So says the founder of a programmatic ad consultancy that claims to have the “little black book” on ad-tech.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media, talks about the new practice of supply path optimization (SPO), through which ad buyers reduce or smoothe out kinks in their programmatic ad-buying to take greater control.
He says Jounce serves brands that have begun to take in-house many of the functions of programmatic ad-buying. But that’s where the problems come to light.
“Behind the DSP are dozens of different exchanges that are serving as marketplaces for executing these programmatic trades” Kane says.
“If the marketer really wants to have a clear line of sight into how their dollars are working, it’s too big and messy of a problem to transact through 50 exchanges. Consolidate down to a set of (eight) trusted partners who give scale, transparency and efficiency.”
New York-based Jounce serves clients including Pinterest, WebMD and RetailMeNot.
Its series of Little Black Books covers many of the key concepts and technologies at play in ad-tech.
For Kane, reducing the number of suppliers can serve supply path optimization.
“There are two types of transparency that come out of this consolidation effort,” he says:
“Supply path transparency helps me understand the technical chain of connections that deliver my bid to the final decisioning point in the publisher’s ad server.
“We have learned that supply path transparency output is much more impactful to helping marketers transact efficiently with publishers than the fee transparency component.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is according to a technology executive who has been watching the rise of SPO.
“As publishers started working with multiple SSPs, a savvy buyer could use a combination of data and research to really identify which of those SSPs, or paths to supply, was most effective for them and drive their buying towards that path,” says Kyle Dozeman, VP of advertiser solutions at PubMatic.
But Dozemand says the definition has become wider, now encompassing anything that an advertiser and agency is doing to better manage or improve their programmatic supply chain.
That includes consolidation and closer collaboration or joint innovation with SSPs.
SPO is useful because fragmentation is “terrible” for buyers, Dozeman adds.
“What I’m really talking about specifically is buying from the hundred or so SSPs that are activated by default within most of the major DSPs,” he says. “So, if you’re a buyer or an agency or advertiser and you’re buying on the a hundred or so SSPs, you really have no ability to manage or control or know what’s going on within that supply chain.”
That gives no information about fees or inventory quality. So SPO aims to “bring control back” to buyers.
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>And, in this video interview with Beet.TV, a company executive lifts the lid on how the organization is redefining its relationships with publishers and their supply-side platforms in order to do so.
Max Jaffe, managing partner and programmatic practice lead at GroupM, says the company is “consolidating whom it works with.
“We’ve been focused on consolidating those relationships (with exchanges) to have more meetings, more in-depth meetings, to get greater insight to what’s going on in the landscape, having more interesting innovation conversations,” he says.
That consolidation focuses on two main areas – selecting tools and processes to find the right path to a publisher, and understanding costs involved.
That is seeing a new, sharper focus being used when it comes to selecting supply-side platforms (SSPs) to work with.
Jaffe says GroupM wants a “deeper understanding” of “how their inventory is set up and prioritized in their ad server”.
“What we can really hope or strive for is that we can build much more strategic conversations with publishers and exchanges, but make sure it’s still operationally efficient for us to actually turn those into a reality on the buy side and for our clients,” he says.
“We have a trade-off of a lot of extra inefficient work in order to get the right path to an inventory.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That is certainly the case for Jenkintown, PA-based Goodway Group.
The company’s origins go back a century, to the day a 14-year-old errand boy decided to learn the printing trade.
Today, it operates a programmatic buying service and connects online activity to offline sales.
But, as it does so, Goodway is trying to balance power with simplicity.
“There are so many players right now, and so for us we’d love to see a more consolidated space where we have partners who can innovate with us – as opposed to having 70 to 90 exchanges vying for our buys across the DSPs that we buy on,” Amanda Martin, VP enterprise partnerships, Goodway Group, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
One way Goodway has been trying to exert control is through supply path optimization, an algorithm demand-side platforms (DSPs) use in order to streamline how they interact with supply-side platforms (SSPs).
“Five years ago we were just checking all of (the ad exchanges), and then the bids and impressions were going out to whomever they would go out to and wherever the path picked,” Martin says.
“But now we like to actually pick what path our bid goes to hit that inventory. What SSP site combination makes the most sense? What path has the best performance for us personally?
“Different brands or verticals tend to have success in different paths. There are so many details you can dig into. It allows us to add value as well on our side that may be a brand themselves couldn’t do. It really is about for us to infuse value into the system in the role that we play.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But a collection of new developments promises to mean ad land must continue to respond and evolve to the changing privacy landscape.
That is according to an executive from one of Dentsu Aegis Network’s data-driven ad agencies.
“Still, I think you see changes going on,” says AJ Kintner, Merkle M1 VP business development, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
He cites similar privacy regulation mooted for California and Vermont as changing the game – but it doesn’t end there.
“What happens if the cookie goes away?,” he asks. “We’re seeing a decrease of cookies in the space, Apple’s making a lot of changes with their policies.
