Clearly a hot topic in online ad-tech right now is the rise of exchange-based buying and the advent of real-time bidding platforms (RTB) that allow advertisers and publishers to transact on an impression by impression basis. Given all the focus on RTB I sometimes have to remind myself that true real-time trading is less than a year into its existence. And given its nascence, the landscape of companies (buy side platforms, sell side platforms, data providers, agencies, brands, publishers, etc.) that are playing a part in these exchanges is changing rapidly. We’ve long been believers in audience based buying and selling of ad inventory. Our investment in Lijit is largely around this concept and more obviously, our work with AdMeld,…
Archives / June, 2010
Rewarding failure
This seems like an appropriate topic against the backdrop of my recent post on becoming more of a data driven organization. When you expose data, you expose not just those areas of your business that are doing well, but also those that aren’t. And this brings up an interesting question: Does your organization embrace failure or only reward success? Specifically, do you encourage people to create challenging goals and give them credit for the work they did trying to achieve them, or do you (implicitly or explicitly) encourage people to sandbag and as a result “overachieve”? The answer to this question may be more nuanced than you originally think once you sit down to consider it. In fact, most people…
How I lost my 1K status
If you followed this blog last year, you know that my quest to hit United 1K status ended with a December 26th trip from Denver to Washington DC. I left the house around 7:00am that morning and returned home that evening at 6:00pm, happily tweeting about the 30 miles I had to spare. And while I never want to make 1K again (that’s just too many miles to fly – especially back and forth from Denver to the east and west coasts, and in particular considering that I probably had another 20k miles on other airlines last year as well) I was pretty pleased with my achievement. Fast forward about two weeks. I’m on my way to CES in early…
Data, Data and more Data
I had planned to title this post “If you have a data intensive business, don’t forget to look at your data.” But when I thought about, really all businesses are (or should be) data-intensive. And as a result all businesses should be obsessed with the data their systems generate. Measure. Track. Analyze. Adjust. Years ago I remember sitting in ServiceMagic board meetings when Rodney or Mike (the co-founders) would pull out a Blackberry and announce: “in the 45 minutes since this meeting began, we’ve made 62,135 dollars and 37 cents!” They were obsessed with their system data and they had designed their platform from the very start to allow them to pull out any and all data they wanted. They…