IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day took place on 28th April and with 1,500+ attendees it is one of the largest virtual events in our industry. Featuring speakers from IAB Europe member companies and advertisers CNN, Bloomberg Media, BBC Global News, Double Verify, OMG, The Trade Desk, Xandr, HelloFresh Vodafone, the event was split into four panel sessions. In a series of blogs, we have provided a wrap up for each of the panels which include answering some of the audience questions that the panellists did not have time for during their discussions:
Panel 1 - The Post-Cookie Era
Panel 2 - Programmatic Transparency: Where Are We Now?
Panel 3 - The State of Supply Path Optimisation
Panel 4 - In-Housing Programmatic Trading - Lessons Learnt and Best Practices
Watch the full recording of the event here.
Event Feedback
Thanks to everyone who attended and completed the post-event survey. If you would like to leave your feedback, you can access the survey here.
With expert speakers in each topic, it is the go to event for the latest industry insight of the programmatic trading market in Europe. But don’t just take our word for it, see below for is what some of the attendees said about the event...
“IAB Europe's Virtual Programmatic Day is a fantastic resource available to push the level of understanding forward on the latest topics in our industry. I can guarantee you will have new ideas and questions for your partners after attending one an IAB Europe Virtual Programmatic Day.”
“The VPD is becoming a must attend event with regards to the quality of the topics and the high level of speakers in the digital European media landscape.”
“The event was really helpful, covering all the important topics especially SPO and In-Housing Programmatic Trading.”
“Great selection of industry leaders, all collaborating for a great discussion.”
Upcoming IAB Europe events
Find out more about upcoming IAB Europe virtual events including our flagship Interact Online event, here.
IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day took place on 28th April and with 1,500+ attendees it is one of the largest virtual events in our industry. Featuring speakers from IAB Europe member companies CNN, Bloomberg Media, BBC Global News, Double Verify, IAS, OMD, MediaCom, Google and OpenX, the event was split into panel sessions to address and debate the industries hottest topics from post-cookie to programmatic in-housing.
The Post-Cookie Era Panel
The first panel of the event addressed one of the most fundamental technology advances our industry has seen in many years, the announcement that third-party cookies were to be depleted. This session explored how prepared the industry is for the demise of third-party cookies, the opportunities and challenges, whether it will still be possible to deliver targeted advertising, impacts on measurement, attribution and frequency capping and key actions the industry needs to take.
Tanzil Bukhari, Managing Director EMEA, DoubleVerify moderated the panel and was joined by:
Event Recording
Watch the event recording here.
Audience Polls
We ran a couple of audience polls during the panel to ask how stakeholders expect the depletion of the third-party cookie to impact programmatic trading levels and whether consumers will benefit. Two thirds of the audience (69%) expect some or a large decrease in programmatic trading whilst nearly half (47%) are not sure if consumers will notice any difference after the depletion.
Key takeaways of the panel discussion as cited by Tanzil include:
Audience Q&A
The panel garnered great levels of engagement from the audience with more questions than they had time to answer! The panelists have provided their viewpoints on some of those questions here:
Q. Retargeting has been a huge part of marketing tactics for direct response brands for years - without cookies, what’s the alternatives to get similar conversion rates?
Mathieu Roche: Third-party cookies are just a technical solution to store user IDs; there are other ways to make user IDs available to ad tech platforms so that use cases such as retargeting can be executed, mainly using first-party storage such as first-party cookies or local storage.
Richard Sharp: The ability to re engage customers and prospects visiting a brand’s digital properties is an effective strategy for many Oracle clients. The good news is there are several solutions that can enable retargeting and yield similar conversion rates. The first is through authenticated traffic. Several solutions are available today that can reach consumers who are in a logged in state both on a brand’s site and on the publisher’s site. This includes retargeting PII-matched or hashed email audiences on walled gardens and several identity consortium’s that are enabling this for open web programmatic retargeting. Alternatively, retargeting is a viable strategy through device IDs in mobile apps or on connected TVs. Consumers today have more devices than ever, offering a myriad of ways to reach those people. But on different devices, they can be enabled either directly, retargeting the same device ID, or indirectly, linking logged in users to device IDs using cross-device.
