Here at isocket we basically split up the inventory that publishers can offer and advertisers can buy into two distinct buckets, Class 1 guaranteed (direct) and Class 2 non-guaranteed (remnant). Class 1 inventory comes with a higher CPM and the sales process includes a lot of back and forth between the advertiser (direct advertisers, agencies and marketers) and the publisher.

Class 2 inventory on the other hand is usually sold on a programmatic basis that’s based on a bidding or auction system without direct interaction between the advertiser and publisher.

Why Buy Class 1 Guaranteed Inventory?

The big question that I want to answer today is why would an advertiser want to buy Class 1 guaranteed inventory from publishers? The fact that me and the rest of the isocket team are only focusing on guaranteed inventory means that I get asked this question a lot. With all of the ways that the demand side has available to buy audiences and reach (through DSPs, etc.) and all of the players that are involved (SSPs, ad networks, data providers, etc.) it’s sometimes hard to believe that any deals are made on a guaranteed basis. But, the fact is that a majority of the revenue being spent on display is through these types of direct, guaranteed deals and I wanted to give a few reasons why it happens this way.

Total Control

Let’s face it, as you move up the advertising food chain there’s an increasing need for more control in knowing where your ad runs. So much, in fact, that there are great businesses that focus only on making sure that creative is only running in the places that agencies are comfortable with. Having an ad run in the wrong place can be devastating for an agency’s relationship with their clients and the best way to make sure that it never happens is to buy a guaranteed campaign directly from a publisher that you know is brand safe.

Reaching Scale

Even though it might sound funny, it’s not always easy for a media buyer to spend their entire budget through the platforms that they’re using. In the auction-based systems that enable buyers to find very specific audiences on an impression by impression basis, reaching the scale that they need in a given amount of time can be tough. Even with the incredibly sophisticated optimization that happens when campaigns are launched into the real-time bidding (RTB) world it’s still hard to spend all of the budget that media buyers set aside for their digital campaigns. Buying guaranteed inventory directly from a publisher allows for their budget to be spent when they want at the scale they need.

Scheduling

Media planners are in the business of well, you know, planning. Planning requires a lot of thought around budgeting and scheduling campaigns at a certain point of time in the future. It could be a few days from now or a couple months, but getting campaigns planned and ready for execution is why media planners exist. With RTB and other Class 2 inventory buys it’s harder for media planners to forecast, plan and execute their digital budgets efficiently due to the nature of the impression by impression bidding that it’s built on. Planning a guaranteed campaign, on the other hand, gives a media planner full control of when the campaign will run, which empowers them to reserve the inventory to schedule what they need ahead of time.

Brand Association

The publishers that businesses associate themselves is important — especially for larger brands. Although it’s now possible to run digital advertising campaigns on pretty much any publisher’s inventory, it’s in a media planner’s best interests to run them where it can give their client a sense of being associated with publishers that are respected in their given industry. By purchasing campaigns on a guaranteed basis, the amount of brand recognition and association with well-respected publishers can be maximized for the advertiser on a consistent basis.

Custom Integration

Looking beyond running only IAB units, there are also some really cool custom integrations that publishers can set up for campaigns. Custom campaigns aren’t the easiest thing to scale for a publisher, but when paired with guaranteed display inventory, these types of campaigns can create a high level of impact with an audience in a really powerful way. You can see how LOOKBOOK.nu, who’s one of our publishers, integrated some custom integration in and around their standard IAB units here in this post I wrote a while back.

Guaranteed Inventory The Easy Way

If buying Class 1 guaranteed makes sense for you as an advertiser, we’d love to help you find the best inventory that can get you in front of the audience you’re looking to reach. You can either chat with us by emailing hello-at-isocket-dot-com or you can check out the inventory we have to offer over at our direct advertising marketplace BuyAds.com.

Also, if you’re a publisher and would like to supercharge your direct ad sales with isocket you should let us know, too. We’d love to talk with you more about how we can make your life a little bit easier when it comes to managing and creating more demand for your direct advertising.

