Featured Interview- Bedrock

February 18, 2010    //    By AdNetworks.NET    //    Featured, Hot News Stories    //    4 comments

Our second featured ad network is Bedrock. Bedrock is an ad network which empowers publishers to create ad units they feel are most appropriate for their audience… and they’re quietly turning the current ad model on its head. Recently, we were able to have a phone interview with Ophir Tanz, CEO of Bedrock. Below is the transcription of our phone interview.

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AdNetworks.NET: So your network puts a unique twist on the current ad network model, could you help explain?

Our ad network is similar to Google AdWords to the extent that advertisers come to a centralized marketplace and buy keywords on a CPC basis. The difference is they don’t provide any creative, they say, ‘send traffic to these keywords and this is what I’m willing to pay for a click,’ and we say, ‘we will send relevant traffic for the specified keywords and you can modify your bids relative to the ROI you are seeing.’ Publishers are then empowered to create ads. The ads can be embedded within content, widgets, rss feeds, really anywhere they choose. What makes Bedrock especially powerful is we enable publishers to monetize inventory that they previously haven’t been able to monetize.

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AdNetworks.NET: Sounds very interesting. How did you see this opportunity?

Bedrock was actually borne out of GumGum. GumGum is an image-licensing platform and one of our licensing solutions is an ad-supported model. When publishers opt into this licensing model we overlay an ad on top of a photo and monetize the license with the associated ad revenue. The problem we faced was that traditional ad networks are not built to allow you to overlay ads on photos. So we had to figure out a scalable solution to monetize non-standard inventory on GumGum before Bedrock even existed. As the solution materialized, we took a step back and said ‘wow this works really well and all these web companies with huge amounts of inventory have the same problem and are leaving billion of eyeballs unmonetized.’ We decided to open the platform up to publishers at large and Bedrock was born.

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AdNetworks.NET: So how are you monetizing, is it just CPC?

Yes, 100% CPC.

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AdNetworks.NET: How do you define “quality” when selecting publishers for the Bedrock network?

Good question. Typically, we work with very large publishers and advertisers. We’ve found it makes the most sense to work with the biggest buyers and sellers (such as a myYearbook, Hi5, Tagged, ClearSpring, etc.) because they have the resources and management systems in place to most effectively leverage Bedrock. Sellers need to create ads which requires resources and buyers need to manage bidding which takes work. Increasingly, we are working with vertical publishers as well. For example, in the auto vertical we are working with some large, successful publishers (such as cardomain.com and other players in the space). We will continue to open up the network over time. Today, Bedrock is not something a mom and pop shop could, or necessarily should, use.

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AdNetworks.NET: What has been the reception so far from Advertisers and Publishers?

Advertisers:
The reception has been unbelievable! On the advertiser side it’s really a no brainer, you go to the marketplace, you specify the keywords you want traffic for and we send traffic and provide real-time reporting. If you want more traffic, you increase your bids. So advertisers on Bedrock are receiving traffic at a price point that makes sense to their business. Of course, if the advertiser bid is too low and they are being outbid by other buyers they’re not going to recieve much traffic.

Publishers:
Bedrock is a game-changer for publishers more than anyone else. We enable publishers to finally break away from IAB standards. Rather than build a site around IAB standards, as most sites do, publishers can build their properties and services in the manner most compelling to their users and integrate ads in a similar fashion. Beyond this, and perhaps most importantly, publishers are able to monetize previously impossible to monetize real-estate. For example, publishers are able to monetize RSS feeds. We work with a few internet companies who have tremendous reach because they syndicate RSS feeds but they haven’t been able to monetize those feeds effectively until Bedrock came along. They integrate ads in-line with the feed, and, of course, call out sponsored links as such.

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AdNetworks.NET: Do you have any early results that you’re able to discuss?

