But a shocking new report published during the pandemic has given them even more reason to scrutinize programmatic ad-buying supply chains.
According to the report by ISBA, the trade body for UK advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and auditor PwC, 15% of advertiser spend could not be attributed, whilst publishers receive only 51% of advertiser spend on average.
The figures have been described as “mind-boggling” – especially several years after earlier industry reports first raised the problems around “ad tax” and transparency.
For Will Luttrell, it all points to the ongoing need for a supply chain clean-up.
“We are more busy now than we ever have been,” says the founder of Amino Payments, a company working to improve transparency.
Luttrell was previously the co-founder and CTO of Integral Ad Science (IAS), the advertising brand safety software vendor.
He founded Amino to “lift the shroud from the media supply chain and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse, making the entire industry more transparent and cost-effective”.
Accountability for each and every dollar spent on digital marketing is more important now than ever. We’re thrilled to partner with @integralads to provide advertisers with Total Visibility into the cost and quality of their media. https://t.co/8ewdT90Q2T
— Will Luttrell (@will_luttrell) April 29, 2020
But IAS and Amino were re-united this April, as the pair announced Total Visibility, an initiative through which IAS customers will get to benefit from Amino’s approach.
The aim is to show advertisers the true cost of qualified media by giving them both impression-level financial insights and media quality verification to optimize campaigns in real-time.
It employs a single tag that collects IAS data, supply path data and financial data, aiming to provide a more accurate cost of inventory and the best supply paths for viewable, safe ads.
In doing so, Total Visibility claims to save advertisers 10% to 15% on their media spend, by buying better inventory. The system is in use by Nestle and HP.
We are proud of our ongoing work with @Nestle, an innovator in digital media transparency.
Read more about how Amino fits into their Global Digital Media Center of Competencies initiative: https://t.co/m5rLb8OE5t
— Amino Payments (@aminopay) November 13, 2019
“We have seen strong value for both the buy side and the sell side. However, the buy side is currently our main customer target at the moment,” Luttrell says of the initiative.
“When buyers are willing to move money towards transparent supply paths, that’s when the industry moves.
Amino Payment’s feature set includes Lens, which records media spending in a digital ledger, and Pay, which uses “smart contract” technology to enforce agreements between parties.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Among the use cases cited for blockchain in ad-tech is improving transparency by making transactions supremely recordable and viewable in an authenticated ledger.
That is also the pitch from Amino Payments, a startup founded by the former CTO and co-founder of Integral Ad Science.
“After I left there, I started to explore blockchain technology,”Amino Payments CEO Will Luttrell
“It occurred to me that a lot of the concepts around supplied chain provenance and tracking transactions as they flow through different systems could be directly applied to some of the challenges I knew still were outstanding in the ad tech industry.”
Amino Payment’s feature set includes:
So how do they fit together, and why? That depends on whether you are a buyer or seller.
“When a big brand puts in $10 million into a large ad campaign, we’re going to give you complete view into where all that money went all the way down to the publishers,” Luttrell adds. “As a DSP and SSP resellers, they’re all taking their cuts that you’ll get to see where every penny that $10 million went and to make sure that it wound up where you thought it was supposed to go. From the sell side, we represent fast reconciliations and fast payments.”
It would be tempting to consider it too early for concrete deployment of what appears to remain a peripheral technology, still swirling from association with turbulent tokens and crypto coins.
But Luttrell claims to have made strides.
“We have six of the top 10 global programmatic spenders either live on the platform or in verbal ‘yeses’ or in legal right now,” he says. “Where the source of the money is, is really what drives a lot of adoption throughout the rest of the ecosystem.
“Likewise, we have huge publishers that are signed on as well as a pretty significant presence growing in the long tail because they’re running their own tests and seeing dollars being siphoned off to people representing them in the exchange environment when it’s not actually them.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“I think it’s going to have the effect of dramatically reducing hidden fees, hopefully eliminating them, and increasing the amount of spend from marketers that gets all the way to publishers,” O’Kelley says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Leadership Meeting of the Internet Advertising Bureau. “Trust means we have to provide transparency.”
Steps taken by AppNexus include publicly disclosing its “take rate” for its supply-side business, which it says is “by far the lowest in the industry.” It’s extending its transparency on take rates all the way through to the brand.
“So any brand who says ‘where did my money go through my DSP to AppNexus,’ we’ll tell you exactly how much the publisher made,” O’Kelley says.
Partners in this effort include Adobe and third-party auditor Amino Payments.
O’Kelley says the AppNexus DSP, called AppNexus Programmable Platform, is fully transparent for every fee.
“We should see publishers making more money, marketers seeing better outcomes and a dramatic reduction in the inefficient intermediaries that we’ve seen in this space for two decades now.”
He traces the path to opaque digital practices in part to the shift to audience buying in the last decade or so. Brands didn’t seem to care where their ads appeared as long as they were told they were targeting the right people.
That indifference has given way to extreme concern by brands large and small, most notably Procter & Gamble and Unilever, whose Chief Marketing Officer, Keith Weed, used the occasion of the IAB gathering to issue a public threat to pull spending from digital platforms.
“Imagine you’re a marketer. You think you’re buying relevant data but it turns out that’s fraud. Really what you’re spending this on is terrible for your brand and having no known outcome.” O’Kelley says.
In the not-to-distant future, he foresees brands reducing the breadth of inventory they’ll buy, working only with quality publishers “maybe one hop away. But this multiple hops isn’t going to work.” They will also reduce their purchases of third-party data “unless it comes directly from a source” and there will be “a lot fewer intermediaries in the space. I think it’s going to be amazing.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
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