Last night we released version 1.0 of the BuyAds.com marketplace! What started off last year as a prototype became a successful experiment, and it was time to upgrade. We have been itching to do some basic upgrades, and heard loud and clear you guys were waiting too

There’s been a few attempts at open ad marketplaces over the years, with most of them failing to meet expectations and shutting down. We humbly think we’ve got some great ideas about why they failed and where BuyAds can finally make the difference and we keep marching forward – but that involves some experimentation, and the world’s not going to change overnight.

For example, included in this release is open searching. Search is actually a really hard thing to get right. We think we got a decent baseline, but it will improve over time and we’d ask for your patience and help!

We’d love to know what you think!

Some highlights of the new changes:

All new visual styling – because sometimes you need a new coat of paint. It’s unusual to see a solid blue background, but we like it. What do you think?

Expanded education pages explaining what BuyAds is, how it works, why it’s different than ad networks, etc. Examples here and here.

Making it easier to find the right websites – search, full IAB categorization, see similar tags or categories, etc.

Improved the website “player cards”. You can now quick expand each one to make the window shopping experience faster, with quick one-click add to cart! Just click the blue “Details” button on a player card to expand it.

Completely redesign the profile pages for groups and websites. We moved the ad inventory up to the top and made it clear and quick what each website wanted to sell. We also added better categorization and metrics, with plans to add more in the near future.

Adding items to your campaign (cart) and the checkout process is drastically streamlined. You can now just “throw” things in your cart, and then configure everything at once like one big campaign. But don’t worry – you can still dig in to each items in your campaign to tweak creatives, tracking URLs, and more.

 Go on, start shopping!

Woot! Uh… I mean… Hoot!

Super popular social media dashboard (and all things Ow.ly) Hootsuite has opened direct ad sales using isocket!

If you want to reach savvy early adopters, social media or community managers, brand managers, or just the general tweet-o-sphere, this is an excellent high impact way to do so.

Hootsuite is displaying a single 125×125 advertisement in the left menu bar of their web app for $3 CPM. You can see the ad when you hover over the left to expand the nav menu.

Check out Hootsuite’s advertising profile and place an order at BuyAds.com!

Speaking of social… are you at BlogWorld Expo in LA right now? Say hi to Hup and Dom! 

isocket exists to make it easier for advertisers and publishers to do business directly with each other.

Today is a big step towards solving those problems. We’re building the world’s first true platform for true premium inventory with a major new addition to our service: programmatic direct sales via our BuyAds.com API.

Put simply:

• For publishers, this is the first time you can expose your Class 1 inventory directly into the buying tools advertisers are already using, like DSPs and media planners. That means more orders.
• For advertisers, within your existing tools you can search for transparent listings of premium publishers and their best inventory – and then click to place an executable order. That means better campaigns with much less hassle.

Psst… some quick definitions: “Class 1″ inventory is the premium ad space bought and sold directly. Advertiser and publisher agree on a specific deal, they shake hands, the campaign is guaranteed to run, etc. It’s the highest priority campaign that can run on a website. “Class 2″ is whatever leftover inventory isn’t sold directly, which is then put out in the open remnant markets (like ad networks and RTB.)

We believe any new product should have a clear reason for existing. But the ad tech industry is in love with complexity for complexity’s sake… so if you’ll indulge me on the wordiness, here’s why isocket is doing this:

Today’s Real Time Bidding is only a piece of the programmatic future.

There has been a ton of progress made in the biddable layer of ad inventory over the last few years. And as a team that’s genuinely passionate about seeing a world where buying and selling ads is easier we’ve always been thrilled about the rise of programmatic buying for remnant inventory (Real Time Bidding).

Heck, our newest teammate even spent the last few years helping build the largest RTB market behind Google. But there’s still more work to be done.

RTB and private exchanges were designed to efficiently sell remnant inventory by letting different systems talk to each other through APIs.  They do a good job at that and will continue to grow market share.

