By Elizabeth Joy Zalman

Mark Wright of Adenyo on Jan. 14 responded to a column I wrote Nov. 3, misconstruing the original intent of the article, but raising some intriguing points surrounding the future of mobile display advertising.

In mobile, there has historically been one type of display available for sale: acquisition. Most inventory providers have been able to enhance this run-of-network media by providing additional targeting, generally defined by devices, their operation system and capabilities such as ringtone or JavaScript support. 

Additional enhancements have come to life recently, including country or more specific location identification using latitude and longitude data. 

Furthermore, publishers or networks with carrier-specific relationships or user-specific data, respectively, can lend even more valuable, supplementary information such as demographic and psychographic insights, most usually at the unique level.

Wrong impression?
To Mr. Wright?s point, ?it is possible to launch a laser-targeted mobile campaign that captures a smaller but 100 percent relevant audience, delivering a better ROI than the spray-and-pray ? that may generate billions of click-throughs.? But is targeting really the solution? 

In a word, no. 

Targeting is certainly the next iteration in buying media after basic run-of-network campaigns.

However, existing targeting capabilities imply that only specific inventory or individuals have intrinsic value. 

In reality, it is not just the New York Times media or the $150,000-plus household income earners that are valuable. All unique individuals have value. 

The question instead to ask is, ?How valuable is this consumer to me at this particular time and for the goals of this particular program?? 

A few weeks ago, Marc Theermann of AdMeld discussed in this publication the concept of real-time bidding (see story). 

In short, real-time bidding enables media buying to transmute from fixed to dynamic.

Previously, if the demand-side wanted to buy media, there would be a fixed CPM entered in an ad server. Buyers did not know much about that consumer and certainly were not able to change their strategy in real-time. 

With the advent of real-time bidding, consumers are matched server-to-server. 

When an impression is available, the ad server sends the buyer-side server a request asking them if they are interested. The recipient server is then able to respond back with a yes/no, and a price dynamic for that particular impression.

In my opinion, real-time bidding is not exciting on its own. 

A game
It is simply the next iteration in making communication more efficient between the supply and demand sides. 

For me, the enthusiasm is instead derived from the flexibility that real-time bidding provides and the applications therein. 

So how would this theory behave within a live program? 

Let us imagine a retailer was buying acquisition inventory.

We might start by taking its existing customer database, scoring the attributes and creating deciles of uniques. ?A? might be the most valuable, ?J? the least. 

Notice, however, that ?J? is not defined as worthless. ?J? has value, just not as much as ?A?.

The retailer would then address this by changing their bid depending upon the decile of the unique attached to the impression request, in addition to any additional data captured such as site traffic or prior brand engagement. 

As such, the retailer maximizes its reach while minimizing the cost, and knows that each prospect is valuable, but adjusts that value in relation to others. And that is the Holy Grail of marketing, is it not?  

Please click here to read "Why I think 2011 won't be the Year of Mobile"

Please click here to read "Contrary to Mobile Marketer column, mobile is measurable"

Please click here to read, "Why real-time bidding matters for mobile advertising"

Elizabeth Joy Zalman is co-founder, chief operating officer and chief marketing officer of Media Armor, a Boston-based cross-platform analytics company. Reach her at .