It's been a hectic few months in the ad & martech sector so I wanted to share a brief overview of some of the things that have caught my eye..
Dmexco
Off the bat, Dmexco is not going anywhere. It felt just as big this year as it has ever been. Ok, there were fewer agencies in attendance but i feel that is more a reflection of the day to day pressures they are under rather than the event no longer being relevant for them. That said, the consultancies were there in force and their stands sandwiched between SSPs, DMP’s and DSPs really illustrated to me their intent to invest & invade the activation space.. Another observation is that mobile point solutions seem to be back in a big way…. 12 months ago the concept of a mobile only DSP/SSP felt a little dated as all big display vendors shouted from the rooftops about their ability to be screen agnostic…. Fast forward 12 months and it felt many had abandoned the complexities of mobile to double down their R&D budgets on the bigger prize, OTT. As a result, Dmexco was awash with a mixture of mobile first CDP’s, DSPs & SSP’s that were all servicing the demand of partners that were struggling to get the same features and performance from the big desktop MadTech vendors as they chased their utopias of owning OTT.
Key soundbites that have caught my attention recently?
AppNexus pulling out of the advertiser ID consortium. It makes perfect sense to me as to why they would want to focus their internal engineering resources on the integration with their new owner AT&T but it is sad to see what looks like the gradual demise of a really important project for the industry. I have been saying now to anybody who will listen for the last several years, what happens when brands and their agencies want to manage the basic foundations of media planning & buying in 12/24 months? I.E how will reach, frequency and attribution be measured if each walled garden has deprecated the cookie & device ID in favour for their own screen agnostic identifier? The industry is racing towards being partially sighted and opticians are far and few between in the media sector to address this growing concern..
One idea that i know sounds bonkers that I feel may get traction in the future is a JV between each of the biggest walled gardens. Hear me out… If global CMO’s are today standing up on stages around the world asking for supply chain transparency, how long will it be before they stand on the same stages asking for better infrastructure to support data portability when it comes to ID management? Will we ever see a time when each of the walled gardens create an ID clearing house that enables brands and their agencies to better manage reach, frequency and attribution as their customers jump from one sandbox to the next? Bottom line, it is in everybody's interest to ensure agencies have holistic visibility on ID’s as no one single player owns 100% of consumers time, yet!
If there is not an ID JV from the walled gardens then who? We know many of the agencies have an appetite to create internal ID’s but with the high volume of accounts won & lost at the moment, will clients get to keep this information or will it be proprietary to the holding cos? What involvement will the likes of the IAB’s or other governing bodies such as the AOP be when it comes to identity? We have seen the IAB Tech lab in the US recently acquire the DigiTrust and this has been a positive move to try and create some type of framework… Without an open ID, the walls for all will just get higher so expect to see a continued momentum from many to make this work.
AppLovin buying MAX (Context, AppLovin valued at $2b, MAX raised $3.5m seed)
For many, this news may have passed by, however, i think it is a pretty big story. Why? Well, we know that advertising where consumers are increasingly spending their time is difficult, and with moves from the likes of Apple around their ITP feature making it even more difficult to run targeted ads on Safari, buyers are going to increasingly find the App ecosystem once deemed the apocalyptic world of spray & pray CPI activity a pretty strong environment for their brand $, after all, Apps still support a deterministic identifier in the device ID & often sit within the tightly controlled environments of the App stores.. As this increase of ad budgets slowly moves away from mWeb and into App, developers are going to find themselves with a massive increase in demand for their inventory. Enter header bidding….. Yes, i am aware there is no header in an App but the concept of the unified auction still applies. The reason this will be big business in App is due to the fact many developers still have a multitude of Ad Nets and mediation partners all set up in waterfalls, very few have until now been able to run a true unified auction of their demand. This is where AppLovin have made very strategic move and bought a company (FYI Max was founded by a chap called Jim Payne that was also behind MoPub & Metamarkets) they can bolt onto their already well adopted SDK and instantly offer their publishers a header auction feature…. If you are in any doubt that this will be bigger in App than desktop, just look at the PR released recently from many desktop SSP’s talking about their in App features…. That said, many of these legacy desktop vendors chasing in App header $ face a big struggle as very few have scaled SDKs.
It sounds like the industry is running with the feature name of ‘parallel bidding’ when it comes to in App unified auctions, expect to hear this term a lot over the next 12/24 months...
Open Data Initiative
A JV between Adobe, Microsoft & SAP to support data portability & a single comprehensive view of data. This has just broken as I am writing this post but it sounds like a really good collaboration and mirrors other JV’s we are seeing in the market in many areas such as ID management (IAB TechLab and AIC) and publishing, think Ozone & The Verified Marketplace by Unruly. The European Broadcaster Exchange (EBX) is another great example of collaboration we are seeing play out as companies look to realign their competitive sets to face new headwinds from walled vendors.
The flight to programmatic guaranteed..
For several years now agencies have made very public statements of intent to become 100% programmatic. However, many are still not there yet and this is through no fault of their own but the programmatic buying model for them to do so has not really existed.
At one point, it looked like Automated Guaranteed may help them to get there but this was never really a programmatic solution, it was more a workflow automation tool and one we rarely hear about anymore now PG models have emerged and support all AG features with the added bonus of being transacted via the OpenRTB protocol so one can implement both impression level buying and data matching strategies.
As more buy and sell side vendors roll out their beta PG offerings expect this to be the catalyst that really enables agencies to migrate from IO to programmatic. Barriers that stopped them from doing this historically were PMP’s that offered at best dynamic price and fluctuating impression volumes, both variables that made it extremely hard for agencies and publishers to commit demand and supply to these types of deals. PG is the best of an IO but transacted in a programmatic way, a real game changer for both buy and sell sides.
If you are a managed service media business without a function to capture programmatic demand, PG is going to create some headwinds for your sales team in 2019, time to think about SSP partnerships..
In my next post, I am going to supply an update on where we are with the concept of unified auctions, who is winning in the battle to get S2S adoption and what best client side wrapper practices we have seen play out over the last 12 months… As always, feel free to dispute any points i have made or make recommendations about future areas you would like me to cover, I can often be found via Twitter on @Gu881n5.
Paul Gubbins is the programmatic lead for Unruly