I think it’s also worth noting that publishers have an innate advantage – they can generally do the audience analysis “for free”, whereas advertisers have to buy media to understand the value of each audience segment. This is a really important counter-balance to the buyer’s informational advantage.

If Google is looking at consumer use of the toolbar, why couldn’t it be expanded to offer targeting capabilities to AdWords or Google Ad Exchange buyers? Perhaps a proprietary targeting stream only available through Google media buying systems that retargets users from data captured through the toolbar.

Curious your thoughts. Boo!

Great analysis and post, and congrats on the continued success over at MediaMath. Here at Covario, we don’t think it’s an either/or battle — we see it as an “and/more” synergy between search and display, with new techniques and analytics in attribution modeling and media mix modeling helping combine the two disciplines.

If you read my blog on the Google launch http://actionableinsights.covario.com/813/the-second-wave-of-display-math-and-science-rule-the-day/
you’ll see that we think that many of the same skills that make SEMs successful will help them in the display ad exchange world, and it’s really the traditional agencies or the folks who only know how to work in the exclusive ad network-dominated world who will lose out.

MediaMath, with your advanced technologies and analytics for buying across all the major exchanges, is obviously a leader in helping agencies and in-house marketers make the shift to real-time, auction-based bidding.

Covario, as one of the leaders in paid search and SEO products and services for global brand advertisers, hopes to work WITH you, not battle you, and I would guess the same of all the major SEMs out there.