As a sell-side platform (SSP) that represents publishers, PubMatic is a key part of the advertising supply chain. The media marketplace is undergoing a significant transformation as marketers look for ways to reach target audiences while respecting consumer privacy.
“We’re seeing activation of data shift to the supply side as it’s closer to the source, in many cases,” said Kyle Dozeman, chief revenue officer for the Americas at sell-side platform PubMatic, in this conversation presented by Beet.TV. “Our focus has been on building tools that allow publishers and data owners to directly connect their data to media, and share that with the brands that they work with.”
Dozeman recently shared his insights about the changing media ecosystem with Adam Gerber, global chief media officer at Essence, a unit of WPP’s GroupM. The agency’s “Responsible Investment” framework aims to advance brand safety, data ethics, responsible journalism, sustainability and diversity, equity and inclusion.
A key challenge for marketers is finding ad inventory among smaller, independent publications that have relied on advertising revenue to finance their journalism. Dozeman said PubMatic has worked to help access that inventory.
“We use a lot of our partners in different parts of our business in ensuring material portions of our dollars are going to companies that have diverse leadership and strong foundations and principles around equity and inclusion,” he said. PubMatic “is leaning in with buyers who care about this, and helping them get more connected with diverse publishers.”
Dozeman and Gerber agreed that the digital advertising ecosystem needs to become more mindful about energy use. The computer servers that form the backbone of the digital ad marketplace consume significant amounts of energy.
“We are cognizant of that fact, and we’re going to start evaluating partners and our supply chain – and try to generate some good results,” Gerber said.
Advertisers also are demanding greater transparency in the digital ad marketplace, not only to ensure they’re reaching the right audiences, but also to avoid losses to ad fraud. Dozeman said PubMatic is focused on quality publisher partners that are reliable.
“We know that brands need complete confidence,” Dozeman said. “Some vendors catch things that others don’t. We want to make sure we’re honoring whatever a brand uses for their source of truth.”
This video is part of the Global Forum on Responsible Media produced by Beet.TV, GroupM with the 4A’s. This track on cross-screen measurement is sponsored by Nielsen. For more videos on this topic, visit this page.
The entire Forum can be watched on-demand here, and all videos from this project can be found here.
]]>But, in 2020, there are still some missing pieces of the puzzle.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Kyle Dozeman, VP of advertiser solutions for PubMatic’s Americas business, describes three innovations he says the industry is asking him for.
1. Identity: “The walled gardens have long had an advantage over the open web when it comes to identity,” Dozeman says. “We as an open internet have an opportunity to remove that advantage.”
2. CTV and OTT: “A lot of the benefits we’ve come to expect in programmatic and other formats – Fee transparency, log data access, the ability to bid what you want to bid – don’t yet exist in programmatic CTV.”
3. Bespoke technology: “Major buyers will want differentiation in their supply chain, and they won’t be able to obtain differentiation by employing, the same tools that all other buyers are employing. We’ve seen, and expect to continue to see, an increase in discussions around custom technology builds.”
Dozeman was speaking as players in the industry look to find better alignment with each other, after several years that had produced fragmentation and, in some quarters, even animosity.
He says: “The supply chain evolved from being a bunch of companies that and systems that were designed to sort of manage each other, to smaller groups of companies actively working together
“Alignment with other components or companies within that supply chain becomes the name of the game”.
How does a vendor do that? By reducing the number of companies it works with, by being clear about the role each one plays and by having shared objectives, Dozeman adds.
That is a recipe Dozeman says MediaMath, another ad-tech supplier, has got right with its Source initiative.
In October 2019, that company announced the new initiative would commit to:
Dozeman says: “MediaMath has done a really good job of sort of flipping that model and saying, ‘Let’s get a much smaller group of partners, all of which have a shared philosophy and development resources, so collectively we can do more, and let’s as a group set the right incentives and roles and responsibilities’.
“We’re really excited about this effort in general and, salute MediaMath for being such a strong leader and collaborator on this front.”
You are watching a segment from a Beet.TV series titled Programmatic Buying: Accountability & Transparency in Focus presented by MediaMath. For more videos from the series, 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.
]]>As the company’s platform sales VP Kyle Dozeman tells Beet.TV in this video interview:
“The first was the removal of our buy-side fees”
“The second was our transition to a first price auction.”
Earlier in February, PubMatic declared it would not charge advertisers any fees for transacting across its platform – something that had become a bugbear for buyers keen on full visibility for pricing models.
That followed its announcement that it would end the historic programmatic practice under which winning ad bidders would pay less than their bid price. This situation has been complicated by the emergence of header bidding, because inconsistency across auctions and lack of transparency into how each auction operates has created an environment where buyers do not have visibility into whether auctions are being closed at first- or second-price. So PubMatic said it would only operate the first-price model.
“We spent a lot of time listening to our buying community, and ultimately came to the conclusion that those steps not only provided transparency, but also a level of consistency for these buyers across their different supply platforms, and that that consistency allows them to focus more on growing programmatic media spend, and delivering great campaigns versus studying our business models, auctions and things like that,” Dozeman adds.
But the transparency game is not over.
“For us, the next big wave starts to get into ensuring that each bid request is appended with as much possible data as possible so that the marketer understands exactly what they’re buying.
“Adding things like viewability metrics, adding brand safety scores and fraud scores within the bid requests on an impression by impression basis, I think is allowing marketers to better understand at a nuanced level exactly what’s happening, and I think that’s where this all will go.”
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.
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