Common limitations include the fact the inventory available in RTB is by definition remnant (often the bottom of the ad server barrel), there are no guarantees around campaign spend, it’s too difficult to pick the URLs an ad will show up on (or even find out where they ran after the fact), publishers feel channel conflict and lack of control, and so on.

Private exchanges haven’t shown to be the answer in many ways either. Kurt Unkel, SVP at VivaKi Nerve Center said last month that “private exchanges create operational inefficiencies on our side, almost as messy as buying on the direct side.” Others point out that the inventory available in private exchanges is a subset of what was already available in RTB, namely Class 2 inventory, now with a higher price tag.

“We want to do direct buys, but without the manual hassle.”

Consequently, brand advertisers have typically only moved audience targeting and retargeting budgets into RTB, and good publishers have only made Class 2 inventory available in RTB and private exchanges.  The vast majority of digital display spend occurs directly between publishers and advertisers / their agencies.

Over the last year isocket started hearing from advertisers and demand side tools with a growing but clear message: “This RTB thing has been great. But there’s a whole other world we want to tackle next. Let’s improve the premium side… we want to do programmatic Class 1. We want better inventory. We want to pick the websites we run on. We want guaranteed campaigns.”

Early platform partner Rob Leathern, CEO of the DSP XA.net, has seen how direct buys and RTB can work together:

“There’s a real need for the BuyAds platform. More advertisers are asking for specific site placements and premium brand campaigns; transparency and certainty is important for our clients. Bringing programmatic Class 1 inventory into the mix can make the RTB buys better, and vice versa.”

“As a premium publisher, you are best suited to represent your own inventory.” – ESPN.com

We agree. But there is a severe lack of tools and infrastructure for publishers to represent themselves, and for advertisers to find and work directly with those publishers. In other words – there’s been a lot of infrastructure and piping laid in the remnant world, but little to none in the premium world.

isocket is changing that. The timing is right, the technology is mature enough, and most importantly the people are ready (well, most of them…)

Today we’re publically planting our flag and sharing the first info about the piping we’ve been laying the last few months.

How we’re doing it

We believe there are fundamental differences between direct premium deals and remnant ones – differences significant enough that we purpose-built our system for Class 1 inventory from the ground up.

We believe in:

• Simplicity wherever possible. Ad tech doesn’t have to equal overly complicated and ugly. Reject old notions and solve the problems that matter.  
• Humans cannot be replaced in direct sales and media planning. Relationships, context, and creativity matters. Direct sales won’t be replaced by robots. But the logistics can improve with the right technology. 
• Publisher specific inventory. It does matter what websites a premium ad runs on. You won’t find blind, obfuscated or oddly-labeled bundles here.
• All inventory is created, priced, and controlled by the publisher. This is a prerequisite to offering truly Class 1 inventory.
• Guaranteed campaigns. Advertisers and publishers both value the certainty of getting exactly what they agreed on.
• Advertisers pick exactly what they want. Both sides pick exactly what they want, and aren’t forced to take anything else.
• Complete publisher control. Publishers control what orders they accept from whom, what creatives run on their sites, etc. Part of direct sales is curating who you do business with, and that doesn’t change here.
• Display can be great for branding and more branding budgets will flow online as the friction of direct guaranteed deals become easier.

Everything should work together. Picture a network of piping connecting all the great demand platforms with all the great inventory sources and all the tools that help execute campaigns (ad servers, creative, etc.)

Just this week two ad tech giants on the advertiser side, Donovan and MediaBank, announced a merger into a new company called MediaOcean. Their mission is to “create an operating system through which any advertising agency can access any advertising technology, and orchestrate across all technologies globally.”

We agree and are working hard to help reach that world. This new platform is a part of that infrastructure, because a system like MediaOcean requires piping into 3^rd parties in order to find and buy inventory.

The platform and APIs

The word “platform” gets misused a lot, but we’re actually building one – some simple but powerful APIs that give anyone the ability to interact with the BuyAds.com infrastructure.

