the Right Media exchange.

Some would say that Right Media does not offer RTB inventory. Is this a misconception?

SH: All eight billion of our daily impressions are auctioned in real time. Each ad called from the Right Media adserver is a separate and unique auction, where every creative and all available data is evaluated to assess how to maximize ROI for advertisers, and revenue for the publisher, given the advertisers’ decision logic, targeting and pricing constraints.

We are now working with our partners to understand what RTB means to them, integrating with other prediction and bidding technologies to enable buyers to efficiently access their target audience whilst ensuring sellers concerns around data leakage are addressed.

How are you positioning Right Media to European buyers? Are you moving up the value chain in terms of what inventory you are making available?

SH: Media Agencies leverage Right Media both as a campaign optimization and media buying platform. Our algorithm is designed to optimise towards direct response ROI metrics, allowing agencies and networks to leverage this powerful engine to deliver best performance to advertisers. By entering the Right Media exchange, buyers can connect directly with our premium supply sources, including the Yahoo! network, who wish to allow them to enter their inventory ad auctions.

Right Media has the ambition to become the biggest ad exchange platform, continuing to grow our impression volumes, but also increase our premium supply and demand partners.

Can you give some details on buy-side access to European Yahoo inventory?

SH: Right Media represents the only platform through which the Yahoo! DR Network, now amongst the top 3 networks in Europe, can be accessed. As agency groups are starting to establish trading desks, with budgets dedicated to buying across exchanges, the Yahoo! DR network has started connecting with them via the Right Media exchange, and expects to see growth from these partnerships.