Okay, we all know the facts: walled gardens are eating the lunches of publishers and tech vendors. Whether or not that is actually the case, that is certainly the feeling by many and as a result, this sentiment is driving a movement of collaboration never seen before in the advertising industry.

Not only do walled gardens provide a cross-screen deterministic view of their users, but they also provide a rich set of first party data to target them against. This, you could argue, is the exact reason they are doing so well, because they drive traffic for publishers and ROI for advertisers. So why is there negativity around their growth from many in the market? Is it envy, is it fear, or is it for other justified reasons…

If you are not glued to the adtech trade press, it might help to have a quick overview of why walled gardens are perceived to be precarious partners for publishers, brands and Adtech vendors at the moment:

• Publishers – They face slowly being disintermediated from their readers, as more and more of their content is being consumed outside of their owned and operated controls.
• Adtech vendors – They will slowly lose the ability to manage holistic reach, frequency and attribution across their automated buys when each walled garden removes their support for the cookie or device ID, and migrates to their own proprietary cross-screen ID.
• CMO’s – They will struggle to extract post-impression intelligence from each vendor into their DMP’s. This restriction around data portability will hinder their ability to build informed and unified global programmatic buying strategies.

Okay, so how is the industry working together to ensure they are not completely disintermediated from their audiences or advertising budgets of yesteryear?

Publisher Alliances via Third Party Tech
A relatively common practice now for big publishers to form cooperatives. Many have formed these partnerships to bundle inventory and data within controlled environments that enable them to compete with walled gardens directly rather than in a fragmented way and amongst themselves for a smaller share of the budget.

Some of big ones that spring to mind include the following:

• The Pangaea Alliance – Collaborating publishers inc The Guardian, Reuters, FT, CNN, The Week and others. Historically made available to programmatic buyers through market leading supply-side platform The Rubicon Project.
• Symmachia – Publishers included at launch were Telegraph Media Group, Future, Dennis, ESI, Auto Trader and others. AppNexus were originally selected to power this alliance.
• LaPlace Media – One of the first in Europe to form and had at one point close to 250 publishers included and a 70 per cent reach of the French online population. This gives you some sense as to why publishers working collectively helps to pull budgets away from the walled gardens who leverage their scale and reach. LaPlace was originally powered by The Rubicon Project.
• J-PAD – Launched in 2016 with six of Japan’s premium publishers – AFPBB News, Forbes JAPAN, JBpress, Mediagene, Perform Group and Toyo Keizai. This alliance is powered by PubMatic.
• DELTA Publisher Alliance – Launched in 2016 with three of Japan’s leading publishers, Soccor King, J-CAST News and AUTO SPORT, who combined have a monthly reach of over 16m unique users. This is another alliance powered by The Rubicon Project.

There are many more formed and forming globally to harness their collectively reach.

Publisher Alliances via First Party Tech
In 2016, digital trade body Digital Content Next launched an ad marketplace called TrustX, in a bid to bring more transparency to buyers and sellers.

The ad exchange will allow bidders to buy ads on properties owned by 25 media companies, including ABC, Condé Nast, Hearst, NBCUniversal, the Washington Post, Meredith, ESPN, Vox Media and News Corp which owns The Wall Street Journal. It is yet to be seen if this will threaten legacy SSPs that have been servicing the participating publishers thus far, however, it is a welcomed move by many who have been claiming SSPs have been opaque in their fee structures for far too long.

According to the PR, TrustX participants are prepaying fees for the initial development and deployment costs of the exchange, with renowned adtech development shop IPONWEB selected to build the actual marketplace.

Digital ID Management Collaborations
This area is made up of two major players: DigiTrust and the AppNexus-led people-based ID consortium, which doesnt currently have a name.

To solve the multiple identifier challenge, DigiTrust is bringing together a cooperative of platforms and publishers to create a single ID for demand- and supply-side platforms, as well as data management platforms.

According to an interview published in September 2016 with their founder Jordan Mitchell, former vice president of product at The Rubicon Project, 10 publishers have committed to use the single ID, and another 35 will do so as long as the platforms buy in.

Post a quick glance at their site, the platforms are clearly buying in with visible support from many of the big adtech players, including Index Exchange, Infectious Media, SpotX, Rubicon, TURN, DataXu, and PubMatic.

Elsewhere, AppNexus, LiveRamp, MediaMath, Index Exchange, LiveIntent and Rocket Fuel have all agreed to create a standard framework that will enable people-based media buying for those looking to execute through programmatic pipes.

Many in the industry have said the founding partners are ideally placed to bring a single cross screen ID to market. Included there are sell side vendors, bidders, deterministic data owners and data on-boarders; what you could call The A Team of any ID management project required to meet such a challenge!

During the initial launch, Andrew Casale, president and chief executive of Index Exchange, said to The Drum that move would bring greater transparency to the industry.

“Creating an open, people-based identifier across industry leaders is a major opportunity – this changes the programmatic landscape for the better, as it exposes unified methods of people-based buying to the open web.”

To summarise, this has hopefully illustrated that despite the doom and gloom surrounding publishers and adtech in the press at the moment, innovation is rife and competitors are collaborating like never before in order to provide advertisers with open transparent alternatives and publishers, the ability to take back control of their audiences and yields.

 In the words of Maximus from one of my favourite movies Gladiator, “Whatever comes out of these gates, weve got a better chance of survival if we work together. Do you understand? If we stay together, we survive”

The post Talking Programmatic: United We Stand, Divided We Fall appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

If you know me, youll already be familiar with the industry jokes about me being obsessed with header bidding. To be fair, I am. I genuinely believe it will change – and is already changing – everything about the way a publisher sells, and the tactics applied by smart buyers to access said publishers inventory and their associated audiences.

Spoiler: this is not another piece about how header bidding works as I am assuming you all know the basics already (if you don’t – it means a publisher running a unified auction and calling all demand sources at the same time rather than the traditional sequential approach referred to as the waterfall). What follows is a quick overview of everything you need to know today in order to sound like an expert when next on stage, or in front of your clients.

Iteration One: Wrappers delight

All SSPs and exchanges (Rubicon, OpenX, PubMatic, Index et al) used to compete with each other for a position within a publisher’s ad server (typically DFP). If they managed to secure a higher place than their competitors, this gave them a USP when talking to buyers. Many also used to negotiate for the ability to sell PMPs exclusively – another major USP if these rights were secured. For the SSPs that did not secure a priority position, they would ordinarily work with the publisher at a lower priority and may have been clearing open exchange inventory. 

Fast forward to the age of header bidding, though, and publishers were removing tags on pages and opting to place SSP tags in their headers, thus completely flattening their waterfall and opting to call all SSPs they were working with at the same time before their ad server was being called.

What were Google offering to publishers at this stage?
Many claim header bidding was born out of a need to disintermediate the relationship between DFP and AdX, the Google-owned ad exchange. Google had made it very easy for a publisher to default to AdX in order to sell their inventory to programmatic buyers. Although fill was high due to the volume of buyers connected to Google, many claimed that eCPM was not as strong as it could have been with external competition competing and submitting a price before AdX had a chance to fill.

Google was quick to sense this growing wave of publisher sentiment and witnessed first-hand how many of their publishers were implementing independent header tags from 3rd parties and that was hindering their ability to win the auction. As a result, Google very quickly released a beta known as Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation (EBDA). For the first time, this enabled third-party SSPs that were included in the launch beta (Rubicon and Index) to compete at the same level as AdX when the dynamic allocation feature was selected by DFP publishers. We will return to Google later, but first…

Step forward the wrapper arms race
Publishers very quickly realised that running a unified auction was creating an incremental uplift in eCPM and fill. However, multiple Java tags in their headers was causing page latency, essentially kryptonite for publishers. In answer to this growing publisher concern, many SSPs developed their own proprietary containers, or ‘wrappers’, that a publisher could adopt and leverage in order to holistically manage all header tags and their time out windows with ease to reduce this latency.

Rather than any one SSP winning out when it came to market share adoption of their wrapper, an open-source wrapper called Prebid.js, born out of the AppNexus engineering camp, started to get real traction. In fact, Rubicon Project recently stated that that over 75 per cent of their publishers had adopted Prebid, and were now openly supporting the open-source wrapper rather than trying to disintermediate and selling a Rubicon equivalent – according to many, a smart play.

The reason publishers were choosing an open source wrapper was that it was perceived to be neutral by those who had to place their tags within it, and empowered publishers to build out bespoke and custom features that met their unique requirements around holistic yield management.

Iteration Two: Server- vs client-side

With the practice of header bidding now widely adopted across the majority of comScore top 100 publishers, many were slowly starting to realise there was a tipping point in the number of header tags they could place within their implemented wrappers, regardless of whether the wrapper was open source or proprietary.

The race to the server side
Publishers quickly realised that by removing the auction from the user’s page and moving to the server, they would not be limited to the number of participants they could run in the auction – and more importantly, their user would not feel the side effect of client-side header bidding, potential page latency.