For example, selected partners can:

• Search our hand-curated “catalog” of premium publishers.
• Search 3^rd party, non-isocket publishers (great for marketers.)
• See what inventory is available at what prices, creatives, etc.
• Place direct orders programmatically.
• Complete the life cycle of an order, from approval through payment and metrics.

This is complemented on the supply side through our industry leading isocket.com platform – notably our awesome partnership with Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers ad server.

The end result? Piping that directly connects advertiser software with publisher ad servers.

Who should partner?

Any tool that helps marketers plan, manage, or execute campaigns can use this platform.

isocket is already working with major Demand Side Platforms and RFP management tools to bring Class 1 inventory within their client’s reach. As those partners announce their integrations we’ll highlight them on our blog.

Early BuyAds platform partner MediaMath’s departing General Manager Anthony Katsur (now at pub optimizer Maxifier) offers his perspective:

“I’ve spent 16 years on both sides of the digital media ecosystem, and one thing is clear: publishers and agencies need to embrace the capabilities that isocket is bringing to the landscape.”

“A single platform creating seamless access to premium media is inevitable. These developments are not intended to replace the direct relationship between buyer and seller, but to strengthen them by removing the overly complex logistics associated with the direct purchase of premium guaranteed buys, allowing buyers and sellers to focus on their core competencies – publishers creating great content, agencies developing ingenious marketing strategies with their clients. It’s a win-win for the entire ecosystem.”

Our early partners not only include traditional Demand Side Platforms and RFP management / media planning tools, but other great services like the recently launched startup MixRank. MixRank gives marketers intelligence about what websites their competitors are successfully running ads on. With the BuyAds.com platform, MixRank can turn that intelligent grocery list into an actionable media plan – click a button, and it’s done.

“Display advertising has been continuously getting more transparent the past few years, and isocket is at the forefront of this trend. We’re very excited about the BuyAds partnership. By combining our data intelligence with the media buying capabilities of the BuyAds platform , it’s now easier than ever for advertisers to execute successful display campaigns.” – Ilya Lichtenstein, Founder

Interested in working with us?

All isocket publishers are automatically included in this platform. If you’d like to join, please apply on www.isocket.com.

If you’d like to partner and use our API, we love to hear new ideas or explore how we can help. Send us a note at hello (at) isocket com!

We’re happy to announce that AOL Tech, the parent group of TechCrunch, is launching additional properties on isocket and buyads.com!

As you may recall, the uber popular blog TechCrunch was our very first publisher. When AOL bought TechCrunch about a year ago some people questioned what would happen with isocket – but after successfully powering direct ad sales for TechCrunch and showing how much isocket can help, the AOL folks wanted to expand.

First on deck is TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), a great site covering all things Apple. Check out TUAW’s advertising options over on BuyAds.com. In addition to the leader board and med rec spots they’ve got the popular 125×125 buttons on a weekly and monthly basis. If you are marketing an iOS application or Apple accessory (like iPhone 5 cases!) this would be a great spot.

More AOL Tech properties are on deck, including the popular gaming blog Joystiq. Check in over the next few weeks for more.

Some other great (and even off the wall) pubs have joined recently.

Check out the ad options for:

• Hootsuite – very popular social media management dashboard
• Fashiolista – 1.5M visitors, fashion, style, women
• The Art of Manliness – 1M visitors, all about mens style
• Adverblog – covers digital marketing ideas
• 4shared – Alexa Top 100 property with 95M registered users
• Springwise – entrepreneurship, startups
• All Women Stalk – fashion, beauty, women
• The Poop Report – 10M page views about poop? Yep!

Your website is your product. You deliver great content and experience, and in exchange people take the time to visit you. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how awesome yet fragile that is.

One of the benefits of direct ad sales is knowing exactly who you’re doing business with. Advertisers have the comfort of knowing where their ad will be (and particularly won’t be), and the publisher knows what they’ll be putting in their user’s faces.

Bad things can happen without this moderated process. Nasty things like malware can infect visitors, an ad for a new car might show up on a website that catalogs drunk driving incidents, or a competitor might hijack your brand…

With Apologies to Federated Media

Federated Media was a popular advertising network founded in 2005. Many of you are familiar with or used FM.

