After a recession at the beginning of the pandemic, it began to recover as early as May last year, when locked-in users completely transferred all their shopping, entertainment and other activities to the digital world.
Today, third-party tracking cookies are living their last days, regulatory requirements are getting tougher, and new initiatives are emerging to strengthen the protection of personal data at the level of operating systems and browsers. Against this background, programmatic advertising got a chance to demonstrate to market participants their capabilities to increase efficiency and profitability.
In this new cookie-free world, publishers can use their own data to better understand the existing context and users and understand the value of their inventory. This way they can optimize their ad campaigns and achieve better results.
We discussed with Wendy Chou (Wenda Zhou), head of products for publishers in the company IPONWEB , the current state of affairs in the sphere of programmatic-advertising - from innovative approaches to optimize titles ( The headers ) during the sales slump to influence deduplication auctions, traffic shaping ( traffic shaping ) and inventory supply chain optimization ( SPO: supply path optimization ).
Gavin Dunaway: Advertising spending is still very far from what it was before the pandemic. What are some simple headline optimization tricks in your opinion that will help publishers get the most bang for their buck?
Wenda Zhou: There is a simple and effective way for a publisher to get the most out of a headline. It is necessary to achieve optimal settings for ad slots: they must combine a high level of viewability with good page quality indicators, and at the same time, bidders must have time to pass the response back to the wrapper within a given timeout window .
This can be achieved, among other things, by dividing individual advertising slots into groups and making separate calls for advertising partners based on the position of the advertising slot on the page. For example, calls to the slots at the top of the page must be made first with a tight response time limit, because advertisers have very little time for this block before the user scrolls down the page. For slots in the middle or at the bottom of the page, the response time requirements are not so stringent, so it makes sense for them to send a separate request with a longer timeout. Publishers who send one request for all slots on the page are actually missing out on some revenue.
GD: Has the programmatic advertising industry really been heavily impacted by auction deduplication, much like The Trade Desk's demands? Will other DSPs (Demand Side Platform) follow suit?
VCh: In short, no. The problem of duplicate traffic (and efforts to minimize it) first emerged about three years ago when it was about duplication from a single source. It was generally resolved with minimal consequences for the industry. Recently, duplicate traffic has been evaluated on the buyer's side from two sides: for a large number of supply sources (offering the same impression from several SSP [ Supply Side Platform - platforms on the supply side]); for single source related partnerships such as Google Open Bidding ( OB ) and Amazon Transparent Ad Marketplace ( TAM ). The Trade Desk's
recent announcement dealt with a second case. Its essence is that one source should not try to simultaneously monetize the same impressions both through a direct channel to the DSP and through other exchange networks. The SSP must select the preferred channel for each source of purchase and offer DSP impressions only through that selected channel (and this is not necessarily the shortest channel).
Of the two types of duplication available, this one is easier to identify and prevent. Considering that the two most striking examples of this type of duplication are work through OB and TAM ( Google and Amazon ), it is unlikely that other DSPs will manage to take a similar place in the market. While in theory The Trade Desk could benefit from reduced duplication at the expense of lower hardware and wiretap costs, we are not aware of any noticeable changes in the market. Although, it is possible that some SSPs were more influenced by this than others.
The trade will be much more affected by solving the duplication problem from multiple sources if (or when) the DSPs find a way to actually solve it. If a DSP chooses to narrow the offer interaction down to a single SSP, it could cause serious scaling and execution issues, and sourcing choices would be reduced to a few clear winners.
GD: How is traffic shapinginfluences the monetization of publishers (and the activity of buyers)?
VC: Publishers have become more selective in their choice of partners on the demand side. Many have started to turn off SSPs, which are not generating meaningful and growing income. Traffic shaping has become for SSP one of the ways to secure a place in the headline of the publisher due to the priority communication channel with it, in order to then concentrate on those of the available advertising resources that provide a higher percentage of completed deals. On the buyer's side, DSPs have become more demanding when choosing the most profitable purchasing channels for their advertisers with the optimal set of advertising resources and cost structure.
