A nice piece of reporting by Susan K. that I had not heard about: eBay and Google competing to build a media industry-spec’d platform (not AdWords….).
From it:
A consortium of some of the biggest advertisers in the United States has plans to move the ad industry out the era of the cattle exchange and into the internet age. They’re looking for someone to build an ADSDAQ — an online exchange similar to the NASDAQ where advertisers and media owners can trade.
Google and eBay are the front runners right now — and eBay has the edge. At stake is a cut of the $800 billion total advertising market. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently boasted that he expects to get his fingers in every piece of it.
Today, at a conference of the Association of National Advertisers, this group, led by Julie Roehm of Wal-Mart, asked ANA members to put up $50 million to test a trading system for traditional media.
Howard Rosenberg, director of trading platforms for eBay, was on hand to demonstrate such a system that eBay has ready to go.
As far as I can tell, Google’s approach is to extend AdWords into other media (image/cpm, video ads, etc.) but eBay would build this to the spec of the media industry, and for them. More of a “pure play” is how one source put it. Innaresting.