Vendor interoperability for client-side header bidding is pretty strong at the moment. Most tier-one SSPs will sit within each others’ wrappers or an open-source wrapper like Prebid. Although it took some work to get all parties to agree, I think the fact this is a transparent environment where everybody can see and audit the auction dynamics meant that competing vendors are now more comfortable working with each other, as they have realised collaboration is a must to grow the market and to support their publishers…

However, server-side header bidding removes a lot of the transparency that is offered by client-side header bidding, and SSPs need to really trust that everybody is acting fairly and in the interests of the publisher. In English, when a publisher appoints a vendor to be their main server side header bidding partner, they are responsible for running the auction. However, nine times out of 10 they are also participating in the auction, hence a reluctance from many parties to migrate from client- (where they can see what happens in the wrapper) to server-side, where they become partially sighted.

The recent partnership between AppNexus and Index Exchange is a massive step forward as we are seeing competitors sharing log level information in order to create a fair and transparent server side demand ecosystem that will drive yield for their collective clients, the publishers.

However, there are some clear points of differences between client and server side implementations that need to be understood from both the sell and buy sides:

1. Server-to-serve (S2S) auctions can accommodate several hundred demand partners, versus 7-10 client-side.
2. Latency increases with the more demand partners added via a client-side implementation.
3. Cookie match rates fall between 55-90 per cent with S2S header bidding, according to AppNexus stats.

If an SSP has strong demand and does not want to participate in a S2S partnership due to transparency concerns, publishers may still want to keep their header tag client-side, as a demand partner with a reduced cookie match rate is a buyer massively disfranchised with your supply.

However, those with weaker demand may be asked to migrate to reduce what I am starting to refer to as a ‘space trash’. Like the defunct satellites that orbit the earth, publishers will remove header tags that clutter their wrappers, cause latency and do not drive any differentiated demand, and ask them to migrate to the server-side where they can be, at best, a filler to help drive bid density.

Step out of the shadows Amazon
With all of the debate in the press on the pros and cons of client versus server side, Amazon – from what felt like out of nowhere – announced last December its plans to offer publishers a cloud-based server-side header bidding solution. Many have questioned their ability to execute this model, but it is important to remember that Amazon already runs a very large cloud-based business in AWS, and has a lot of experience under its belt as a data-driven programmatic ad buyer.

It is yet to be seen who will be able to participate in this beta, but needless to say, it could prove a welcome boost to publishers yields and divide camps even further, as the utopia of vendor interoperability is tested daily in ad tech.

Okay, but what about Facebook?
Rather than building any type of header bidding product for publishers, Facebook is talking about making one of its strongest assets available to existing sell-side vendors who build header bidding products: its demand.

Facebook recently announced it is going to open up its Facebook Audience Network (FAN) demand to publishers who implement certain wrappers. It has reportedly certified Amazon Publisher Services, Index Exchange, Media.net, Sonobi, Sortable and AppNexus. This means that any publisher who has a client-side wrapper from these vendors can, in theory, now access mobile web demand from FAN buyers – a welcome revenue boost to many premium publishers who are struggling to ramp their mobile yields. Facebook are yet to announce their plans for publishers who have implemented a server-side header bidding solution.

Back to Google…
Late last month, there were reports in the industry press that Google would be ramping up its efforts around EBDA and opening up to additional demand partners and publishers. But most of what we read about header bidding today is not about mobile or video. Other than the recent Facebook announcement, most of what of what you have read or seen discussed on panels at events is likely focused around desktop. Mobile header bidding is technically different due to the nature of apps and video, and the player formats.

That said, the concept of a unified auction is beneficial to a publisher regardless of the format at the centre of the auction, and with a scarcity of video and demand at an all-time high, we are starting to see SSPs talking about their early successes in their video header beta tests.

To summarise: think smart and ask challenging questions. For example, I would want to know how header bidding vendors are building product for life beyond the cookie, client- or server- side.

The post Talking Programmatic: Everything You Need to Know About Header Bidding Today appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

With all the negativity and press that has recently surrounded programmatic, I felt compelled to write a piece that defended a component of the media industry I have been proud to be a part of for the last eight years.

Although I believe news organisations are right to expose flaws in the controls of media goliaths that deliver advertising in or around inappropriate content, I do not feel it is right to say that programmatic funds terrorism, and all other associated ills, with automated ad misplacements.

I have said it before and I will say it again: programmatic infrastructure refers to the pipes, not what flows between them. That is the choice of both seller and buyer. Think about a mobile operator; they provide the infrastructure, they don’t control the conversations or messages that flow between their contracted users.

So what are the main issues causing concern and strengthening the perception from media’s old guard that programmatic advertising is not working?

Well, putting fake news to one side, the most recent and high profile is of course YouTube. Unless you have been living in a cave, you will know what I am referring to. What I will say about this example is that it was a Google-owned DSP (DBM) pointing at a Google-owned inventory source (YouTube), and when you have one of the most advanced and sophisticated companies in the world who make self-driving cars and own the renowned AI division, Deep Mind, the press were well within their rights to ask to ask some difficult questions.

