Any brand that can move into these developing markets early will benefit from a first-mover opportunity to market to what will arguably be the biggest online consumer market. But we've all heard the stories about brands entering a new market with very little understanding of cultural norms; they end up being slapped by the law of unintended consequences.

Those consequences can be far from hilarious, like Chevy’s oft-cited data-free decision to bring its Nova brand to Spanish-speaking countries, where “no va” means “no go.” Now imagine bringing the complexity and speed of programmatic media buying, where decisions on where to place an ad  are made in milliseconds; missteps here are downright dangerous to the brand's credibility and future ability to establish trust in a new market.

Proximic, a Palo Alto-based data analysis company, has pioneered a fundamentally different approach to analyzing pages that is getting noticed by global brands looking for something adaptable to their needs. Proximic calls this Pattern Proximity, and this non-linguistic, non-semantic approach is quietly gaining the attention of brands and agencies who know what good data looks like. Most interestingly, Proximic is seeing a sudden sharp uptick in demand for its real-time, page-level data services for Japan (end of Q1) and China (mid Q2).

Proximic is a neutral data partner whose customers range from brands and their agencies to exchanges, DSPs and publishers, each looking to solve a very specific problem.  Whether it be a customized filter for targeting or brand protection based on the partner's own keywords or URLs, or an exchange looking to enhance its inventory quality, or a publisher looking to accelerate its content classification across its own sites, Proximic can help. It also helps the industry agree on a data currency for page level analysis.

Growth in programmatic media trading is happening at a  record pace. Russia is online, with companies such as Video International leading the way. Latin America is preparing for both the World Cup and Olympics in the next few years, so targeting Portuguese and Spanish-speaking audiences will be vital to expanding opportunities in that part of the world. The EU is seeing growth across all of its territories and APAC, especially Japan and China, shows strong interest in entering the space in 2013.

Taobao will be starting its  “TanX” exchange in 2013.  Proximic CEO Philipp Pieper delivered the keynote at its introductory conference, and Proximic was asked to be a part of TanX once its Chinese language services are completed in Q2. For more information on what's happening in China's RTB market go here: RTBChina.com (use Google Chrome if you are not a native speaker).

Programmatic is on the move and Proximic is  growing with it, building solid technology and real technology solutions.

I've found that out through my work with ZEDO, the San Francisco-based platform partner for publishers. ZEDO started with one person doing its social media almost two years ago: me. But the company is growing rapidly, and it has a globally distributed work force in many different time zones. This year, my challenge is to inspire my colleagues to help me with the social media so we CAN scale it better.

I'm fortunate, ZEDO is still relatively small -- about 250 employees. But suppose you are a public company, or even a very large private company with a distributed global work force? How will you control your brand? How do you respond to Twitter complaints in a manner that meets the expectations of customers who tweet out their troubles expecting someone to be there listening? And how do you use social media to help you attract talent?

Listening platforms like Radian 6 help. But they're just a beginning. After all, they're just listening and monitoring. They're not sharing information.

Ideally, we'd like to turn our best customers (our fans) into advocates or at least into customer service reps. SocialToaster purports to do this for fans, and forums do this online if you have the patience to consult them. But those are relatively minor efforts that   still don't solve the problem.

And most customers don't want to be bothered. They can't be depended on to be there when you need them, 24x7x365. Who else can help?

Maybe it's the people whose paychecks we sign.

Because of the scope and magnitude of the "Big Shift" to customer control from vendor control, we must engage and enlist every employee to help, whether  two  or 200,000. IBM figured this out a while ago, and has been singing this song as loudly as it can, including walking its talk by empowering its own employees. IBM even has created an enterprise platform for this.

But the platform is not the most important part: it's the education, engagement, and empowerment of the employees that's critical.

I had this discussion with Marcus Nelson, formerly of UserVoice and Salesforce, about 9 months ago, and I angel invested in the company he started to solve this problem: -- Addvocate. Addvocate is moving right along through its beta, but it is only able to work with companies that are already enlightened.

Most companies are not. First, someone must have the discussion with the C-suite. Why is it necessary (rather than just nice) to have employees who are empowered, with the ability and tools to respond socially? How do you engage those employees, incentivize them, and educate them so they can really help the company deliver the right messages at the right time with the right results?

As usual, I'll be the person who starts the discussion and takes the arrows. In the next couple of months, I'm going to speak to a large company that has a unique set of challenges in this area. And I plan to speak many more times, until I help complete the transition to a more social, responsive, business environment for all of us.

ZEDO believes, and we can back this up with metrics from both Nielsen and Comscore, that what's important is that an ad  gets viewed, or in our language,  is not a simple display ad, but a high impact format. 2013 will be the year of viewable impressions, a movement championed by the IAB and many other industry thought leaders. In truth, it makes perfect sense that no ad is effective, no matter what you pay for it, if it just isn't seen.

