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Hot Topic: Transparency in Programmatic - Digiday Programmatic Summit Europe, 4/13/15
1. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating
Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
April 2015
Darren sharp – Head of Programmatic Trading
Darren.sharp@incisivemedia.com 020 7316 9264
Transparency in Programmatic
What can sellers do to help increase a
more transparent culture in
programmatic
2. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating2 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Agenda
• Brief background to what transparency
• What are the internal causes of
transparency within publishers
• New demands from sellers to be more
transparent
• What sellers can do to increase
transparency
3. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating3 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Background to Lack of Transparency
4. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating4 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
5. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating5 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
6. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating6 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
7. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating7 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
8. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating8 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Source AOL
9. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating9 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
10. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating10 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Price and Fee Transparency Across the Value Chain
11. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating11 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Bid Landscape Reporting
Only 10% of ad impressions have bid landscape as buyer networks “opted out” of revealing data. Including
Accordiant Media, Accuent, Amnet, AppNexus, AOL, Google AdWords, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis
Starcom, The Exchange Lab, Vivaki, Xaxis
12. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating12 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Block Or Parity Anonymous Inventory
13. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating13 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Transparency on Viewability
14. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating14 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Non Human Traffic
15. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating15 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Programmatic Reserve
Programmatic Reserved/Guarantee can provide a high level of transparency to both buyer and
seller:-
Buyer – exact placement, viewability, audience, context, impression volume
Seller – spend, costs, data leakage
16. Incisive (in-sy-siv) adj. mentally sharp; acute; clear and effective; cutting; penetrating16 Digital Publisher of the Year 2010 & 2013
Summary
• Transparency is an industry wide issue
• Buyers, sellers and ad tech companies need to work on
this together
• Sellers are expected to be more transparent while
buyers are being less transparent by hiding bid history
• Selling anonymously has a limited future in
programmatic
• We need to identify where are most valuable inventory
is and disclose this clearly in PMP deals.
• Programmatic reserved likely to help transparency
Good morning, I’m Darren Sharp, head of programmatic trading at Incisive Media.
Incisive Media is a business to business publisher, based in London, New York and Hong Kong, operating in markets such as investment, risk management, business technology, legal and insurance.
We broadly operate two business models for our websites, either primarily ad funded or subscription. All our sites though carry advertising, and are available programmatically.
In my presentation I am going to discuss transparency in programmatic, and the issues facing publishers and how we can work with sellers to be more transparent and hopefully remove some of the barriers that are creating issues today.
Transparency is such a wide topic to cover, especially on the “buyside” and the relationship between trading desks and their clients. Therefore unless they have a direct impact on publishers I won’t be covering these aspects in my presentation.
Many of the causes of transparency (for Incisive at least) come from the early days of programmatic, when it was primarily a remnant inventory platform.
Sellers were understandably very cautious about shouting to the world that their premium inventory could be bought at a fraction of their direct sold rates.
This was a massive concern at Incisive, since we are a specialist publisher, our rates typically quite high. We can’t afford for our clients to be accessing that inventory cheaply via the “back door”
This is personally one of my biggest challenges since direct sales teams often complain that programmatic is undercutting their direct deals or that they are losing out on direct business due to programmatic.
Trust is also a big factor
A recent study by infectious media found that 75% of brand marketers plan to increase their programmatic spend during the next year. However 65% cited lack of transparency in financials as a barrier to significantly increasing their spend.
For publishers at first glance, this wouldn’t appear to affect us. However what we need to be careful of is that our brands aren’t being used as the “trophy” within a programmatic campaigns, with the majority of the spend running on long tail sites at low CPMs.
We also need to make sure the PMP deals we do with trading desks don’t encourage this further, by guaranteeing access to premium inventory without any guarantees on spend.
In the past it was acceptable to trade either anonymously or “semi branded”, i.e. where the seller may be identified by company rather full site URL. Many of the major trading desks now demanding full transparency, including fully visible and correct URL in the bid request.
The days of selling by holding company or blind are going, buyers are simply not going to be confident putting their brand advertising into blind or semi blind buys
Many sellers are still using multiple SSPs to sell their inventory at different floor prices.
This creates potential conflicts where inventory can be bought cheaper on some platforms than others, and multiple bids on the same impression.
As sellers we have little transparency in what is happing in the background, which may favour one platform over another.
By keeping the things simple, we can restrict to a single bid, so buyers know that there one and only chance is the first bid and they can’t get it cheaper further down the funnel.
And finally the “elephant in the room”
TECHNOLOGY TAXES
AOL estimate that between £2.3 – £3.5bn (UK) will be lost on the multitude of ad technologies sitting between the advertiser and the publisher. This a technology tax, where as much as 58% of a client’s spend will be lost to mid-market feature-led companies.
Some of our buyers are saying that these taxes are especially problematic for premium publishers, where they are a percentage of a CPM rather than a flat fee.
The market needs to have a lot more transparency in fees across the value chain.
On both the buy and sell side, a lot of parties don’t know the costs in transacting. For example do you know the percentage your SSP is taking? (hopefully you do)
It is currently very difficult to compare rates due to charges.
One solution may be ability to report on non media costs and identify exactly where these are going to.
Some SSPs already separate out their commissions from net revenue to publishers, but with different SSPs reporting in different ways there is little consistency.
Bid landscape reporting to publishers provides a great insight into how buyers value inventory and the gap between that value and what they are actually paying
Analysing this data can provide opportunities to approach buyers for private marketplace deals, and provide more transparency to sellers how to price their inventory.
However many buyers, including many major agency trading desks are now hiding this data from sellers.
At Incisive we have seen a massive decrease in the past 12 months in number of impressions bid on with buyers disclosing bid history.
Major buyers now opting out include Accuen, Ament, AOL, OMD and Xaxis. These are the very same buyers requesting more transparency on the sell side.
When Incisive first started trading programmatically, we had a two tier price structure, one for “branded” and another for anonymously traded inventory.
Having a two price structure like this has the potential to create perception that there is quality to still be bought anonymously.
Everyone (virtually) sells programmatically today, don’t hide it. Using inventory controls such as pricing, advertiser blocking can be just as effective for avoiding channel conflict (and also generate higher CPMs and more revenue)
With the trend to full URL transparency, buyers are now able to optimise not only based on performance but on other key metrics including viewability.
When transacting with buyers, especially in PMP deals, we can be transparent using historical reporting to give buyers and idea of what to expect so that can value inventory accordingly.
As buyers we need to reassure buyers that the inventory they are buying programmatically is being seen by a human.
With various sources quoting “bot” traffic to be as high as 36% (ComScore) publishers can’t hide their head in the sand.
Non human traffic is a threat to both buyers and sellers alike. For premium publishers we shouldn’t consider us immune to NHT, so we should monitor and control where possible.
Tools such as “Traffic Scanner” from RocketFuel can identify the issues and help identify ways of fixing them.
At Incisive we are also looking at working with Integral Ad Science with the Pub Expert product, which will help us for forecast and evaluate inventory on elements such as viewability, ad fraud and brand safety.
This is important to publishers since if we don’t know where we have problems, we can’t do anything about them! We should also demand from our platform providers that they weed out the bad players.
And Finally
Reserve or “automated guaranteed” platforms are likely to have a huge part to play to increase transparency in the marketplace.
IDC projects that by 2018 that this will be the largest segment of programmatic. Equating to £3 billion in the UK alone.
Incisive Media currently works with 3 platforms providers in this market (Adlsot, BuySellAds and AdEye). We have taken an approach that we should list in these platforms in a way equal to direct sold campaigns.
Buyers know exactly what they are getting, such as contextual placement, positioning or audience segmentation.
As sellers we know exactly the margins being taken by the platform (they are agreed upfront), and buyers know exactly how much they are paying for a given impression.
For sellers, we also have insight into what an advertiser is planning to spend, which isn’t always clear with other forms of programmatic trading.
Transparency is an issue we need to consider as an industry.
We can’t solve this on our own, buyers, sellers, and ad tech providers need to work together to deliver the transparency the market is demanding.
By delivering this, we can all help deliver the trust, confidence and avoid the conflicts that could restrict growth.
Thank you for listening, if we have time I am open to answering any questions.