Changes are afoot in the world of display advertising if recent developments are anything to go by.  In recent weeks both AOL and Yahoo have announced the development of new platforms for buying and booking display advertising with one common them, flexibility.  The flexibility to book, buy, pause and up-weight online display advertising campaigns in real time, allowing for a more fluid media plan and more effective optimisation.

The planning of online display advertising has for a long time been the least flexible of the online disciplines with placements requiring to be booked for a minimum one month period in most instances and with little optimisation or flexibility available once in place.  The solution to this has been to utilise the advanced adserving technologies to improve the tracking and optimisation of display adverts and for the biggest agencies to book up inventory on popular spaces and resell it later to their client base.

But is all this about the change?  Google has had their placement network in place for a while which allows for all the functionality and flexibility of search through their display partner network, but they never quite had the distribution.  More recently they have signed up a few bigger partners and are now trialling accepting 3rd party ad serving tags which will please digital media planners.  This has made Google a more viable addition to a media plan and it sounds from the press releases that AOL and Yahoo’s platforms will be similar (even if they both claim to be revolutionary!).

I think this is the way display advertising needs to go.  A move away from long term bookings and static CPM rates and towards a dynamic environment with real time placement bidding and the ability to pause and activate display campaigns through campaign interfaces.  MSN and Yahoo have already tried this with their DR model with limited success but they still require a set period for the insertion order and also only offer their remnant, unsold inventory through the system.  In reality, the only flexibility comes from the auction model, which can only be updated once a day, so isn’t actually very flexible!

The future I foresee for display advertising brings it in line with the pay per click method of campaign advertising we are all familiar with.  Real time optimisation of placements and publisher sites in line with campaign objectives and goals.  No lengthy sign ups necessary and no “mates rates” for the bigger agencies, a simple, transparent(ish) auction model with real time optimisation capabilities.  This would be great for the real, hard working digital agencies, but bad news for the lazy media agencies, as it would require hard graft to optimise a display advertising campaign in real time based on performance metrics.  It would also be bad news for the publishers as it would invariably drive down the cost of their placements.  But in a world of economic turbulence and with advertisers demanding more from their advertising spend, it could be the saviour for online display advertising which has long benefited from traditional advertising naivety to just how measurable digital marketing can be.