Real-time Bidding without Real-time Reporting

So Invite Media was bought by Google today. To me that means Realtime Bidding is officially ON. We all knew it’s valuable and the mechanism to do it has been validated.

But that still leaves wide open, what to do with it now that you have the mechanism to do it. What is the use of real-time bidding if you can’t have real-time reporting and you can’t have a real-time dashboard to examine, analyze and control that.

There is a critical problem there. Decisioning on the price in real-time if you already know who a user is has been made readily available with DSP’s like Invite Media, however, what about real-time estimation on that impression and what about crafting your algorithm to learn and adjust things like frequency, ad sequence, and offer based on that real-time bid. I’m hoping google will quickly string together Teracent and Invite to be able to do this. Only time will tell.

But on the Media Buyer or Agency side where I now sit, other things come to mind. Like if this data is flowing in and I can bid in real-time then I should probably get access to map this data to my marketing plan and report on this based on my marketing plan so that my marketing plan becomes a living breathing thing.

To do this you need real-time Reporting to match your real-time bidding!