Risk-Aware Dynamic Reserve Prices of Programmatic Guarantee in Display Advertising

Chen, B. (2016) Risk-Aware Dynamic Reserve Prices of Programmatic Guarantee in Display Advertising. In: 2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), Barcelona, Spain, 12-15 Dec 2016, pp. 511-518. ISBN 9781509059102 (doi: 10.1109/ICDMW.2016.0079)

Abstract

Display advertising is one important online advertising type where banner advertisements (shortly ad) on websites are usually measured by how many times they are viewed by online users. There are two major channels to sell ad views. They can be auctioned off in real time or be directly sold through guaranteed contracts in advance. The former is also known as real-time bidding (RTB), in which media buyers come to a common marketplace to compete for a single ad view and this inventory will be allocated to a buyer in milliseconds by an auction model. Unlike RTB, buying and selling guaranteed contracts are not usually programmatic but through private negotiations as advertisers would like to customise their requests and purchase ad views in bulk. In this paper, we propose a simple model that facilitates the automation of direct sales. In our model, a media seller puts future ad views on sale and receives buy requests sequentially over time until the future delivery period. The seller maintains a hidden yet dynamically changing reserve price in order to decide whether to accept a buy request or not. The future supply and demand are assumed to be well estimated and static, and the model's revenue management is using inventory control theory where each computed reverse price is based on the updated supply and demand, and the unsold future ad views will be auctioned off in RTB to the meet the unfulfilled demand. The model has several desirable properties. First, it is not limited to the demand arrival assumption. Second, it will not affect the current equilibrium between RTB and direct sales as there are no posted guaranteed prices. Third, the model uses the expected revenue from RTB as a lower bound for inventory control and we show that a publisher can receive expected total revenue greater than or equal to those from only RTB if she uses the computed dynamic reserves prices for direct sales.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Chen, Dr Bowei
• Authors: Chen, B.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Management
• ISSN: 2375-9259
• ISBN: 9781509059102
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2016 IEEE
• First Published: First published in 2016 IEEE 16th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW): 511-518
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy