Shani Higgins on Programmatic Selling in the Era of Fragmentation

One would think the automation that comes with programmatic buying and selling would make the lives of publishers pretty simple by speeding up the ad sales process selling more inventory and eliminating human mistakes But one would be dead wrongThese days a large portion of marketersamp8217 digital spending moves through a multitude of automated and semiautomated buyside platforms technologies and managed services Sellers ie publishers must scramble to support these disparate platforms if they want to get the highest value for each advertising impressionamp160 This automation has brought an incredible amount of fragmentation and both sides of the auction are buried in complexityIn order to reach marketing objectives buyers divvy up their budget and employ multiplatform strategies to give themselves the best chance of success Taking full advantage of the continually innovating marketplace buyers pick a handful of platform partners to begin working with rotate off the lowest performing partners and then bring in another group to test and optimize In other words almost nothing about programmatic buying and selling remains the same week in and week outAfter optimizing within and among platforms buyers often work with optimized data segments across platform partners to meet the scale needs of the campaign Each player brings their own approach as to how they segment and target audiencesOn top of this buyers are constantly trying out new technologies data segments and partners to better hit their marketing goals It is kind of like looking for the repeat patterns in a kaleidoscopeamp8220The many partners at each stage of a campaignamp8217s execution are needed for their individual purposesamp8221 Jim Caruso Vice President of Strategy at Varick Media has said amp8220This vast array of partners continue to cause fragmentation and requires the expertise to be able to constantly survey and weigh the value of partners across the landscapequotFragmentation of demand worsens with source and domain whitelists sampling optimization filtering frequency capping access to exchanges within exchanges and the list goes onamp160 Itamp8217s almost impossible for a publisher to truly get every impression exposed to every viable advertiser through the myriad of settings restrictions and business rules that buyers set up across systems and partnersTo maximize access to budgets publishers must work with multiple partners needing to be everywhere all the timeamp160Welcome to the migraine publishers face when trying to stitch together the disparate but necessary solutionsamp160When working with multiple partners publishers are faced with high internal management costs in time and resources needed to implement and maintain multiple integrationsamp160 The pain of accessing and consolidating reporting much less setting and managing blocks floors and ad quality parameters across the multiple partners can be a major deterrent to adding additional valuable partnerships to their mixSell side platforms were meant to solve this issue but most are far from neutral They provide the tech but also the marketplace with the majority of their income coming from marketplace commissionsamp160 Itamp8217s in their best interest to make their own marketplace stronger and to not level the playing field for their competitionWhen they do integrate other marketplaces publishers feel the commission hit twice or more depending on how many partners are nested within each other Marketplace platforms also cater to both the sell and buy sides limiting their ability to build competitive feature sets for one side over the otherAs more advertising budgets move to programmatic buying and innovation and data improve performance for both sides a multipartner strategy only grows in importance To mitigate the headaches of a multipartner strategy the industry will need standardization to help partners work better together and transparency to minimize the inefficiencies and complexity publishers face Additionally tools that stay sell side focused and remain neutral to different buying platforms will thrive as publishers make big bets in programmaticThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage management or associated bloggers

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Shani Higgins on Programmatic Selling in the Era of Fragmentation

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