That said, many who had little or no understanding of programmatic execution were quick to assume this was a common practice. It is not. There is a lot of user-generated content on YouTube and this is reflected in the scale and price available to its advertisers. Google has stated that it is strengthening its controls and all will be good again. That said, it has still left many with concerns about the wider practices of automated buying and selling of media…

To compound concerns around brand safety and inventory quality, we have recently seen a large newspaper group, The Guardian, initiate legal proceeding against market-leading SSP, Rubicon Project, for buy-side fees that are claimed to have not been disclosed (Rubicon has publicly said it is countering these claims).

Collectively, this negativity and turbulence can look from the outside like things might just be easier if we just went back to fax machines and the three hour martini lunches on Charlotte Street.

However, if we take a step back and isolate several areas where the practise of programmatic is really helping the industry, there are a number of areas worth highlighting.

A helping hand for publishers
In a world where publishers’ readers are transient, programmatic technology can be used to help both identify and segment their audiences before they are made available to the buy side.  Many publishers are now seeing more traffic to their sites from mobile than desktop and without a ‘logged into’ environment, ad tech is increasingly being leveraged in order to help publishers understand who their users are and how they can ensure they can continue to communicate with them, and make it easy for advertisers to target. Not as easy as it sounds without a cookie, and in a mobile world of different operating systems…

Programmatic technology is also helping publishers slow the migration of ad spend to those with data-rich closed environments, the big walled gardens. Without insights generated via data management platforms and device graphs, contextual insights would be one of the main targeting parameters offered up by publishers, and buyers expecting user-level information would be forced to migrate ad spends elsewhere.

Many big premium publishers are also now involved in collective alliances with their competitors in order to fight the duopoly, and to capture incremental value for their inventory and audience. However, in order for these to work, they have to be underpinned by programmatic technology.

For the publishers that are not yet running a unified auction via header bidding and letting programmatic demand compete with their direct sold, many are starting to extract programmatic insights to inform the rate cards of their direct sold inventory. This is enabling them to capture incremental yield via dynamic CPMs that yesteryear would have been static and set quarterly or monthly.  

Finally, a practice that has been around for some time but is slowly building momentum once again is audience extension. Without programmatic technology, it would be impossible to extract this incremental revenue stream from the market, as audiences need to be identified and made available for targeting.

Precision, scale and automation
For the buy side, programmatic advertising enables advertisers and agencies to manage holistic reach, frequency and attribution across a multitude of different screens for the same campaign. This practice of precision ensures users are not bombarded with the same messages and creative that are irrelevant for the environment that they are in – think a heavy HTML5 ad for mobile when the user is not on wi-fi – and returns a better response for the advertiser.

Programmatic technology enables marketers to find audiences they did not know existed. Contextual relevancy was the main proxy for targeting yesteryear. Today, brands are finding incremental reach as the targeting parameters of demand side platforms are exposing areas of interests their audience display that were never historically deemed a factor.

Programmatic technology is now also enabling big brands to bring some of their automated media buying in house. DMP and DSP adoption and activation at the client level is an increasing trend, and empowering smart advertisers in ways that historically not been made possible.

As with all emerging technologies and practices, things will break and flaws will be discovered. Programmatic advertising is still very much in its early years of development, and both buyers and sellers have to be cognisant of that fact. Asking the right questions and understanding what happens beyond the managed IO or SaaS contract being signed will safeguard buyers, sellers and their brands or publications when they come under scrutiny.

The FSA in the UK has done a great job in asking people to understand the dynamics of the financial markets before they invest in, in order to ensure they remain protected. I think we as an industry need to arm both buy- and sell-side with knowledge, so they can mitigate against risks like opaque fees and inventory quality within the programmatic ecosystem.

To summarise, programmatic advertising is no more responsible for funding terrorism than the cashier at my local bank was for causing the credit crunch. Understand the vendors you work with, and leverage the information in the public domain to make informed decisions. Rome was not built in a day as they say!

The post Talking Programmatic: Its Time to Applaud, Not Boo, Programmatic Advertising appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

My column this week has been inspired by a conversation I had on Twitter with Paul Frampton, CEO and UK country manager of Havas Media Group. Paul was asking why so few ad tech vendors can differentiate and are often, at times, reluctant to lift the bonnet (or hood for my American friends) on their platforms to illustrate just how they work and make their money.

As we move full steam ahead into Ad Week Europe and the resulting social white noise it will generate, I wanted to have a focused look back before suggesting how we can look forward when it comes to buy-side vendor selection and adoption.