The major tech blog TechCrunch was isocket’s first publisher. They left FM to switch over to isocket after many months of publicized disagreements between TC and FM. In what has become well known within certain advertising/startup circles, our startup was introduced to the world via a blog post from Michael Arrington titled “So Long Federated Media, And Thanks For All The Fish.” Over two years later, we still have people calling us remembering that story.

We’ve been honored that the trend continues as more and more publishers leave older school rep-firms like FM and switch over to isocket. We’ve heard over time that the folks at FM don’t like us very much because of this.

So we never expected John Battelle – the Founder and former CEO of FM who is a justifiably respected guy in the web world – to allow our isocket advertisement to run on his blog. Yet the next day…

*image doctored for size

That was two weeks ago. Our ad says “Self-Service Ads Power by isocket”. Right above the nameless ads from FM. If that isn’t trolling… we don’t know what is.

Protect Your Brand

We didn’t do this to be mean, and we expect it to be removed after this post. We did it to prove a point. Your brand and customer experience is important – cherish it and protect it. Bad stuff will always leak through, but at the minimum you must be aware of it and proactively try to keep the bad stuff out.

It’s for this reason that no advertising campaign bought through isocket ever goes live on a website until the publisher has reviewed and approved it.

On a whim, we even added a feature to isocket that let publishers show nothing at all in their ad space if it was unsold. So instead of filling it with something remnant like AdSense (which is often a culprit of really bad ad placements), the ad space would just collapse down and disappear. We’ve been happy that it’s an increasingly popular feature.

The Good and the Bad

There are limitless examples of very bad ad placements. Even just today, a relatively mild but unfortunate placement on CNN’s homepage:

But sometimes there are really awesome coincidences, like this shot of the former IMF chief:

If you’re looking for a cool source of good ad placements, check out the Cool Ads section of Oddee. Here’s their 15 worst ad placements ever.

I think it’s an appropriate time to use one of my favorite sayings: “We’re as happy as a clam” to share that Mashable, one of the leading social media and tech news sources, just opened up their self-service ad sales on isocket!

If you’re into the world of social media and you haven’t somehow heard of Mashable then you’ve probably been living under a rock that’s hidden in a barn that’s stuck in a cave in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, they’re that awesome. The great team of people at Mashable are growing and doing big things.

Want to reach 13 million tech savvy visitors? Check out the run of site ad packages on Mashable’s advertising sales page.

Their inventory includes run of site ad zones of the 728×90 leaderboard, 300×250 medium rectangle, and 160×600 wide skycraper varieties. You can also sponsor the 300×250 med rec in their RSS feed to reach half a million subscribers.

We just made some tweaks to how you place a CPM ad order when adding it to your cart, why not give it a test run with an order?

With Mashable, TechCrunch, some exciting new publishers about to be announced soon, and our other great tech/startup blogs – BuyAds.com is the best place anywhere to reach these premium targeted audiences.

More to come

Twitching with joy to announce two awesome things today: the launch of our premium ad marketplace BuyAds.com and an industry-first partnership with Google’s DoubleClick ad server!

The folks here at isocket are oddly passionate about making advertising sales suck less. Our self-serve ad sales application is thriving and has helped move the industry forward by making it super simple for advertisers to buy a direct campaign and for publishers to configure and sell their inventory (and all for 0% commissions!)

Now the next logical step is to make a “shoppable” marketplace for advertisers. Well, it’s finally here.

BuyAds.com is the easiest way to buy premium ads on the web’s best sites!

BuyAds.com (sweet domain right?) is our new premium marketplace featuring ad inventory of hundreds of the web’s best properties. You can pick and configure the ads you want, add them to your cart, checkout, and you’re done!

We’re experimenting with different ways to make it easy for advertisers. Rather than an open search box, we’ve tagged websites into verticals like Fashion, Gaming, Tech and Entertainment. We know it’s really tough for advertisers to find the websites they want to advertise on. We get calls from people searching through Google and going one by one by one for the right places to advertise. Stop!

