There was good news for media buyers today with the announcement that OpenX is moving aggressively to compete globally with Google’s DoubleClick AdEx and Right Media Exchange. OpenX is launching a new partnership in Japan with Dentsu, one of the top five ad agency and mar-coms companies in the world. 

Dentsu’s subsidiary, CCI (Cyber Communications, Inc.) already has a network of over 1,000 publishers in Japan together with some 400 ad agency clients. Japan represents the 2nd largest display ad marketplace after the USA, $7.4 billion in 2009, and is growing at over 40% a year. The new relationship means that OpenX now has marketing muscle and presence in what has traditionally been a very difficult marketplace. Since Japan has no single dominant ad exchange right now, OpenX is potentially well positioned well to take first-mover advantage.

In particular, OpenX’s announcement claims that, “OpenX Market Japan will enable publishers to maximize their ad revenue by selling their inventory via a powerful exchange where all classes of buyers compete for each impression in a real-time auction. The auction will be run for every single impression in real-time with a minimum "floor price" set by the publishers.”

This announcement follows one from March of this year when OpenX launched a partnership in Europe with telco giant Orange in order to offer a multi-lingual, multi-currency ad exchange on a pan-European basis. Europe is a market where display ads are still largely bought through publishers and ad networks, but the opportunity for OpenX lies in the fact that spending through ad exchanges in Europe is forecast to grow by 400% to $800 million a year by 2012.

OpenX has long been a good ad server solution for small publishers, and they have been moving fast over the last couple of years to develop new ad exchange technology and to move towards real-time bidding. With partnerships now in place with major players in both Europe and Japan, they have a real chance to challenge the burgeoning dominance of DoubleClick AdEx and Right Media.

For media buyers this means that there are going to be big opportunities to find low-cost inventory in fresh new markets, and that publishers willing to take on the challenge of producing multi-lingual offerings will be able to monetize effectively from early in the process. Competition is always good, but nowhere more so than in what is effectively a “market-makers” position.

Online marketing needs more relevancy and better targeting. Real-time ad exchanges offer the potential to provide both, but the benefits won’t outweigh the disadvantages unless there are multiple strong players competing with each other. Experience has shown that’s the only way to keep everyone honest so the new OpenX announcement has to be seen a good thing for the industry.