Many moons ago, I left Unanimis to follow a chap called Alex Rahaman, helping him launch a mobile DSP called StrikeAd. If we cast our minds back to late 2010/early 2011, mobile ad networks were still the default partners for many agencies and provided both great service and returns. However, in the same way that programmatic buying and selling had disrupted desktop digital several years prior, the same was about to happen in the mobile ecosystem.

My job at the time was to generate demand, either via IO’s or SaaS contracts with the agency trading desks. Although I was starting from a position of strength as I had good relationships with most of the agencies I was selling to, very few buyers trusted the concept of programmatic in mobile (again, this was a time when mobile SSP’s and exchanges were still getting ramped; think Nexage, MoPub and Smaato, etc.) and the narrative of migrating audiences had yet to gain real momentum.

This reluctance from the buy side to work with us via a managed or self-serve basis needed to be addressed, and, as a fledgling start-up, had to be done so quickly. We decided on a course of action that to many in the industry at the time was unheard of: we invited each of the senior heads of mobile into StrikeAd and ‘lifted the hood’.

We illustrated exactly where we bought the inventory from and explained that to run a managed buy, we would make a margin of ‘XYZ’, but provide a service layer that included optimization reporting and post campaign analysis etc. If they licensed our DSP via a SaaS contract, they would be charged ‘XYZ’ and expected to pull the levers at the ATD level themselves.

This exercise was the catalyst to both an increase in managed demand and ATD adoption almost overnight, as the value proposition of RTB over opaque ad network buying was clear, the programmatic technology explained and concerns around margins and non-disclosed fees mitigated by the transparency on business models we had offered.

Although the scenario of full disclosure above sounds like basics in today’s practices, according to many senior leads on the buy side, this it is still not happening.

So how did we end up here? At a time when venture capital firms were liquid and the appetite to win big on the next AdMeld or Invite Media was palpable, many backed ad tech companies that in hindsight transpired to be exit vehicles that could trade around the early confusion that surrounded programmatic, rather than being built to meet the needs of advertisers and their agencies.

During this time, there was also a perception that proprietary tech (UI/Bidder etc) was a vendor’s main USP, and if you were seen to be relying on any technology other than your own, this was perceived to be a weakness and prohibited many from lifting their hoods.

“There are no precedents for today’s data driven scenarios we are planning for, so collaboration and knowledge sharing are a must”

In hindsight, we should have recognised as an industry that a company with only several million in seed or series A funding was never going to have built a scaled programmatic infrastructure to support the querying and bidding across billions of impressions, and many were in fact leveraging third parties for help behind the scenes.

Fast forward to 2017 and there are many companies on the programmatic buy side that now recognise the value is not in trying to claim or even paying for ownership of back end infrastructure like bidders, but the intelligence you push into them to make informed decisions.

Open tech ecosystems such as AppNexus or development companies like the renowned IPONWEB have empowered vendors to realise that owning a blender (a crude analogy for two very sophisticated engineering companies) does not make their juice taste any better, but it is the ingredients that differentiate the quality and its health benefits. Today’s ingredients are data, bidding logic, cross-device intelligence and the application of machine learning (I won’t say AI), to name a few that enable vendors to create real value for their buy-side partners.

The good guys should always be quick to say they if they are built on top of companies such as AppNexus and IPONWEB, as both provide the educated procurement team with confidence around tech stability and scalability. No longer is third party support for commoditised functions such as bidding deemed a weakness, in the same way I don’t ask myself if the blending machines used at my local store to make my morning smoothie are leased or owned. I care about their ingredients and the output in the form of my drink, and therefore I choose them and not their competition next door.

Ok, but what else can be done to bring pricing transparency to agencies and their advertisers? The majority of OpenRTB vendors operate on a “second price” auction model, where the amount paid by the winning bidder will always be £0.01 more than the second highest bidder, but there any many senior industry figures in ad tech that are now talking about the benefits of moving from a second price to first price model. I am far from an auction dynamics expert but the three benefits I see for our industry moving to a first price standard are as follows:

1. Buyers (advertisers) have an increased chance of winning the auction. If bidding into an SSP today that is passing impressions via a header tag, the publisher wrapper will run a first price auction and take the highest winning second price passed from the SSP’s. Therefore, a buyer could win the SSP auction but fail to win the wrapper auction.
2. A publisher can make more money as they take the full price the advertiser is prepared to pay for their impression in the auction and not the highest second price pulled from the wrapper.
3. Moving to a first price could remove any non-transparent fees taken by either DSP or SSP as it would ensure there is no delta left on the table between first price submitted and the second price cleared. This means both buy and sell side capture the full benefit of their advertising spend, minus disclosed buy and sell side fees, bringing a much needed layer of commercial transparency and mitigating against a perceived ‘ad tech tax’.

