Nielsen To Measure The Mobile Media Consumer | Nielsen Media Research

Dr. Media says, finally even Nielsen,. good old Nielsen the ratings lords, get that their numbers are completely out of sych with the new media world, just think cellphones--some might say the greatest democratic invention of the thee end of the century, no users group needed and you get to talk to people--needed to be tracked to find out what people want, especially young and poor people, no land lines.





Nielsen To Measure The Mobile Media Consumer | Nielsen Media Research

Nielsen To Measure The Mobile Media Consumer

More than 33 Million Persons Used Mobile Web and 8 Million Persons Viewed Mobile Video in the Past 30 Days
Contacts
Karen Gyimesi at The Nielsen Company:

NEW YORK, NY - June 6, 2007 - The Nielsen Company today announced that it will begin measuring mobile phone users through a new service called Nielsen Wireless. This service will measure how many people use content services such as mobile Internet and mobile video and what impact this has on established media behavior.

Nielsen Wireless is led by Nielsen Vice President Jeff Herrmann, who also leads Nielsen Games, Nielsen's video game measurement service. Nielsen Wireless is designed specifically for the wireless industry and also complements Nielsen's Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative, which will measure television usage on all television and video platforms, including personal video devices such as mobile phones. Nielsen already supports the wireless industry through customer segmentation, ringtone sales tracking (Nielsen RingScan), attitudinal and behavioral surveys and mobile polling. Nielsen Wireless will work in tandem with these existing Nielsen services.

Nielsen Wireless' first product - Mobile Vector - will launch in the U.S. in July 2007. It will use information culled from Nielsen's existing National People Meter TV sample to report on media behavior and audience demographics segmented by wireless carrier. This will:

* Help wireless carriers develop more efficient advertising campaigns to reach their most valuable subscribers, while helping mobile content producers decide which mobile content distributor will be most effective in extending their brand.

* Help the mobile media industry establish competitive positioning and differentiation.

* Identify how the subscribers of different wireless carriers consume media in the home (i.e. TV viewing preferences, video gaming activity, media technology adoption).



"The value of an entertainment medium is directly proportional to how well it is measured," said Herrmann. "Reliable and accurate measurement of mobile consumers will enable advertisers to properly evaluate the mobile marketing opportunity. This new mobile measurement service demonstrates Nielsen's continued commitment to follow content wherever consumers take it. Independent measurement of the cross-media behavior of the growing mobile audience will support and accelerate the evolution of mobile media business models."

"Understanding the consumer value proposition of mobile marketing can only come from understanding user behavior," said Courtney Jane Acuff, director of denuo, a Publicis Group Company. "The announcement of Nielsen's Mobile Vector now gives brands and agencies insights that were previously unavailable. Education is so critical to the overall success of this new medium and having trusted syndicated research resources to better educate and ultimately inform the planning of new media initiatives is crucial to success and longevity."

Later this year, Nielsen will expand Nielsen Mobile Vector to include a survey of mobile phone users that will provide information about their consumption of mobile media content. Through continued collaboration with wireless industry stakeholders, Nielsen's ultimate goal is to develop a system that will support a market-wide view of mobile media consumption.

The Mobile Consumer

Nielsen Wireless estimates that in the first quarter of 2007, more than 33 million persons 12 and older used mobile web in the past 30 days, and more than 8 million persons 12 and older viewed video on their mobile phone (this excludes videos created with a phone's camcorder function). According to the CTIA (the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry), there are more than 230 million wireless subscriptions in the U.S. Nielsen also estimates that:

* At least 7% of 18-34 year-olds viewed mobile video programming in the first quarter of 2007 while at least 25% used their mobile phone to connect to the Internet

* As of May 31, more than half, 55%, of primary users of video-enabled mobile phones lived in households with total incomes of $75,000 or above.

* Subscribers to different carriers vary in terms of cable status: people in Sprint households were 30% more likely than people in T-mobile households to have a digital broadcast satellite (DBS) system. People in Verizon Wireless households are 26% more likely to have digital cable service in their home (39% of Verizon Wireless household persons had wired digital cable compared to 31% of U.S. Persons 2+).

* The mobile video audience skews somewhat older and male: 46% of the mobile video audience is 35 years or older and 54% of the audience is male.

