• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, November 11, 2013

“Good luck with the stock photography. (That’ll be all a $0.20 CPM will get you.)” 

That’s just some of the provocative copy in a new ad campaign that’s being launched by Sonobi, which bills itself as the only digital ad platform “created by digital publishers for publishers.” 

The essence of the campaign is that many digital publishers are getting squeezed to the breaking point as media consolidates further and new technologies like real-time bidding continue to gain traction. Many competing third-party vendor systems have “technology designed to favor the ad buyer, not the seller,” Sonobi contends. 

The  ad campaign features prominent artists, writers and photographers—including writer Guy Lawson and photographer Jake Rajs -- who endorse a new Sonobi technology called “Smart Floor,” to maximize the return on digital ad inventory. Copy in the ads states: “When Publishers get paid what they deserve, they can give their readers the world’s best content.”  

The campaign was designed by Jon Bond, co-founder of Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, founder of consultancy Tomorro LLC and an advisor to Sonobi. (Full disclosure: Bond also pens the “Truth In Advertising” column for MAD.) 

Bond said the campaign is designed to help raise awareness of the downward pricing pressure of RTB. “If we keep going down this path, there won’t be enough money for superior content,” said Bond. “After all, great content is what attracts great readers which attracts great advertisers. We need to find a better, smarter way forward, which is the conversation we want to instigate here.”  

According to Sonobi, its new SmartFloor platform links a publisher’s existing floor price to performance. That price dynamically changes based on third party performance to create upward pricing pressure. Sonobi asserts that the new technology ensures “RTB will never again decrease the value of your inventory, and the upside is that it will automatically increase the value whenever possible to fetch a higher price.” 

CEO and Founder of Sonobi Michael Connolly stated: “We are a platform created for digital publishers by publishers. So we understand that they care about revenue, but don’t have the time to keep up with the dynamic fluctuations in RTB. Either too high and you have unsold inventory, or too low and you are leaving money on the table. So we automated it so they could efficiently maximize their revenue.”