Many vocal commentators still think consolidation is needed among buy-side tech vendors. Some are hoping this thinning may come post the GDPR, however agencies time and time again voice their frustrations around having to use multiple DSPs for a single campaign. I personally think we are going to see more DSPs, not fewer, as the race for ID management heats up and walled gardens close off access to third party bidders and keep their inventory or data held back for customers using their own data loaded DSP (think of YouTube’s supply for DBM customers only etc.).

With this in mind, for anybody in the process of trying to differentiate or evaluate new programmatic buy-side partners, I would recommend asking questions in the following areas:

• How much funding do they have? If still private, can they support your business as you scale? Securing series B or C funding is getting increasingly difficult for ‘me to’ vendors.
• Have they built their own technology? If not, what third parties are powering their back end? As discussed above, if they are using the right guys, they will be happy to tell you.
• Ask to see a product road map and get a better understanding of where their engineering and product teams are based. Do they have a clear path to handle GDPR and build features to support cross-device targeting, etc.?
• Ask where their inventory is coming from and request a list of SSPs and Exchanges they are connected to. Feel free to reach out to SSPs for vendor feedback too; most will be happy to let you know if a connected DSP is working with them rather than just listing their logo on PPT to secure demand.
• Understand their fee structure. How does it work and what levels of transparency are provided?
• Ask to visit their local office and meet with the product and engineering teams. Not the polished commercial guys, but the teams that can tell you why their platform can deliver tangible ROI via the application of data and technology. Remember our ingredients analogy: what are their ingredients?)

It could be a good idea as an industry to open source a buy- and sell-side RFP template. Enabling agencies and publisher to really get under the skin of the correct questions to be asking. There are no precedents for today’s data driven scenarios we are planning for, so collaboration and knowledge sharing are a must in order to smoke out the bad actors and to navigate programmatic away from the negative headlines it is currently generating.

To summarise, we know there are a lot of VC-backed, privately-owned buy-side ad tech vendors in market that at times can struggle to differentiate themselves. We know that agencies are under immense pressure around pricing, and opting for the cheapest ad tech vendor (managed or via SaaS) is not always the best approach.

Yesteryear, pricing could be driven down when dealing with a publisher or media owner directly as the quality of the print or TV ad would not be compromised. However, with programmatic technology you do often get what you pay for and with increased scrutiny around inventory quality and margin transparency, it is wise to select a buy-side partner based upon their ability to differentiate and offer a long-term partnership that enables them to make money so they can continue to build products and features that meet the agencies and their advertisers’ requirements.

The post Talking Programmatic: What to Ask a Buy-side Vendor appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

The programmatic ecosystem now dominates mobile marketing, but with ever-changing systems and terminology, many publishers are still struggling to make the technology work the best for them and their audience. Topics like header bidding and mobile monetisation are on everyone’s lips, but there’s confusion over what really works, and concerns over brand safety.

It’s with this in mind that Mobile Marketing Magazine are launching our first Programmatic for Publishers Summit, an event that will act as a forum to enable mobile publishers to bring their questions and concerns to the firms behind the platforms and channels they use.

Building off the success of last year’s Mobile Programmatic Summit, this event will be tailored to the needs of publishers, providing straight answers from experience voices within the industry, as well as practical advice from publishers who have found success in driving ad revenues up by embracing programmatic.

The event will be co-chaired by our editor David Murphy and programmatic specialist (and Mobile Marketing Magazine columnist) Paul Gubbins, with speakers including experts from SpotX and AddApptr.

“Having worked for a number of sell-side technologies, I’ve seen first-hand the opportunities and threats premium publishers are facing today,” said Paul Gubbins. “That said, I believe they are currently in the strongest position they have been in for some time due to chief marketing officers now asking their programmatic buying partners to value context as well as audience.”

Our summits are about creating a dialogue between our speakers, panellists and delegates that will help all attendees understand this key marketing technology. Between our expert speakers, our roundtable sessions and our panel debates, you are guaranteed to leave the event more confident and prepared for the future of mobile marketing.

If you’re interested in finding out more about our Programmatic for Publishers Summit, please email [email protected] for more details, and to discuss how the event can best serve your needs.

The post Introducing our Programmatic for Publishers Summit appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Having been involved in helping companies to train and transition their direct sales teams from an IO to programmatic view of the world, I wanted to share some thoughts on what I believe the sales teams of today and tomorrow may look like.

