Media Futures Group research wins best paper award

A paper by Bowei Chen, Shuai Yuan, and Jun Wang has received Best Paper award at ADKDD 2014: The 8th International Workshop on Data Mining for Online Advertising, a premier venue for computational advertising. 

There are two major ways of selling impressions in display advertising. They are either sold in spot through auction mechanisms or in advance via guaranteed contracts. The former has achieved a significant automation via real-time bidding (RTB); however, the latter is still mainly done over the counter through direct sales. The paper, in the first time, proposes a mathematical model that allocates and prices the future impressions between real-time auctions and guaranteed contracts. Under conventional economic assumptions, the paper shows that the two ways can be seamless combined automatically and the publisher’s revenue can be maximised via price discrimination and optimal allocation.

From the experiments the team find that, in a less competitive market, lower prices of the guaranteed contracts will encourage the purchase in advance and the revenue gain is mainly contributed by the increased competition in future RTB. In a highly competitive market, advertisers are more willing to purchase the guaranteed contracts and thus higher prices are expected. The revenue gain is largely contributed by the guaranteed selling.