Ad management tool or Ad serving is an important piece in the digital advertising supply chain. Typical ad management tool users are the publishers who sell ad inventory to advertisers, ad networks which provide site representation service, or digital agency who manage ad campaign for its clients.
Popular ad management tools such as Atlas Suite, DoubleClick DART, Open Adstream, and the open source choice OpenX, all have gained pretty good customers base.
Last Thursday, Google soft-launched Google Ad Manager, a complete suite of ad management tool that supports display, contextual (Adsense), and many other ad formats including video. The tool also provides features like yield management, ad targeting (support Geo-targeting), trafficking, and order booking in various pricing models like CPM, CPC, and CPD (Cost-Per-Day). Everything is free of charge; according to Google, there will be no sign-up, ad serving, feature, or support costs.
Last Friday Microsoft also unveiled a plan to acquire Rapt adding an ad analytics solution into its digital ad business portfolio.
As the advertising market continues to consolidate, we expect to see a slim supply chain. Which is good according to Dave Morgan said in his post,
… the supply chain of online media planning, buying, sales, delivery, optimization and measurement is a mess. There are billing problems. Inventory projection problems. Inventory reservation problems. Ad serving discrepancies… This has to be fixed or agencies won’t be able to provide the focus and resources to digital channels commensurate with the audience attention that these channels receive.
I now run a boutique digital agency. I share Dave’s view.
Thanks for visiting this weblog. I am a digital marketer based in Hong Kong. After founding a marketing consulting company, merged it with a trade show company, and completed my tenure in 2007, I am blogging my insight and commentary for marketing and entrepreneurial experience. Now I am the Managing Director of 
