WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY IS PROGRAMMATIC BUYING?
One of the first questions an organization needs to answer when adopting programmatic buying is who will lead its efforts. Typically the advocate for programmatic is a senior executive, most often at the director level or higher. While today, media buyers are the most common advocates for programmatic, many respondents to the Ad Age survey believe that this function will shift toward marketers as programmatic buying becomes a strategic investment affecting almost every element of a marketer’s job (Figure 3).Building the programmatic stack: A problem of plenty Much of the perceived complexity of programmatic buying and selling results from the large number of partners
that can make up an organization’s technology “stack,” including demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, yield management platforms, data management platforms, data providers, inventory sources, verification services, viewabilitysolutions, transactional systems and buy-side forecasting tools. “It would be wonderful to have a single holistic solution from ad call to ad serve, but for the moment we have to address each of these elements in a piecemeal fashion,” says Cohen of UM.
Further muddying the picture, these providers run the gamut, including overly narrow or undifferentiated tools, those unable to deliver promised results and true best-of-breed solutions struggling to stand out from the crowd.
VivaKi, the ad tech arm of Publicis Groupe, has created a centralized unit to oversee programmatic buying and provide centralized knowledge for all Publicis agencies. “We develop best practices and evaluate technology partners to make sure the ones we want to work with meet our standards. By identifying individual providers that are ‘VivaKi Verified,’ we can help simplify the programmatic landscape for Publicis agencies and their clients,” says VivaKi Global President of Data and Technology Domenic Venuto. “A key part of the agency’s role in programmatic is to help clients sort through the complexity to identify and stitch together the smartest, most advanced, highest quality solutions that deliver the right messages to the right people at the highest moment of receptivity.” In determining which providers merit the VivaKi Verified stamp, Venuto looks at criteria such as global scalability, brand protection functionality, viewability standards and media performance. “We weed out the bottom two-thirds of the industry and even then work with only a small percentage of those who pass our standards,” he says.
It’s not just advertisers dealing with this complexity. Publishers, too, are now faced with many decisions to make around what technology partners to use and how to efficiently segment their inventory across channels. “There’s the strategy piece and the execution piece,” says Vogel of About.com. “The strategy piece isn’t an issue—you put your inventory in the right places with the right rules and let the right people access it so it works in alignment with your broader sales strategy. The fear is that you’ll invest in the wrong tools or partners. Each publisher has its own needs, and different partners are good at different things. You have to identify the partners that make sense for the inventory you have.”
Given these considerations, it’s not surprising that buyers in the Ad Age survey tend to express a preference for working with a robust, unified platform (64.4%) rather than an array of individual niche vendors (35.6%) for purchasing mobile, video and display advertising.
How marketers are adopting programmatic
One of the first questions an organization needs to answer when adopting programmatic buying is who will lead its efforts. Typically the advocate for programmatic is a senior executive, most often at the director level or higher. While today, media buyers are the most common advocates for programmatic, many respondents to the Ad Age survey believe that this function will shift toward marketers as programmatic buying becomes a strategic investment affecting almost every element of a marketer’s job (Figure 3).Building the programmatic stack: A problem of plenty Much of the perceived complexity of programmatic buying and selling results from the large number of partners
that can make up an organization’s technology “stack,” including demand-side platforms, supply-side platforms, yield management platforms, data management platforms, data providers, inventory sources, verification services, viewabilitysolutions, transactional systems and buy-side forecasting tools. “It would be wonderful to have a single holistic solution from ad call to ad serve, but for the moment we have to address each of these elements in a piecemeal fashion,” says Cohen of UM.
Further muddying the picture, these providers run the gamut, including overly narrow or undifferentiated tools, those unable to deliver promised results and true best-of-breed solutions struggling to stand out from the crowd.
VivaKi, the ad tech arm of Publicis Groupe, has created a centralized unit to oversee programmatic buying and provide centralized knowledge for all Publicis agencies. “We develop best practices and evaluate technology partners to make sure the ones we want to work with meet our standards. By identifying individual providers that are ‘VivaKi Verified,’ we can help simplify the programmatic landscape for Publicis agencies and their clients,” says VivaKi Global President of Data and Technology Domenic Venuto. “A key part of the agency’s role in programmatic is to help clients sort through the complexity to identify and stitch together the smartest, most advanced, highest quality solutions that deliver the right messages to the right people at the highest moment of receptivity.” In determining which providers merit the VivaKi Verified stamp, Venuto looks at criteria such as global scalability, brand protection functionality, viewability standards and media performance. “We weed out the bottom two-thirds of the industry and even then work with only a small percentage of those who pass our standards,” he says.
