Apps in the Advertising Display Ecosystem

The future of the web could be applications. Seeing how smart phones are catching up to personal computers in the number of people accessing the internet, it looks like the future of the web will be based on applications that you will use from every one of your devices. This is one of the main predictions among tech gurus right now. But will this trend touch other internet businesses?

Online adversiting is a huge business. Search engine marketing is about 50% of the pie, while display advertising, after some years of low growth, is on the rise again. New technologies in the display advertising arena - like retargeting and user data information - are improving advertiser's results, giving them good ROIs. The industry is getting more complex and technologies are evolving fast. Marketers need to test new features and strategies quickly in a very sophisticated environment. Usually these kinds of tests are hard to execute because of the implications of integrating different advertising technology providers. They are long and expensive technical and operational integrations.

But how is the industry solving this problem? Thinking about the world of applications. An ecosystem that provides you the right application in minutes to deploy all your display advertising campaign tests, just paying the cost of its license, could be a huge innovation for the online display advertising industry. The first company to understand this new paradigm is AppNexus, who is providing marketers and publishers with a centralized adserver with buying and selling capabilities, including all the lastest performance technologies and giving developers the power to build, launch and earn money in their application store.

It is too early to see if the application world will be a reality in the online display advertising industry, but like Apple did with the Iphone, Itunes, AppStore and now ICloud, companies like AppNexus are doing a vertical integration of an online business and creating their own ecosystem. That is where the application world gets us. From this perspective, we will always have the debate about open or closed ecosystems. The web is getting narrow from a user perspective: you search, email, phone or watch videos on Google properties or you like your life on Facebook. That has happened in search advertising with Google and Adwords too. Will this narrow internet applications trend affect the online display advertising industry? And if this happens, will it be good, or bad?

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