Certainly. Before joining our network CTR was around 0.1% for many publishers on a good day, in fact, for most IAB ads on the Internet this is considered a good CTR. After joining our network they began to see CTR’s upwards of 3%, 5%, 10%, even as high as 30%, and what that does for monetization is really amazing. Taking a CTR from .1% to 10%, represents a 100x increase in monetization. There is a growing phenomenon of banner blindness where users have trained themselves not to look at certain areas of a web page. We are reintroducing ads back into the story in a more natural and relevant way.

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AdNetworks.NET: How much customization does the publisher have?

Customization is Bedrock’s key differentiator. Bedrock is easier to integrate than any other network in the world. There is actually no “integration” that takes place, there is no embed code or on-site setup process required. Publishers create the ad just like they would any other type of content – an image in Photoshop or a text-link generated via a Wordpress CMS, then they simply hyperlink the ad to our marketplace – the click comes through and the URL contains parameters in the query string, such as keyword, that we run a real-time auction on. We then send the click over to the highest bidder.

It is interesting to note that publishers typically have more awareness of their audience than a 3rd party ad network ever could. Publishers are able to think about their audience in non-linear ways, something 3rd party ad network do not do well. For example, a publisher may know that their users are interested in expensive cars even if the site is about something else entirely, like finance or travel or fitness.

To be clear, our aim is not to compete with Google or Yahoo. We believe they provide a valuable, rich, and very effective service and will continue to be key revenue generators for publishers for the foreseeable future. We provide incremental, yet meaningful, revenue opportunities that enable publishers to monetize their properties and services more effectively.

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AdNetworks.NET: How do you compare with adsense and yahoo?

Today, because we obviously have lower volume on the buyer side of the market than the giants in the space, publishers will often see CPC’s that are a tad lower. However, the idea is that the higher CTR more than makes up the difference. Beyond this, if you’re driving quality traffic then more advertisers will bid on your traffic thereby driving the price up.

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AdNetworks.NET: How do you define quality traffic?

We don’t maintain the notion of quality internally at Bedrock. We don’t even maintain the concept of impressions because we do not put any tracking code on the publisher’s site. In the same vein, we don’t directly know the CTR publishers are generating. All we are aware of is how many clicks are being driven into the marketplace. Publishers know their CTR and advertisers know their conversion rates and that is what is important. One publisher might be sending quality traffic to a very happy advertiser and another advertiser might get that same traffic and deem it to be low quality, per their definition of qualtiy. Different advertisers are able to bid different amounts for identical traffic based on their own internal measures of quality.

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So there is complete insight into the publisher?

Buyers can see which publisher’s are sending them traffic, but we don’t report the seller site URL, it’s obfuscated. This plays the dual role of incentivizing publishers to send qualified traffic through the marketplace.

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AdNetworks.NET: What types of geo-traffic are advertisers able to target?

Currently support geo fully. Most focused in UK, Canada, and US.

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AdNetworks.NET: Where do you see the ad network community heading over the next year and what role do you hope for Bedrock to play?

I see publishers as generally having been under-served by traditional ad networks. GumGum is a good example of a network with lots of quality eyeballs, tremendous reach, really interesting inventory, and we simply were not given the opportunity to effectively monetize this audience. I think that’s because sites, services and distribution mediums have grown faster than the ad networks have been able to keep up with. We see a lot of new inventory being created thanks to Bedrock and we see publishers making a lot of money as a result. Furthermore, advertisers are able to get at traffic they have never been able to get at before, as the ad units and placements never existed before, so there is newfound value.

One of the most exciting things for us is getting publishers excited about the platform. As they understand how it works and it proves it’ value we see publishers dedicating entire teams to monetizing with Bedrock. So what that means, at the end of the day, is publishers have increased responsibility, but with that comes tremendous opportunity. It’s exciting to see truly new inventory on the Internet from an ad perspective. Publishers in a distributive context are going to come up with much more interesting creative than a single company ever could on it’s own.

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For more information check out Bedrock.com

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