* There are differences in traditional television viewing by wireless carrier:

* The rating for the May 23 American Idol finale on FOX was higher among people in Verizon households than those in Sprint or AT&T households by differences of 11 percent and 7 percent, respectively.

* Looking at primary users of mobile video-enabled phones across the TV season, American Idol earned the highest rating among Sprint subscribers, averaging a 13.2 rating during Tuesday telecasts and a 13.5 rating during Wednesday telecasts among Sprint's primary users of video-enabled phones.



About Nielsen Wireless

In October 2006, Nielsen launched Nielsen Wireless and Interactive Services, a measurement service for video games and mobile phone users. Due to the expansion of scope beyond media measurement, that service was subsequently split into two services: Nielsen Games and Nielsen Wireless. Mobile Vector is the first product to come out of the Nielsen Wireless service.



About The Nielsen Company

The Nielsen Company is a global information and media company with leading market positions and recognized brands in marketing information (ACNielsen), media information (Nielsen Media Research), business publications (Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek), trade shows and the newspaper sector (Scarborough Research). The privately held company is active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in Haarlem, the Netherlands and New York, USA. For more information, please visit, www.nielsen.com.

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WP: Does virtual reality need a sheriff?

Dr. Media says, at last real reality hits the Disney world illusion of VR, whats actually the most interesting thing about this is the reactions to the virtual event, no animals were harmed during the filming as it were, folks this is NOT REAL. The Iraq war, is REAL, people REALLY die. Here in VR, there is an illusion the illusion is based on the fantasy of the participants, these moral objections are to a fantasy made public which EVERYONE knows some people hold privately.
What about those privately held religious, or political, beliefs, should they also be policed, or only sexual fantasies.
VR becomes reality!

WP: Does virtual reality need a sheriff? - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

