I agree with both previous posts on this thread - and would also welcome change and a move towards ad-networks with a more sophisticated approach. Quality competitive ad-networks must differentiate themselves from the established competition by offering access to a high-quality targeted audience attractive to advertisers keen on both direct response and branding. This will allow them to fully compete for any increased spend with the enormous portals and giant blind networks that simply rely upon sheer critical mass to gain results.

This audience access can be achieved by researching and ultimately entering into honest and reciprocal relationships with publishers offering premium content - and then targeting their user-bases via cutting-edge ad-serving technology based upon user profiles and behaviour. These higher levels of relevancy and user-driven personalization of the advertising delivered is key to progress - not purely the visibility on any performance, although this is obviously also key.

Any technical issues surrounding measurability may still remain and is a challenge for all involved, but if smart ad-networks can start getting the basics right regarding audience quality and targeting and worry less about sheer volumes, then their differentiation and survival will be assured. Simply work hard to serve the right message to the right audience in the right way and then concentrate on the service levels to all parties involved by being fully transparent and you will surely succeed.

Another key point is that dynamic ad-networks can help to develop talented independent publishers by allowing them to fully commercialise their growing websites in innovative ways and introducing them to higher-value advertisers that they could not approach themselves. This empowers those publishers to fulfil their promise and afford to keep developing sites that can benefit us all - thus also resulting in advertisers gaining access to diverse growth sites that would otherwise remain undiscovered.

In that way quality competitive ad-networks can be a key element of the growth of the marketplace, the range and quality of audiences available within it and the improvement of the ad-delivery to those audiences - rather than simply being seen as a necessary evil for publishers that would rather not or cannot sell their own advertising space.

If that can be achieved and overall online ad-spend does continues to increase, then it is dynamic growth rather than purely survival that the competitive ad-networks should be confident of. This may well result in the demise of a large number of networks in the UK… and rightly so - if we are to be truly progressive.

Not only will their optimisation techniques be evident but so will the true quality of their inventory. Many networks can drive substantial volumes in cost per performance programmes, but looking deeper into the quality of response’s is going to be equally as important for clients.

With the open access universal ad tags provide networks, It will be interesting to see how much extra scale clients will achieve. It will be as interesting to see how networks utilise this access. I certainly believe “Quality” reach will become increasingly important and with this, transparency between networks and agencies/clients will be key.

In terms of de-duplication, ad serving companies such as Atlas and Doubleclick will have to find a solution for ad networks to see both de-duped post click and post impression data. I certainly agree that this is a current in-efficiency that universal as tag technology has.