But what if it could also move the needle on social responsibility?
In this video interview with Beet.TV, GroupM VP, Managing Partner, Global Head of Programmatic, explains how SPO is changing.
SPO has risen as more ad buyers have wanted a better handle on the kinds of inventory they are really buying, and how.
But now it’s more than that.
“The idea of inclusion in social responsibility, understanding what properties our clients and GroupM is really supporting, is really at the forefront of our minds and has been for a bit,” Jaffe says.
He says the first step is to focus around understanding all of the players within the path, their alignment and focus with buyer aims.
GroupM works with SSPs from the likes of Index Exchange, SpotX and PubMatic.
But SPO is evolving now to focus on more than just SSPs, Jaffe says, pointing to the importance of all three parties:
A growing number of marketers are coming to that conclusion.
In Beet.tv’s Responsible Media Global Forum with GroupM and the 4As, plus with IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and Pubmatic, a series of guest speakers wrestled with balancing the new capabilities with a drive for simplicity.
ANA CEO Bob Liodice said a major problem is “information asymmetry”, the “increasing level of opacity” over advertising data.
“This is very different from where we were 10 years ago, when we had such a relatively simple landscape,” he said.
“Marketers are receiving relatively less and less information for which to be able to make responsible media investment decisions. We have less to make those calls and less to be able to analyse the impact of those results.”
4A’s EVP for government relations Alison Pepper said agencies are having to live with the new regulated environment – but they deserve a consistent approach.
“I think we’re no longer in an environment where we can really truly rely on self-regulation to do what needs to happen to keep our industry thriving and vibrant,” she said. “I think we are at an inflexion point.
“We’re really going to have to regulate … at a national level so that we don’t see this bifurcation of different privacy regimes happen at the state level. Agencies have so many touchpoints into how they’re getting data and how they’re using data that I think agencies increasingly have a really strong interest in seeing one national standard. They really need uniformity.”
IBM Watson Advertising revenue head Jeremy Hlavacek said improvements are coming.
“It’s clearly time for improvement and reinvention. I’m encouraged by the increased transparency that we’re demonstrating on our platforms,” he said.
“And I’m encouraged by how we can take this ecosystem to the next level and have it be both data-driven and intelligent, but also consumer-friendly and privacy-safe.”
GroupM global head of programmatic Max Jaffe said agencies are also having to ensure responsible media buying in this complex environment.
“The idea of inclusion in the social responsibility and understanding what properties our clients in GroupM is really supporting is really at the forefront of our minds and has been for a bit,” Jaffe said.
“Understanding how (players’) alignment and what their focus is on these types of issues and topics is really important.”
The considerations keep coming, however, as 4A’s chief operating officer Ashwini Karandikar says the drive to guarantee the provenance of ad inventory remains important.
“In the past, the notion of cleaning up supply was mainly restricted to programmatic media,” Karandikar said.
“At this point, there is so much programmatic guaranteed buyers that are already in place across all media types, across television, across audio, across just standard digital properties that are applying these same principles in terms of how you plan, buy, optimise, analyse, and go back and feed all this data back into your next planning cycle is possible for all media types.”
It all boils down to a need to balance two key pillars – performance and responsibility – according to MediaMath chief partnerships officer Laurent Cordier.
“We should aim (to) make programmatic performing, make programmatic transparent, make programmatic valuable,” Cordier said.
“The second side is, ‘What’s your responsibility, how do you see your responsibility or your role in continuing to favour or flourishing an open ecosystem?'”
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.
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