Firstly, I really don’t think a huge amount should or will change. There is still an underlying worry from many in the traditional camp that programmatic (or problem-matic as many used to chant at me on the sales floor as I evangelised automation) should be feared.

I understand where this fear comes from, as many associate it with autonomous AI, but that could not be further from the truth. Programmatic is merely plumbing, and in the same way a household could have a number of gas or electricity suppliers flowing through its connected pipes, the OpenRTB infrastructure can deal with a variety of ad requests and bid responses.

The point I am trying to illustrate is that each gas and electricity company in the UK still employs many sales people to articulate the benefits of their supply above and beyond their competitors; the fact it reaches the consumer’s house now at a flick of a switch rather than via horse and cart is irrelevant.

The way sales teams have been structured both at the publisher and ad network level are changing. For several years, there has been a clear line of distinction between the direct and programmatic teams. This was a logical partition as the IO guys and girls traded on their relationships and the programmatic whiz kids their ability to speak jargon at speed to their ATD counterparts.

However, as the agency model evolves and the isolated and incubated skillsets housed within the ATD model are dispersed into the wider holding companies in the form of programmatic buying units, it has become increasingly difficult to pin down the programmatic leads in any agency.

The reasons for this dispersal are various: disclosed versus no disclosed fees, agencies looking to upskill all teams in programmatic, etc., but it’s clear programmatic is now a language everyone is learning, and quickly. This has meant a lot of crossover for the sales teams of media owners or digital ad networks with duplicated conversations, endless meetings, and ambiguity around budget ownership and resulting commission payments.

Thus, we are starting to see a new type of sales force emerge.  Those that do not fear programmatic but embrace it. Those that are confident enough to talk to planners, buyers, PBU’s & ATD’s about the relevancy of their audience for the campaigns being planned and the points of access their audience. Those who know that contextual relevancy can be procured via the IO or on a guaranteed or biddable basis through OpenRTB pipes. The way publishers or ad networks legislate against channel conflict is dependent on their own strategy, but the smart ones are providing choice to their buy side partners rather than forcing their own agenda when it comes to execution.

There have been a number of terms cobbled together recently, some to make a mockery of the industry and some to justify the new world order. These range from “programanaged” and “hand sold programmatic” through to the “biddable IO”. Personally, I think they all describe the reality of today’s sales process pretty well. Relationships will sit at the heart of our industry for many years to come; I can’t think of a single audience that is unique to one publisher or social platform, therefore sales people will always be required to sell both environment and audience to those that plan & buy on behalf of advertisers.

The reason Cannes involves so many yacht parties, helicopter trips, private concerts from pop stars and lunches on private islands is because people buy from people. Programmatic technology is a wonderful thing and it has enabled our media industry to innovate way beyond anything I could have ever imagined back when I used to sell classified ads in Classic Tractor magazine. However, when it breaks or does not work in the ways expected, you need confidence in your personal relationships to get things fixed, and quickly.

If we look to the SSP world for evidence in my hypothesis above that people trump tech, you will see first-hand that header bidding has meant that many now have the same publishers, and at the same priorities, through their header tag implementations. What does this mean? Well, many are investing in their demand development teams to build stronger buy-side relationships, the same relationships many neglected when they had a priority position in the publisher’s waterfall to differentiate them.

To summarise, I am amazed at the number of senior commercial people I have met over the last several years that freely admit to never or rarely taking the time to read the ad tech trade press and then turn around and say, “Yeah, but this is all just jargon…”. Several years ago maybe, but today, if you are in digital sales and struggle to articulate the difference between programmatic and automated guaranteed, probabilistic versus deterministic, or what the GDPR is, you have just landed on a snake my friend, go back to the beginning…

There is always going to be a line in the sand between those that pull the levers in DSPs and man the ad servers. However, the sales person of today and tomorrow should not fear programmatic and automation, but learn about it, harness it and make sure you are the smartest person in the room. Remember, it’s just the pipes, and the only thing that can be replaced is the IO, not you!

The post Talking Programmatic: What a Sales Team Looks Like Now appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

After many years working for traditional premium publishers such as The Daily Telegraph, Thomson Reuters and City A.M., Paul helped to launch one of the first global mobile DSPs, StrikeAd. As an early advocate and champion of programmatic and data-driven buying, he has also spent time helping to transition established businesses to programmatic in his role as the first head of programmatic at Millennial Media, and working with the team at WEVE to help them launch their programmatic offering to the buy side.

More recently, Paul has held senior roles at ID management company AdBrain and leading supply side platforms such as The Rubicon Project, who work with a number of comScore Top 100 publishers to help facilitate both programmatic and automated buying models.

Paul will be discussing programmatic issues in a regular fortnightly column.

The post Introducing our New Columnist appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.