“People are kind of a little bit worried that what we’re currently doing in optimization or targeting might change. So everyone’s kind of asking, ‘How are we going to fix it?’ And there’s not a lot of solutions right now.”
Around the industry, tech vendors are scrambling to offer that solution – combining multiple fragments of an individual’s identity, as laid by different digital devices, uniting them in to a singular whole.
Parly as a hedge against that, Kintner wants to see more direct deals done between publishers and ad buyers.
“(After the changes), IP addresses might be PII (personally-identifiable information),” Kintner says. “If that’s true, that’ll change a lot of how companies in the ecosystem work. I mean, device graphs are currently being built off of IP addresses across the board of many companies. So if that goes away and becomes a private PII, it could change a lot of the ecosystem.
“We hope the privacy (issue) doesn’t come out of nowhere and just stop a lot of what we’re doing in programmatic. That’s the worst case scenario, (that) we have to switch so fast to a cookie or an anonymous ID.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>After years in which they felt at the mercy of software platforms, more are now exerting more control than ever over how they find and buy ad inventory.
Case in point – Magna Global sets stringent requirements for the supply-side platforms (SSPs) it works with, and now wants to go beyond the supply-chain information historically provided to it by demand-side platforms.
“Even when a partner is telling you that they are transparent or that they’re supplying some transparency to you, it’s hard to get that at scale when you work with so many different partners,” confesses Jean Fitzpatrick, Magna Global marketplace development VP.
So Fitzpatrick is getting strict.
“When we look at SSPs … we ask them to declare a lot of information. We ask them about their partnerships with companies that can do verification. We ask them about how much inventory they have and what kind of inventory they have.”
But Magna Global is doing more than that. The agency is using an evolving variant of supply-path optimization (SPO), a method demand-side platforms (DSPs) use in order to streamline how they interact with supply-side platforms (SSPs).
“It means something different to the different groups within programmatic,” Fizpatrick adds. “For us, it’s taking a look at what the DSPs did and going a layer deeper … creating more control along the entire path than we may have had in the past.”
SPO has been around for a while, but Fitzpatrick says it is changing. “It’s really evolved and I think, at this point, for a lot of buyers, what it means more than anything is looking at those technology partners in the supply space and starting to consolidate those.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>For Jordan Linville, that means understanding the true nature of the outlets where people are really spending their media time.
“I’d say the biggest challenge I see now is actually understanding the attention of a user,” says Linville, PubMatic head of agency, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“We’ve got a lot of sites that are essentially out there … arbitrage by cheap clicks. (They) show as many ad impressions as possible. And sometimes they look good on a performance basis, but they’re not really giving a brand lift. They’re not really driving value.
“The next step is then understanding where are users spending their time and their attention, and where can we really drive value there. Because today it’s just all kind of looked at equally.”
Linville says, in the last two years, agencies and advertisers directly have reached out to PubMatic and other SSPs to better understand supply.
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>On this video interview with Beet.TV, Rahil Berani, Digitas North America VP programmatic, says his agency is having to respond to the changing dynamic by cutting the number of supply-side platforms (SSPs) it works with.
“With the obvious continued growth and evolution happening on the supply side, one of the things that’s become apparent is that multiple partners and players are kind of becoming duplicative in what they’re doing.
“So really now the agency side is starting to figure out, ‘Okay, who are the right partners in working towards getting the right inventory source and solutions for our advertisers?’. And what that comes with is this need to consolidate and make sure you’re not duplicating your efforts, and ultimately betting against yourself out in the marketplace.
“What that leads to is finding the right partners. Really, where are you getting most of that premium inventory source that you’re looking for? So that generally gives us an opportunity to find where to trim the fat.”
The shifting sands been Berani is trying to avoid a an ecosystem where the same kind of players rise to the top because they have a stranglehold on both the supply and demand sides, pricing-out competitors.
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>But transparency issues still remain on the publisher side of the industry, according to this agency executive.
“As programmatic has evolved, there has been tremendous inconsistency in how (ad) supply is delivered,” says Sean Muzzy, IPG’s Cadreon North America president, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The big opportunity there is to create more visibility for buyers and sellers, so that they know what’s fair price. When we’re trying to drive performance for clients … you need to have complete visibility of the supply chain.”
When the transparency outcry first rose to prominence, it was because some agencies stood accused of withholding clients’ media spend because they had struck discounted rates with publishers and failed to disclose them.
Muzzy said both the buy and sell sides are now beginning to use the same language and that consolidation is helping buyers to be able to hold open conversations with their suppliers.
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Noah Porter would welcome it – though the media agency executive would also do so cautiously.
“There are lots of players in this space and it can be very complex to wrap one’s head around, so consolidation helps with that,” says the 360i programmatic senior director, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The downside is, that takes away some of the buying power we have … it makes things a bit harder from a negotiation standpoint if there’s only one or two sources for a particular piece of supply.”