As recent advances in Internet technology have spurred millions of users to build and explore new digital worlds, the creations have imported not only their users' dreams but also their vices. These alternative realms are testing the long-held notions of what is criminal and whether law enforcement should patrol the digital frontier. "People have an interest in their property and the integrity of their person. But in virtual reality, these interests are not tangible but built from intangible data and software," said Greg Lastowka, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law at Camden in New Jersey. Some virtual activities clearly violate the law, like trafficking in stolen credit card numbers, he said. Others, like virtual muggings and sex crimes, are harder to define, though they may cause real-life anguish for users. Virtual killings, muggings, rapes Simulated violence and thievery have long been a part of virtual reality, especially in the computer games that pioneered online digital role-playing. At times, however, this conduct has crossed the lines of what even seasoned game players consider acceptable. In World of Warcraft, the most popular online game, with an estimated 8 million participants worldwide, some regions of this fantasy domain have grown so lawless that players said they fear to brave them alone. Gangs of animated characters have repeatedly preyed upon lone travelers, killing them and making off with their virtual belongings. Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money. Julian Dibbell, a prominent commentator on digital culture, chronicled the first known case of sexual assault in cyberspace in 1993, when virtual reality was still in its infancy. A participant in LambdaMOO, a community of users who congregated in a virtual California house, had used a computer program called a "voodoo doll" to force another player's character to act out being raped. Though this virtual world was rudimentary and the assault simulated, Dibbell recounted that the trauma was jarringly real. The woman whose character was attacked later wept -- "post-traumatic tears were streaming down her face" -- as she vented her outrage and demand for revenge in an online posting, he wrote. Since then, advances in high-speed Internet, user interfaces and graphic design have rendered virtual reality more real, allowing users to endow their characters with greater humanity and identify ever more closely with their creations. 'Double-edged sword' Nowhere is this truer than in Second Life, where more than 6 million people have registered to create characters called avatars, cartoon human figures that respond to keyboard commands and socialize with others' characters. The breadth of creativity and interaction in Second Life is greater than on nearly any other virtual-reality Web site because there is no game or other objective; it is just an open-ended, lifelike digital environment. Moreover, Linden Labs, which operates Second Life, has given users the software tools to design their characters and online setting as they see fit; some avatars look like their real-life alter egos, while others are fantastical creations. This virtual frontier has attracted a stunning array of immigrants. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has opened a virtual campaign headquarters. Reuters and other news agencies have set up virtual bureaus. IBM has developed office space for employee avatars. On May 22, Maldives became the first country to open an embassy in Second Life, with Sweden following this week. Second Life is intended only for adults, and about 15 percent of the properties on the site -- in essence, space on computer servers that appear as parcels of land -- have been voluntarily flagged by their residents as having mature material. Though some is relatively innocent, in some locations avatars act out drug use, child abuse, rape and various forms of sadomasochism. "This is the double-edged sword of the wonderful creativity in Second Life," Dibbell said in an interview. One user found herself the unwilling neighbor of an especially sordid underage sex club. "Tons of men would drop in looking for sex with little girls and boys. I abhorred the club," wrote the user on a Second Life blog under the avatar name Anna Valeeva. She even tried to evict the club by buying their land, she wrote. Disagreements among countries The question of what is criminal in virtual reality is complicated by disagreements among countries over what is legal even in real life. For example, virtual renderings of child abuse are not a crime in the United States but are considered illegal pornography in some European countries, including Germany. After German authorities began their investigation, Linden Labs issued a statement on its official blog condemning the virtual depictions of child pornography. Linden Labs said it was cooperating with law enforcement and had banned two participants in the incident, a 54-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman, from Second Life. Some Second Life users objected on the blog that Linden Labs had gone too far. "Excuse me. You banned two residents, both mature, who did a little role-playing? No children, I repeat no children, were harmed or even involved in that act," protested another user on the Second Life blog. "Since when is fantasy against the fricking law?" Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, said in an interview that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. He recounted, for example, that his company has called in the FBI several times, most recently this spring to ensure that Second Life's virtual casinos complied with U.S. law. Federal investigators created their own avatars and toured the site, he said. In coming months, his company plans to disperse tens of thousands of computer servers from California and Texas to countries around the world in order to improve the site's performance. Also, he said, this will make activities on those servers subject to laws of the host countries. Rosedale said he hopes participants in Second Life eventually develop their own virtual legal code and justice system. "In the ideal case, the people who are in Second Life should think of themselves as citizens of this new place and not citizens of their countries," he said. © 2007 The Washington Post Company Rate this story Low Rate it 0.5 Rate it 1 Rate it 1.5 Rate it 2 Rate it 2.5 Rate it 3 Rate it 3.5 Rate it 4 Rate it 4.5 Rate it 5 High Current rating: 0.5 by 2 users • View Top Rated stories Print this Email this Blog this IM this MORE FROM WASHINGTONPOST.COM HIGHLIGHTS washingtonpost.com Highlights Section Front Immigration bill gains momentum Tortured lives of interrogators What is your dog thinking? 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For Pornographers, Internet’s Virtues Turn to Vices

Dr. Media says, check this out, the porno guys are losing money, who knew. We did, think about it, if Napster worked to break the music logjam, why wouldn't porno aficionados--some estimates are that 60% of all searches are for sex related items, FYI--use video sharing software to get it for free, and besides,I guess amateurs like amateurs, after all, the climax is always predictable!!





For Pornographers, Internet’s Virtues Turn to Vices - New York Times

June 2, 2007
For Pornographers, Internet’s Virtues Turn to Vices
By MATT RICHTEL

The Internet was supposed to be a tremendous boon for the pornography industry, creating a global market of images and videos accessible from the privacy of a home computer. For a time it worked, with wider distribution and social acceptance driving a steady increase in sales.

But now the established pornography business is in decline — and the Internet is being held responsible.

The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers.

And unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones, or a well-lighted movie set for a ratty couch at an amateur videographer’s house.

After years of essentially steady increases, sales and rentals of pornographic videos were $3.62 billion in 2006, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, according to estimates by AVN, an industry trade publication. If the situation does not change, the overall $13 billion sex-related entertainment market may shrink this year, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, the magazine’s publisher. The industry’s online revenue is substantial but is not growing quickly enough to make up for the drop in video income.

Older companies in the industry are responding with better production values and more sophisticated Web offerings. But to their chagrin, making and distributing pornography have become a lot easier.