It’s not just advertisers dealing with this complexity. Publishers, too, are now faced with many decisions to make around what technology partners to use and how to efficiently segment their inventory across channels. “There’s the strategy piece and the execution piece,” says Vogel of About.com. “The strategy piece isn’t an issue—you put your inventory in the right places with the right rules and let the right people access it so it works in alignment with your broader sales strategy. The fear is that you’ll invest in the wrong tools or partners. Each publisher has its own needs, and different partners are good at different things. You have to identify the partners that make sense for the inventory you have.”
Given these considerations, it’s not surprising that buyers in the Ad Age survey tend to express a preference for working with a robust, unified platform (64.4%) rather than an array of individual niche vendors (35.6%) for purchasing mobile, video and display advertising.
their sponsorship or direct sales negotiations in the future.
This trend contributes to the expansion of programmatic discussions earlier in the buying process. In the Ad Age survey, 41.5% of agencies and marketers indicated they believe that programmatic is top-of-mind when a media plan is being designed rather than after all buys are made (Figure 4).
Procter & Gamble Co., for example, made news earlier this year with its intention to buy 70% to 75% of its
U.S. digital media programmatically by the end of 2014,
an aggressive goal that will depend on the availability of premium inventory through programmatic buying. The company said it plans a similar push into programmatic for its mobile ad buying next year.
Marketers are also expanding programmatic beyond display into online video, television, multi-screen and
even offline media, using rich audience data to buy more effectively across channels. Still, this trend is in the early stages on both the buy and sell sides. About one in three marketers and publishers in the Ad Age survey reported using a programmatic approach for digital video or multichannel/multi-screen campaigns, while almost half
(48.2%) are using neither approach, most often because they either don’t perceive a demand or have yet to make it a priority.
Programmatic direct and other sell-side strategies
To meet marketers’ rising demand for top-tier placements via programmatic channels, a growing number of media publishers are taking a holistic view of their inventory and weaving programmatic throughout the sales process. High-quality inventory is now being made available through programmatic direct deals to advertisers, but media execs do cite the need for better forecasting tools to support this strategy.
This strategy also calls for organizational changes, and some publishers have assembled programmatic teams that work closely with their direct sales teams to coordinate the management of large programmatic buying budgets. Others have merged ad operations, programmatic and sales teams to streamline operations and meet buyer demands. However, the proportion of media companies taking a broader view of programmatic currently lags behind the expressed interest of marketers, suggesting the potential for competitive differentiation by publishers that look beyond remnant inventory (Figure 5).
In the past, advertisers have typically held the lion’s share of data and consumer insight. Programmatic is helping rebalance that, with publishers gaining the ability to use their own data more effectively and sell against the right audiences at fair prices.
Given programmatic platform capabilities and insights, many publishers are now enabling advertisers to access their inventory based on individual campaign objectives where
it makes the most sense. “As the largest online premium content publisher with large-scale and valuable audiences,
WHERE PROGRAMMATIC SELLING FITS IN THE SALES PROCESS
As part of your organization’s current selling process for digital advertising, when is programmatic made a part of the selling process?
as well as an integrated ad tech stack, we are evolving
the business of using our first-party data while helping advertisers understand they can get much more from their programmatic budgets than they are seeing today,” says Jason White, VP-programmatic revenue at CBS Interactive.
Time Inc. used the DoubleClick Ad Exchange to
launch the Time Inc. Global Exchange, giving advertisers programmatic access to premium ad inventory on Time, People, Sports Illustrated and InStyle, among others, across devices and platforms. A similar strategy is being used by the Local Media Consortium, which covers 800 daily newspapers and 200 local broadcast stations.
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“Sellers aren’t going to want to give up the control of their upfront model, with the ability to sell the majority of their inventory at once, but it’ll come. Why wouldn’t you want to make the whole process more efficient if you could on the digital side?” —Zach Friedman, VP-digital ad sales, FOX News Channel and FOX Business Network |
