SBIR Phase I: Double-Sided Advertising Exchange

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to develop and validate a real-time, double-sided auction framework AdEx, for intelligent advertisements. This system significantly increases the likelihood of more relevant matches at a lower cost between consumers and advertisers, buyers and sellers. The key innovation is to directly utilize user-purchasing and interest profiles, culled from aggregated exchange data and social networking information, and use this data to create fungible trading objects. Aggregating groups of these objects with similar interests and profiles will enable real-time bidding for both the producer and consumer of advertising over a multi-variable bidding space. Configured as a dynamic exchange, AdEx facilitates three novel functionalities: 1) double-sided dynamic bidding; 2) allows dual programmable trading agents for optimized marketing; and 3) auctions would be cleared and use linear programming to assess the outcome. Thus allowing synthetic liquidity generation, and interconnection between disparate advertising networks with commission sharing resulting in more efficient markets. This double-sided advertising exchange, a component of MetaNet's vision of efficient interconnected enterprise social extranets, will form the fabric for the next growth phase of the Information Revolution allowing corporations to connect with customers and collaborate with trusted partners in remarkable new ways. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be the facilitation of more efficient automated markets, which will transform advertising and direct marketing. The new revenue models possible, based on knowing more about who will be communicating with and why, are vast. The search engine industry was able to connect any user to any other user on the web. Eventually, both types of connections will combine with impact to marketing ROI. Currently the launch of a new consumer brand could cost between $10-100 million, with most of this spent on advertising. MetaNet?s vision could reduce the cost of launching a new brand disruptively by enabling a revolution in the ease-of-launching new products and businesses. If deployed universally, it could enable a reduction of friction causing a dramatic rise in global productivity. Finally, as spam overtakes our Inboxes and Facebook updates, signal-to-noise ratio for electronic communication is dropping. This innovation is designed to improve the ability to target consumers intelligently, and thus, may be the seed for a new communications eco-system that could someday eliminate spam.