“People are making movies in their houses and dragging and dropping them” onto free Web sites, said Harvey Kaplan, a former maker of pornographic movies and now chief executive of GoGoBill.com, which processes payments for pornographic Web sites. “It’s killing the marketplace.”

It is an unusual twist on the Internet-transforms-industry story. The Internet quickly presented a challenge to some businesses, like recorded music and newspapers. But initially, the digital age led to a kind of mainstreaming of pornography by providing easy and anonymous access online.

The spread of high-speed Internet access promised even further growth. Instead, faster connections have simply allowed people to download free movies more quickly, and allowed amateur moviemakers to upload their creations easily.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the market continues to be flooded with new video releases, both online and on disc. Mr. Fishbein said that this year he expected to see more than 1,000 X-rated DVDs a month produced for retail sale, a figure driven in part by the new spate of low-budget filmmakers.

“The barrier to get into the industry is so low: you need a video camera and a couple of people who will have sex,” Mr. Fishbein said.

Some companies say they have had success with selling subscriptions to their Web sites, and in offering movies for download or watching online. But Internet revenue, while growing modestly, is not compensating for the drop in video sales and rentals. In 2006, revenue from online subscriptions and sales was $2.8 billion, up from $2.5 billion in 2005, according to estimates from AVN — an increase but nothing near the e-commerce growth enjoyed by many industries.

The more traditional pornographic film companies are not giving up, of course. They say they have an answer to the new competition: quality.

They are seeking to differentiate themselves from makers of inexpensive films by selling with fancier packaging in stores or through slicker Web sites, and by using better cameras and more experienced directors and performers. They are banking that viewers will be discerning when it comes to sex.

“We use good-quality lighting and very good sound,” said David Joseph, president of Red Light District, a production company in Los Angeles that has made films like “Obscene Behavior.”

Mr. Joseph said his company did not waste its time, or that of the viewers, on unnecessary plot lines.

“There’s not a whole lot of story — it’s basically right to the sex, but we’re consistent with the quality,” he said, noting that the company is also careful to pick interesting backdrops. “We use different locations, rooms and couches.”

Red Light’s sales have dropped more than 30 percent in the last two years. To counter the trend, Mr. Joseph says the company plans to start giving film buyers an extra promotional DVD with more scenes from its movies, which typically cost $20. He also plans to improve the packaging of his DVDs.

A similar tactic is planned by Sean Logan, chief of Nectar Entertainment, which has made movies like “Exxxtasy Island.” Business is down 25 percent in the last year, Mr. Logan said, and, because his movies cost $50,000 to $80,000 to make, he cannot afford to compete with some DVD competitors who are dropping their prices as low as a few dollars a film to maintain their volume of sales.

But Mr. Logan said he could improve his packaging for retail shelves. He has begun adding a sleeve around his box covers that includes a foil logo and metallic sheen to bring out the images, as was done on “Brazilian Island Trilogy.”

He said he was sticking to his plan to shoot his movies in exotic locations like Brazil or simulating them with elaborate sets. For the movie “Mystified,” Nectar built an elaborate set that included a waterfall in a warehouse in Canoga Park, Calif. It is not your everyday backdrop for hard-core sex, Mr. Logan noted: “It looks like ‘Lord of the Rings.’ ”

Nectar, like Red Light, recently introduced a redesigned Web site to compete better online. Nectar charges $29.95 a month for access, which allows members to look at thousands of still photos and stream 35 movies from its library.

But this is a far cry from the price and the volume of free X-rated content available on some sites. One site operated by Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network has 200,000 videos, many of them submitted by amateur videographers, said Scott Coffman, the company’s president.

“We get input from all over the world — Japan, Germany, Brazil,” Mr. Coffman said, noting that even he was surprised by the number of contributors. “It’s the same thing as YouTube, where you’re wondering, How many people out there have cameras and are filming this stuff?”

Mr. Coffman said he was not in the business of giving away content. About half the videos submitted to the site, he said, are from pornographic movie companies looking to get viewers interested and persuade them to pay for a longer download or DVD. Some companies pay to have their clips displayed on the site, and some give it a cut of the revenue if a visitor turns into a customer.

In fact, many of the free video clips circulating online are distributed by companies using them as marketing tools. Mr. Kaplan of GoGoBill.com said he thought that was a failed strategy.