Porter was speaking with Beet.TV to give an overview of the evolution of programmatic ad trading over the last few years.
He says his advertisers’ demands have gone unchanged – they are thirsty for transparency and quality. But one tactic is rising up the agenda – programmatic guaranteed, through which an ad buyer an a publisher agree a fixed price on inventory if a publisher sends an advance device ID through a supply-side platform.
“Programmatic guaranteed is becoming something that is talked about more and more with myself and my colleagues,” Porter says. “There are challenges with that obviously, because, from a supply standpoint, there aren’t that many SSPs (supply-side platforms) who are making that capability available yet.
“And honestly, not all of the DSPs (demand-side platforms) have that capability as well, which is a challenge, -but that’s something that we’re pushing for as we go towards the future.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>“Header bidding” technology sought to solve all that – eliminating the “waterfall” through which publishers would entertain ad bids from different demand platforms sequentially, thus allowing them to entertain maximum prices in a single hit.
Now ad buyers can expect even more simplification, according to one agency exec who has been seeing moves afoot from the publishers community.
“What I’m really excited about when I talk to our various supply partners is there seems to be kind of a consensus that, by end of 2020, beginning of 2021, the vast majority of video inventory that’s accessible programmatically will move into a unified auction format,” says Ben Hovaness, Omnicom Media Group MD marketplace innovation and intelligence, in this video interview with Beet.TV
“It’s not necessarily going to be called ‘header bidding’, but the point is that all demand is being aggregated instantaneously into one auction. That really improves the yield mechanics for publishers, which means that it benefits them commercially to expose all this inventory programmatically.
“I think that’s going to be a huge shift and it’s going to have major implications for how we negotiate these PMP (private marketplace) deals, for example, and what the overall shape of the industry looks like. I’m optimistic that will drive investment further away from your old school digital insertion orders and even more volume into programmatic.”
Speaking further about ad auctions Hovaness also says his OMG is working with PubMatic, a publisher-side ad-tech supplier, to introduce a brand-new buying control – the ability for platforms to grant a rate benefit to certain buyers.
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>When it first reared its head, the automated ad trading model was more commonly thought of as a way to sell unsold inventory. Now that has changed, with new technologies offering ad buyers the ability to sell automatically from a smaller and more controlled group of publishers.
Still, at Horizon Media, the agency’s trading desk wants to combine “premium” with continuing to buy from open ad exchanges. So, how will Monica Capelan pull it off?
“Clients always want to be in the most premium areas that they can be against,” says the VP of Sales Planning for Horizon’s HX, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“So I think the more open conversations we have with SSPs and the more open conversations we have with optimizing those SSPs to make sure that we are in the best environment possible… I think that that’s really the next step for us when we’re working with these clients.”
When Capelan started four years ago, HX was just four people. Fast-forward, and the unit has now reached 45 – an indication, she says, of the growing zeal with which ad buyers want to conduct automatically.
And HX will continue automating through the typical systems with which programmatic has grown up.
“I would say 80% to 90% of our buys are open exchange,” Capelan adds. “We prefer to have the decisioning power in our hands. Certain channels like CTV (connected TV) where you can only engage in a PMP (private marketplace), that’s where we’ll have to beat PMP only.
“But, unless a client has a specific site or specific reason that they need to be executing on a specific site, we prefer open exchange buys.”
Capelan is encouraged to do so because verification partners and pre-bid solutions have made life easier.
Next up, she is hoping industry consolidation can reduce the number of supply-side platforms she has to work with.
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Now it wants to bypass some ad exchanges and deal directly with publishers.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Vin Paolozzi, Magna Global EVP innovation, explains that the unit needs to reduce the current number of exchanges it works with to “a much more digestible number”.
“Historically, we’ve purchased anywhere across about 70 different exchanges,” he says. “When you start to look at where inventory is being sourced from, the reality is, is you don’t need that many different connection points to get access to the inventory.
“And so we’re starting, first and foremost, with trying to minimize the number of exchanges that we’re going to work with because we think we can get closer to the publisher, which is most important to us over time.”
Magna Global once set a target of buying half of its advertising in automated fashion by 2016 – somewhat revolutionary at the time.
Of course, Paolozzi’s change doesn’t mean a return to manual buying. Today, publishers themselves are increasingly operating their own ad-tech platforms to open themselves to automated buying
Many brands now know the kinds of publishers they want to buy with, and don’t need to have full sight of the world of inventory.
The move won’t just mean changes for the publishers, it will also mean changes for the exchanges Magna continues to work with.
“For the first time, we’re actually putting real service agreements in place with exchanges, which we’ve never done in the past,” Paolozzi adds. “The reason for that is, looking for those who will give us the things that we need to better service our clients.
“Who’s going to help us understand the fees that are being taken out, what’s being used? We’re looking at who has the direct connections to the inventory sources, and minimizing kind of the reseller aspect of what’s happened in exchanges in the past.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
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