Many DSPs have added traffic filtering to their purchasing algorithms or moved advertising purchasing to private marketplaces ( PMP: Private Ad Exchange / Marketplace ) in order to get more direct access to the publisher's advertising resources. According to our observations, traffic shaping is used for those types of ad resources that are not limited in terms of supply, such as Internet resources for PCs and mobile devices. At the same time, there were no changes for advertising resources intended for display on a large screen, for example, video for TVs with Internet access ( CTV: Connected TV ). Traffic shaping, as well as inventory supply chain optimization(SPO) is a way for publishers to start with customers, i.e. with agencies and DSPs, dialogue on deepening partnerships, promising added value to both parties by facilitating access to premium procurement while maximizing transparency and reducing costs.
GD: SPO - rescue for programmatic advertising or destruction of the ecosystem?
HF:The opinion about the usefulness of SPO and its value for the ecosystem very much depends on who you ask this question. Those recipient party representatives who have been pushed aside by agency buyers or DSPs who use machine learning purchasing models to determine the most profitable channel to access ad resources will say that it would be better without an SPO. However, the SPO's goal is to heal the ecosystem through the creation of transparent and efficient channels of access to quality media resources. No risks of fraud and damage to brand reputation.
From this point of view, SPO appears to be beneficial to all players generating independent value within the supply chain. For agencies, this means working closely with a variety of DSPs, SSPs and publishers to find purchasing channels that provide transparency, efficiency and confidentiality, ads.txt compliance and privacy requirements, and safeguard brand reputation - and give them a competitive edge over other buyers. ...
Publishers should consider SPOs as an opportunity to inform their buying partners about their preferred purchasing channels, that is, channels that allow them to recoup the costs of operating media resources and at the same time potentially carry minimal financial risks.... In this case, the SPO is unlikely to become the messiah for programmatic advertising, but it will help to reshape the market, make it the center of real value creation and give buyers and sellers a sense of balance and control.
GD: The open ecosystem of programmatic advertising is increasingly acquiring the features of a closed one. What can be done to reverse this trend? Is the idea of a second growth stage just a pipe dream?
HF: While programmatic advertising has yet to reach its full potential, it still works within the data marketplace. And data is the blood of closed ecosystems, and if we really need effective competition within the framework of the open Internet (which stimulates the second stage of the growth of the programmatic advertising market), then agencies, brands and publishers should be able to use closed data in trade within the framework of a system that provides data confidentiality provided (fairly) by new regulatory restrictions. The main thing here is to solve the identification problem ( ID), because in the existing system, identification plays a key role both from the point of view of the business model of independent publishers, and to provide an opportunity for brands and agencies to independently track and evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign.
Considering how quickly the rules of open RTB trading ( RTB: Real-Time Bidding) and how quickly very complex ad trading systems grew on these rules, there is no doubt that the identification problem will be solved. However, this time around, the drive to find a solution that meets the needs of the online advertising industry (as well as the growing calls for consumer privacy) must be collective and rooted in the belief that the open Internet must remain free and rely on advertisements from all market players, not limited circle of persons.
DG: Third-party tracking cookies are living their last days. What alternative technologies does IPONWEB rely on?
HF:We are actively exploring a variety of solutions across all of our business projects, including BidSwitch and MediaGrid, as well as engaging with industry associations such as IAB's Rearc Project and the World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C: World Wide Web Consortium ). It is our common goal to work together to find all possible solutions and identify the best ones to ensure privacy and user accountability.
Some of these solutions include: use of internal cookies or a unique identifier at the publisher level, contextual targeting, targeting / tracking with user consent, parsing of trade and user tracking information in anonymized form without the possibility of personal binding, etc.
Gavin Dunaway is the Chief Editor of AdMonsters, he is responsible for all content on the site, as well as setting the agenda for conferences such as the Publisher Forum and Ops.