“They think that if they give people enough of a free sample, they’ll come back and pay, but that’s not true,” he said. The reality, he said, is that people are surfing for free material, getting what they want and then leaving.

But some in the industry disagree. Manny Ulele, the founder of a Las Vegas-based video production company and Web site, said the use of these teaser videos was turning the online pornography business into something of a science. (That is not his real name, but one he uses for business purposes.)

Mr. Ulele said his company could pay $500 to $600 a day to get its short clips listed prominently on popular video clearinghouses. He said that fee could be justified by the rates at which people follow through: 1 in 1,000 viewers of the free content click onto his site, he said, and 1 in 600 of those might buy something — a subscription, DVD or other product.

Over all, he said, his Web site has around 10,000 customers paying $30 a month to download or stream video clips.

“The perception of the consumer is that there is free porn,” Mr. Ulele said. “But most of it nowadays is controlled.” He added that he and other operators understood what length of video clip, and what kind of clip, would hook viewers.

“We’ve been fine-tuning it for years,” he said. “We’re able to determine exactly what works and what doesn’t.”

Selling Web Advertising Space Like Pork Bellies --WSJ

Dr. Media says welcome to the brave new world of advertising. check this out, an entirely new market, what they really need is a way to target their audience, and track the effectiveness of the campaign.But wait thats not new thats what Dr. Media calls Market research.This is where web analytics and the Semantic web, Web 3.0 come in, with out these new technologies, there will be no data to mine, only money to spend.

Selling Web Advertising Space Like Pork Bellies





Exchanges That Pair Buyers,

Sellers for Available Ad Slots

Attract Internet Giants

By ROBERT A. GUTH and KEVIN J. DELANEY



The next big Internet race might turn the buying and selling of advertising space on Web sites into the online equivalent of the pork-bellies pit.



Over the past few years, a host of small companies has started electronic exchanges where advertisers and Web sites can buy and sell online advertising space. The companies, with names like Right Media Inc., AdECN Inc., Turn Inc. and ContextWeb Inc., have been an obscure sideshow to a broader battle over Internet advertising.



That's changing quickly. The biggest Internet companies, including Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., are focusing attention and money on the emerging business, hoping to be first with the kind of large-scale, dynamic market for the ad industry that the Nasdaq market brought to stocks.

[Combo]



Over time there will be "a handful of winners that build very high-tech marketplaces," predicts Jim Barnett, chief executive of San Mateo, Calif.-based Turn. "That's what we're trying to do; that's what Google is trying to do."



Today, online publications and Internet companies have space for display ads built into their Web sites. Typically, that space gets filled with ads either the old-fashioned way -- through a salesperson -- or by a mix of computers and people called an ad network that automatically sells ads for the spot. But a significant portion of the available ad space -- called "inventory" -- remains unsold, or is sold for next to nothing. Enter the exchanges, which use automated systems to match buyers with sellers of unsold space.



With ad exchanges, member advertisers specify the price they're willing to pay for a certain type of ad spot, such as a banner ad that will be viewed by a female in Boston. When a woman in Boston pulls up a Web page of an exchange member with a banner slot available, software assesses the exchange's offer. If the price offered is better than the site's minimum rate for that page and higher than what it can get from other sources, such as ads sold by its sales staff, the site will usually accept the exchange-brokered offer. The exchange's computers can then deliver the winning ad to be displayed as the Web page loads on the consumer's PC. The exchange immediately notifies the site if it doesn't have a buyer for the ad space, and the site can then put in a nonpaying house ad or try other means to unload it on the fly.



Web sites rely on data such as IP addresses -- identifiers for PCs connected to the Web -- to know the general location, gender and other characteristics of the Web surfer pulling up an ad. Sites also use cookies, small files stored on users' computers, to track their Web activity, such as recent searches. Web publishers say the cookies generally don't allow them or advertisers to know the actual identity of specific users -- and any data are made anonymous. But for a car maker who might want ads to be shown only to consumers who had previously visited auto sites or had done car-related Web searches, for example, the targeting such technology makes possible can be attractive. By bringing together a lot of ad sellers, exchanges can potentially help advertisers buy a larger quantity of such specifically targeted ads across different Web sites.