BuyAds is a hand curated list of the best sites. And we’ve even included websites that aren’t powered by isocket. You can’t add them to your cart, but at least it helps you move in the right direction.

So what kind of sites are on BuyAds.com? Here’s a sample list:

• TechCrunch
• The Cheezburger Network (iCanHasCheezburger, failBlog, The Daily What)
• The Spartz Network (OMG Facts, Taste of Awesome, smartphOWNED)
• LOOKBOOK.nu
• What I Wore
• The Blog of Tim Ferriss
• GameZebo
• VentureLoop
• Vator.tv
• and many more…

We’re very excited about what we could do with BuyAds.com and it’s definitely the “first draft” in what we hope becomes the number one destination for premium advertising. We’d love to have you check it out and if you have any feedback for how we could improve it, we’re all ears!

Google and isocket partner to bring self-service and guaranteed ad sales to any publisher using Google’s DFP ad server!

For the last year Google and isocket have been locked in a lab cooking up a batch of awesome. Many publishers use DoubleClick’s Dart for Publishers ad server (part of which was formerly called Google Ad Manager). But unfortunately those ad servers don’t make it easy enough to do direct ad sales.

For the first time in the industry publishers on DFP can seamlessly integrate a direct sales tool into their ad server – avoiding the need to daisy chain ad servers together, work with messy ad tags, etc.

When a publisher using the integration approves an order in isocket, we send it directly into their DFP server no differently than if an ad ops person entered it in by hand. Except in this case its auto-magic.

We’ve already soft-launched this plugin with a handful of our publishers. Now we’re looking for more – if you want to use the DFP plugin, please contact us.

And don’t forget – isocket is totally free for publishers until they sell their first ad. Why not apply today?

The Cheezburger Network, one of the largest networks of entertainment sites on the web and home to LOLcats & Fail Blog, is exclusively using isocket to power their direct and self-serve ad sales.

You may have seen Cheezburger on isocket a few months ago. They started with a pilot test on some of their properties. After pausing to reshuffle their growing empire of sites, they have now fully launched on isocket. You can buy impressions across all of their websites, separated into 4 groups.

Check out their inventory and sponsor the lolcatz now! Reach over 15 million visitors per month for an awesome price of $6 CPM.

Working with Cheezburger is fun.

True story: our CEO John was recently giving a demo of isocket to a really big corporate publisher, in a meeting room with projectors and suits and all that. While everyone was getting settled, he pulled up www.icanhascheezburger.com to show them. Someone hurried over and whispered “Dude – unprofessional! Your screen is showing up live on the projector. Stop playing around on lolcats!”

And because we get to write stuff like this on their isocket payout checks…

Noticing a pattern…

Cheezburger was recently in the news for raising $30M in venture capital. Congrats! We’re starting to see a pattern here – isocket publisher TechCrunch gets acquired by AOL, as does BlogWorld co-organizer Deb Ng’s blog, and a few others. Does using isocket mean you’ll get funded or acquired?!

Probably not, but it’s fun to think about =)

We’re big fans of Tim Ferriss. His NY Times #1 best selling books The Four Hour Work Week and The Four Hour Body are wildly successful, and his messages about how to “hack” your life for the better have helped a lot of people. He’s also a geek and active in the web community!

Starting today, isocket is the exclusive advertising provider on his blog! Tim runs a great blog with an active community over at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

Check out Tim’s advertising options on his isocket page.

True to Tim, they are keeping their ad packages simple but powerful. You can buy a one month sponsorship in the great 300×250 medium rectangle ad spot on the top right of every page. You’ll get around 1 million impressions over 30 days, for an eCPM of $4. That’s a great opportunity to reach a highly engaged audience of life hackers.

Update:

Wasting no time, the first ad campaign was already purchased by the fine folks at Athletic Greens, who’s nutritional “superfood” was featured in Tim’s new book the Four Hour Body. Congrats to Tim and Athletic Greens!