Following the recent article on the front page of The Times about big brands funding terrorism via their advertising; fake news winning US elections; Methbot apparently sucking up between $3-5m per day from unsuspecting advertisers buying inventory from SSPs and exchanges; and P&G’s Marc Pritchard publicly suggesting the supply chain is murky at best, programmatic buying finds itself in the limelight again for all the wrong reasons.

One of the main benefits of data-driven buying via demand side platforms (DSPs) is that buyers can find audiences at scale. What does this mean? Well, it means a DSP can match cookies or device IDs to originating impressions regardless of the environment of their origin (so long as the site or app of origin are not on the advertiser’s blacklist).

So how is this any different from yesteryear when I could call my favourite newspaper and book ads to run in their travel channel via an insertion order (IO)? Well, the volume of impressions available to me as an advertiser was limited – and was sold to me on a fixed CPM basis so I could not cherry-pick each impression – and we know the audience of said travel channel does not just look at this content all day; they also look at other channels and sites and engage with many mobile apps.

Limited traffic
OK, but how can a DSP help me then if you are telling me there is only a limited amount of traffic I can target in my desired travel channel of the premium newspaper publisher? Well, by feeding your selected DSP a combination of first, second and third party data and a blacklist, you empower it to find travel users across the web and app ecosystem.

This migration from insertion order to programmatic buying has had both pros and cons for premium publishers. The pros are that it opens up their inventory to incremental demand that their direct sales team could never have secured via a feet-on-the-street, IO-driven approach. It also enables smart publishers to interrogate the incoming programmatic data to inform their rate card and act as a leads list that their direct sales teams can mine to inform their larger strategic conversations around formats than cannot be pushed through OpenRTB pipes, this being the protocol most programmatic vendors follow when they build their platforms in order to encourage interoperability within the ecosystem.

The cons? Well, many premium publishers early on had their yields eroded by programmatic and channel conflict – the fact that advertisers were buying their inventory/audience for a lower CPM via RTB than their direct sales team sells it for was an area of concern for many. However, fast forward to 2017 and channel conflict is less of a concern as major SSPs and exchanges such as The Rubicon Project, Index Exchange and OpenX are no longer in iteration 1 and provide very powerful tools to publishers that enable them to manage things like dynamic floor pricing, advertiser controls and bid landscape insights.

Data leakage
The concerns are now around things like data leakage and how technology is empowering advertisers to find the same or similar audiences on other environments that have lower price floors. This has changed the balance of power from seller to buyer as the algorithmically-powered bidders licensed by buyers autonomously direct demand based upon audience and price. This dynamic has meant some premium publishers have had an uphill struggle on their hands to protect and grow their digital revenues in this new dawn of data-driven buying.

Net result? The machines have been trained to find audiences and at times can be blind to a 100-year old premium brand and instead favour an app that launched six months ago that has little or no contextually relevance for the advertiser they are buying for.

Although many buyers now leverage third party contextual data to ensure their DSPs are not only finding audience (Cookie or Device ID) but the environment their ad is served in is also contextually relevant, I think we are starting to see the pendulum swing back in favour of premium publishers that can provide both audience and context within a controlled, open and transparent environment.

Emerging models
Issues such as those raised by The Times and the current focus on things like fraud (Methbot et al) are all going to be catalysts that force the buy side to better understand the make-up of their supply partners.

New, emerging programmatic buying models, like Programmatic Guaranteed, are empowering the buy side to still transact via OpenRTB but are now enabling them to secure the same pricing and volume commitments from publishers they could have secured yesterday via the IO. This means they are no longer exposed to the unpredictable dynamics of biddable open and private exchange environments and can guarantee both price and volumes to the advertisers they are buying for – a big win for the industry to encourage more brand spend to transition from IO to programmatic.

I think we are going to see the debate of audience versus context play out a lot this year on the AdTech panel circuit. I am constantly involved in debates about what is premium in mobile and how we should collectively be valuing gaming and utility apps if audience can be quantified within these environments. Do we empower the DSPs to find an advertiser’s audience regardless of the environments (News, Gaming, Utility etc.) they originate from, or do we force the DSP to work within the pre-defined boundaries of a publisher whitelist as this is perceived to be the only way we can truly mitigate against things like fraud & fake news.

The bottom line is that buyers will always be looking for cost efficiencies and scale. However, premium publishers are now in a stronger position than ever before as CMOs start to ask more informed questions of their programmatic activation and supply partners. Expect the debate to continue, as that narrative at MWC this year will be around audience versus context for the many businesses that are built around the App ecosystem.

The post Talking Programmatic: Is it Time to Retrain the Machines? appeared first on Mobile Marketing Magazine.