AdECN says it can complete an auction for the ads on a Web page in 12 milliseconds after a consumer clicks to pull it up. AdECN runs an exchange where 28 advertising networks, which purchase ad slots from many different sites and sell them at higher rates to advertisers, buy and sell ads.



Exchanges usually collect payments for ads and pass them along to the sites, taking a commission. Ads are generally priced per thousand times they're viewed by consumers, a unit known in the industry as CPM.



Online ticket seller StubHub in recent months started using exchanges and ad networks to spread its reach to sports and music fans on the Web. (Historically, the company used ads tied to Internet search results on Google to reach customers.) The exchanges have allowed StubHub to place ads on a broader universe of sites large and small that it never had used before. Some of those, including ads on Gawker, a gossip blog, and Internet radio station Accuradio, led to ticket sales, StubHub executives say.



In a few months of use, ad networks and exchanges "have already become material to our marketing mix," says Michael Janes, chief marketing officer at StubHub. He estimates the company now spends about 15% of its budget (up from zero at the beginning of the year) for display ads over networks and exchanges. There's still some disagreement over the actual differences between networks and exchanges. But many industry executives agree that transparent pricing and an open neutral marketplace where anyone can buy or sell ads are distinguishing characteristics of exchanges.



Q Interactive of Chicago this month started selling some ads on its sites through the Right Media exchange. And it believes that buying ads on other sites through the exchange, which it has begun doing as well, will offer a 20% to 30% better return on investment than its previous practice of going around and buying ads from different sites individually. "Right now if you want to do a media buy you have to buy on a lot of different networks and with a lot of different publishers," says Q Interactive CEO Matt Wise. "Theoretically, with an exchange, one technology platform can cover an enormous swath of the Internet."



Or so the big players hope. Yahoo thrust exchanges into the spotlight in April when it agreed to pay $680 million for the remaining 80% of Right Media, following a 20% stake it bought last October. Yahoo said that it wanted to own Right Media as a way to take a leadership role in promoting the exchange model. The company has been selling some ad space on its site through Right Media, and says it has seen increases of over 50% in prices for ad spaces sold through Right Media compared with what it brought in for them on its own.



The Right Media acquisition followed Google's $3.1 billion deal to purchase DoubleClick Inc., which is building an ad exchange. DoubleClick last week began conducting transactions for actual ads on the exchange it has been building.



David Rosenblatt, chief executive of DoubleClick, estimates exchanges could eventually handle 50% of all display ad sales. He compares the exchanges to auctions that Internet search providers like Google used to ignite search-related advertising several years ago. "I think the exchange concept will have the same impact on the display market," he says.



Meanwhile, Microsoft has started developing a prototype of an exchange and has also considered buying one of the start-ups, say people familiar with the company. Microsoft General Manager Joe Doran declined to give details but said Microsoft has been studying the exchange model and "what it would take to build an exchange." But, he said, "it's still very early for the exchange concept to really catch on and drive to large scale."



Indeed, if the dream is to have the same kind of impact on advertising that spot markets had on commodities and stock markets on equities, one or more exchanges will need a critical mass of buyers and sellers. As with stock markets, "liquidity" is key for the ad exchanges: the more participants, the greater the chance of finding buyers and sellers.



But with a bevy of exchanges large and small, the industry risks not having a critical mass of buyers and sellers on any one exchange to make a viable market. "That's the thing that's uncertain," says analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence in Oakland, Calif.



It's also unclear what percentage of their ads Web sites will be willing to sell through exchanges. Many industry executives say the exchanges are suited only for "remnant," or leftover ads and ad space that the biggest brands aren't interested in. Big advertisers generally want to have more control over where the online ads appear and who sees them.



With exchanges, "the underlying assumption to that is you're buying a commoditized product that anyone can sell you," says Steven Kaufman, senior vice president at Publicis Group SA's Digitas interactive agency. Many of the high-end ads that Digitas handles require human negotiation and tailoring before appearing on a Web site. "That's not coming through an exchange," he says.



Others disagree. Such high-end ads represent at most 10% of the ad market, counters AdECN CEO Bill Urschel. "And everything else is up for an exchange."



Write to Robert A. Guth at rob.guth@wsj.com and Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com

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