• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 25, 2012

Casale Media on Monday launched Index Platform to support publishers that are willing to drive real-time bidding on their sites. GateHouse Media's private marketplace, Adhance media, and Casale Media's ad exchange, CasaleX, are among the first to adopt the platform.

Index Platform integrates with Casale's dealID, a new technology standard for advanced selling within private exchanges, and 25 technology partners, including Adnetik, Criteo, DataXu, Invite Media, MediaMath, The Trade Desk, and Turn.

The bids are based on a second price auction model, which means the advertiser placing the winning bid will only pay the second-highest bid price, according to Andrew Casale, VP of ad strategy. When asked about the largest bid the company has seen through the RTB model, Casale said the most competitive comes from the automotive industry -- about $20 per 1,000 impressions, or one bid price divided by 1,000.

Casale serves about 25 billion RTB-related ads daily for roughly 3,000 publishers. The platform, which aims to compete with Google and PubMatic, will support for white-label implementation, as well as bids-per-second (BPS) and bids per impression (BPI) metrics. It also integrates dealID, a new technology standard that enables advanced selling within private exchanges.

Think of RTB as one component in a media strategy, similar to a semiconductor in a smartphone. "RTB is the technology that allows display to complete buying transactions within fractions of a second, compared with the traditional methods that have been used up to now," said Joe Casale, Casale Media CEO. "In this sense RTB is to display ads what the state of semiconductor technology is to the smartphones. Without this evolved state, we would still only have feature phones."

These days, Casale Media execs spend more time educating the industry than selling services. So the company created Index Pulse, a real-time map of bids flowing from demand-side platforms (DSPs) and agency trading desks, in an attempt to visualize the massive amounts of data RTB systems create. The bids are identified by prices and regions for the impression. Technologies that support real-time bidding, also known as programmatic buying and selling, process transactions within a fraction of a second; Casale Media, several thousand.

The index identifies less than 1% of all transactions that Casale Media processes, according to Casale. In real-time, the map indicates bids by size; the larger the dot on the map, the higher the bid. Colors match specific industries, such as automotive or retail.

Aside from trying to educate an industry on the benefits of RTB, one of the biggest challenges for the sales reps is recognizing they have access to quality inventory, other than excess, from one platform. Casale said sales reps need to stop looking at the RTB model as a means to only selling unsold, leftover impressions.