On Thursday, Google and VivaKi, a digital agency that is part of the Publicis Groupe, will announce a two-year renewal of their 2008 partnership that will incorporate a new platform for buying video and mobile display ads in the United States and Europe. The platform, an extension of the VivaKi Nerve Center trading desk, or the Audience on Demand product, would allow companies to bid on mobile and video display advertising space in real time on ad exchanges, including Google’s DoubleClick exchange.
“Marketers have seen the power of addressable advertising; the logical progression is to do this in video and in mobile advertising,” said Curt Hecht, chief executive of VivaKi Nerve Center. “Finding the right person at the right time on any screen or any device is the future of marketing,” Mr. Hecht said.
The vision for the product that Google will co-develop with VivaKi involves building on the existing technology of Invite Media, the ad-buying platform Google bought in June, and the automated display advertising technology of Teracent, the San Mateo start-up Google acquired in 2009, said Neal Mohan, the vice president for product management responsible for Google’s display-advertising products. “It’s a large market today; we believe that it can be substantially larger,” said Mr. Mohan, echoing one of the predictions he made for the future of Google’s display-advertising model at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx conference in New York in September.
Mr. Mohan described the feedback from publishers as “extremely positive,” adding that display advertising has so far represented a $2.5 billion business for the company, and mobile advertising a $1 billion yearly run-rate.
Mr. Hecht predicts that video and mobile advertising will make up a bigger market than graphical display advertising and that the impact will be seen on the creative side. “The notion of dynamic messaging and advertising is going to be critical,” he said. “The real-time buying aspect of this is going to turn into real-time creative as well.”
Google’s acquisitions of YouTube and AdMob, the mobile advertising start-up, also represent vast inventory pools for advertisers, added Mr. Hecht.