A few years ago the advertising/agency world woke up to the fact that they could geographically target their online campaigns.  This meant that they could ensure their adverts were only displayed to local audiences able to access and buy their products.  Advertisers no longer needed to accept that around a quarter of all their impressions would be shown to effectively irrelevant targets. 

It is amazing to me that it took the advertising world so long to realise that online media could be geotargeted too - especially when you consider that for many years various ad serving technologies have offered accurate geographic targeting and reporting as one of their core features.  How and when they came to this realisation is neither here nor there.  What is important is that today advertisers are explicitly requesting country targets as standard, so now publishers need to target advertising by the location of their audience.  However, this causes a problem for them when it comes to selling their international inventory.

I would estimate that the typical UK-based online publisher will have around 20-30% international traffic (some popular newspapers have shown over 60%).   Whilst it’s relatively easy to segment an international audience using your ad server, it’s a lot more difficult to actually monetise that inventory.  This means that some publishers have large swathes of their audience and impressions which generate little or no revenue, rendering them effectively obsolete.  So what can publishers do about this? 

Typically, a publisher will use an in-country direct sales team to monetise their local inventory, supplementing this with an ad network or two for anything unsold or remnant.  For international inventory though, the difficulty comes from the breadth of the different countries and regions and the shear number of sales people/networks required to sell in each of these countries.  Having a local sales team on the ground in every region would be impractical and a complete waste of time.

What publishers need is a low-cost, easily accessible and automated tool, accessible by the majority of agencies, advertisers, and ad networks across the world.  Luckily for publishers this already exists in latest version of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange 2.0 (ADX2).  ADX2 has a wide reach enabling publishers to sell their inventory to the furthest flung regions in the world.  It also offers sufficient control so that they do not have to compromise their brand or the efforts of their direct sales teams on the ground.  

In terms of scale, ADX2 is accessed by the vast majority of International agency groups, who control the majority of the global digital display ad-spend.  These are the guys who have amassed vast networks of agencies and buying houses, as well as ad networks in many different countries, each with access to the inventory on the exchange and buying media. 

While the participation of all of these agencies and ad networks is good, icing on the ADX2 cake is the inclusion of the Google Display Network (GDN) and AdWords, as between them they are the largest single buyer of media in the world.  Combine this with the participation of the agencies and you have a lot of buying power – exactly what a publisher needs if it is going to get reasonable CPMs from an ad exchange.

With the availability of technology platforms like ADX2, publishers no longer need to look at their international audience as a barren wasteland for paid-for advertising, nor do they need to hire someone on the ground to bash the phones to local advertisers.  By embracing the huge buying potential unleashed by platforms like ADX2, publishers can efficiently monetise their overseas audience whilst controlling who they are selling to and at what rate.