We were far out front of this movement with our InView Slider, which boasts 99% viewability month after month for the publishers  who use it. And the Slider isn't sold through anonymous network; it is often sold through direct sales, commanding far higher eCPMS.

Now, we're not saying the eCPM is an effective measurement for online advertising, and we are participating in efforts to come up with a better pricing model, especially for tablets and mobile, but right now it's the only model the industry has, and we're stuck with it. So we're committed to offering formats whose higher viewability and impact make advertisers  willing to pay more for them.

A good example of this is our full-screen video, in which an ad expands to fill the screen and audio begins when a viewer mouses over it, or our expandable  mouse-rollover ads. These ads command higher prices, because they get more attention.

Some of these formats are so innovative that they're not even on our site yet, but are only available to our customers and partners by scheduling a demo. I know every ad tech company says they will increase ROI, but how many of them have been around long enough to back their claims with numbers? As one of the veterans and thought leaders in the industry, we would like to re-introduce ourselves to you through our high impact formats and viewable impressions, as well as our standard ad server offerings.

We think it's not  the bidding methodology that gives brands and publishers more return on their investment, but the formats of the ads themselves and their propensity to be actually seen.

Related articles

• Publishers: Examine Your Content to Increase Revenues (zedo.com)
• Measuring viewable not served impressions: Industry impact , by @JoshSternberg (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Agencies: Become Accountable With Direct Pipe (zedo.com)
• A New Suite of Offerings From ZEDO (zedo.com)

Digging deeper, this goes to the publisher's own brand;  whether it is interested in brand ads or performance ads, whether it sees the future as higher CPM's for fewer ads, or whether it wants to sell out its entire inventory, even as remnant.

For premium publishers, a scarcity of inventory is not only acceptable, in some sense it's desirable. If they run out of inventory, they raise the price, and they actually accept fewer ads. In this sense, they're like old-time glossy magazines; you can only afford them if you are someone they want in the book.  Today, as I write, there is only one ad on the entire Huffington Post home page. These are the basic supply and demand principles: scarce supply drives up price.

Premium publishers are also moving quickly toward video. The single ad on today's Economist home page is a video.

And the single ad at the top of the page on Vogue is a rotator with three promos for the magazine and only one slide for the single advertiser on the home page, J.Crew.

For these new formats, premium publishers enjoy high CPMs, which is why they've "sacrificed" clutter. In point of fact, they're responding to readers, who will tolerate an ad or two, but not too many. And those ads are not performance ads -- they're brand ads that associate like brands (the publisher and the advertiser) with each other.

In my ASU class on the business and future of journalism, I polled my students on what they would like to see in advertising support for online publishers. Since they're the Millennials, they have strong preferences, and they want fewer, more interesting and relevant ads. In other words, they'll happily tolerate ads with good creative. I showed them ZEDO's new InviewSlider, and they actually thought it was cool!

On the other hand, non-premium publishers are still insisting on 100% fill rates. They will tolerate more ads, sold at lower CPM's. In general, they don't sell video, or any of the new high impact formats we are now introducing to such enthusiasm. And they are not looking for brand ads -- they're looking for ads that justify their rates.

We believe that the premium brands are what will keep digital media alive, and that advertisers want brand-safe placements that will help, not hurt their brands, and they're willing to pay for that.

In August alone, market research firm comScore found that 188 million Americans watched video online. The figure represents an all-time high,  and these users accessed 37.7 billion videos.

Americans also saw 9.5 billion video ads in the month. So video, which is clearly a popular medium for content will also be a popular medium for advertising. It will be the shot in the arm that the advertising business sorely needs.

The ability to air their TV spots online is a boon for brands like Samsung and even Nokia, whose web videos have gone viral. As well as hoping for ads to go viral, brands are also happy to pay for users to see their TV Ads. This will allow brands to do what they have always wanted to do: integrated marketing campaigns that reinforce the same messages in multiple channels. That’s the only way to get attention in the current noisy environment.

At ZEDO, our publishers are seeing substantially higher eCPMS from video ads, and that’s just the beginning. The completion rate for video ads is much higher than the click-through rate for banners, which now looks stale by comparison.

We think video ads, especially full-screen video, will soon be as effective for brands as TV spots. In fact, over the summer Dell ran a campaign that we watched very closely, because it was the first of its kind. In the campaign, Dell delivered :15 and :30 second spots cross-platform to consumers on connected TVs and mobile devices. The ads linked to Dell’s rich media mobile site. Group M and Joule, WPP’s mobile agency, reported a 68% lift in the time consumers spent on the Dell mobile site if they had seen the ads on more than one device.

One reason this hasn’t happened earlier has been the difficulty of re-compiling video ads for the multitude of mobile operating systems and devices being marketed today, but that problem has largely been solved. Now advertisers can upload their TV spots once to every mobile device.

You can imagine how much this means for brands who have budgetary, logistical and time constraints on video ad production. If you can produce your ad once and take it to several platforms, clearly there’s an incentive --both a marketing and a budgetary incentive -- to do so.