Open to interpretation

This week at OMMA, CEO Don Epperson of Havas Digital announced a dramatic shift in how Havas manages, plans and purchases online ad inventory.

The model — representing Havas' foray into the crowded ad network industry — brings Wall Street's stock and futures markets to mind. Epperson dubbed the project a "virtual brand network" that enables planning, purchasing, managing and reallocation of online inventory, based on the real-time value of an advertiser's brand.

"We call this an open insertion order," Epperson went on. "The ad network or publisher won't know the actual brand that's going in here until after the transaction is made."

The offering is powered by Artemis, a database management and reporting system that's profiled over one-third of the global online user population. Crucial to Havas' model is that it's in a position to supply marketers and suppliers with proprietary data regarding the underlying — and perpetually changing — value of a brand, then monitor how they fluctuate over time.

"We still have that special relationship with the client […] The client still shares with us, all that information about the long-term value of their [customers]."

By wedding customer insights to performance data provided by networks, publishers and third parties, Havas built a dynamic online ad trading system that turns user profile and unique cookie data into "the primary currency," as opposed to the publisher's inventory, reports MediaPost.

By leveraging those unique customer insights and coupling them with performance data from publishers, networks and other third parties, Epperson said Havas Digital has been able to create a dynamic online ad trading system that is decoupling audiences from publishing content, and is making user profile and unique cookie data the primary currency, not the tangible inventory that a publisher serves.

"We're starting to think of our job at agencies almost as audience aggregators vs. media planners," Epperson concluded.