Q. Measuring marketing activities has long been based on cookies - without this direct link to who saw your ads, what measurement solutions should we pivot to?
Tanzil Bukhari: DoubleVerify does not rely on cookies to detect fraud, deliver brand safety or measure viewability, therefore quality measurement solutions have not been as impacted. As it relates to targeting and performance measurement, advertisers will turn to new technologies, like contextual, as well as more meaningful performance measures.We are able to gather troves of information on the impact of ad exposure and key dimensions of engagement to predict the likelihood of an ad to convert. It is time to start mining and analyzing this information - which does not include PII - to better understand the environment that is most conducive to achieving specific KPIs, ultimately driving ROI.
Richard Sharp: Marketers should focus on measurement solutions that are based on the ability to identify real people and households, ones that are not bound and dependent on cookies. At Oracle Data Cloud, this is foundational to our measurement solutions, as for our entire history we’ve focused on building multiple linkages using MAIDs, IFAs, and registration-based matches. While most of our identity-based measurement does not rely on cookies at all, we’re future-proofing our solutions to move to person-based matching and panel-based data sources that move beyond cookies to consent, so they’re compliant with an ever-evolving privacy landscape. Lastly, it’s worth asking if your measurement solutions are working with respected industry-wide approaches like IFA.
Q. In a cookie-less world, will contextual win the targeting game?
Mathieu Roche: Contextual and Behavioural targeting are different techniques, which should work together, not against each other (the infamous “right person, right place” goal). What is at stake with the redefinition of identity for digital advertising is the ability to still do user-level targeting (or frequency capping / attribution for that matter) on the open web. If we can’t, I fear contextual targeting won’t be good enough for publishers to “win the game” against the walled gardens.
Tanzil Bukhari: Contextual targeting definitely has a role to play. But it can’t be the contextual targeting of yesteryear that focused on simple interest categories. With the help of ontological machine learning and semantic science, contextual targeting has the potential to be much more. An in-depth, accurate understanding of the content on the page, together with engagement signals, can help uncover what drives performance. Imagine contextual segments that are built around your core messages, and the actions you want people to take. It is this level of sophistication that makes contextual targeting interesting again.
Richard Sharp: In a cookie-less world, advertisers will still need to reach the right audience at the right time with the best message in brand safe environments. Targeting tactics not only have to perform, but they are also only as good as their ability to activate and scale. Given the evolution of IDs, you will have to leverage other data assets for insights and activation. Advertisers will need to deploy an individualised strategy that blends permissioned first-party data, anonymised data, and data that sits somewhere in between. Context is one of many de-identified data sets, and context alone will not be the end-all solution. However, the ability to link context with smarter data, and activate in a more intelligent and scaled fashion is key.
Q. How important is it for brands and publishers to build their own DMPs using first party data?
Ben Hancock: Bear in mind that most publishers and brands are not in the business of building ad tech, and the process is expensive, time consuming and - considering how quickly this market moves - it’s difficult to be certain that they would be able to create something that is better than what is currently out there. But saying that, I think there is opportunity potentially for the largest brands and publishers to build something (perhaps shared similar to what we’re seeing in the consortium space?) that is better suited to the new demands of a privacy first era for specific needs and would be economically viable due to the scale of these businesses
Q. Is it time for marketers and advertisers to rethink their KPIs?
Tanzil Bukhari: Efficient, measurable ROI will continue to be the goal for advertisers. How they achieve that, and the milestones or KPIs they need to get there, may shift. Despite the adjustment around cookies, people still want relevant and suitable content experiences. Marketers should ask themselves, how can we enhance targeting, while complying with evolving regulation and practices?
Q. So, what will be the currency in the future, will we go back to the past regarding contextual?
Mathieu Roche: By building a privacy-compliant infrastructure to identify users and enable “smart advertising” to power publishers’ businesses.
Q. In response to Mathieu’s point, not being able to prospect via first-party data by definition, can be achieved via the likes of Ozone Project?
Mathieu Roche: Any publisher can offer targeting segments across its properties, but buy-side targeting (ie. customer onboarding, third-party audience targeting), cross-site frequency capping, and attribution (ie. linking actions across publishers and advertisers sites) require a cross-domain ID to be performed at scale. Even within the “walls” of the Ozone Project.
Q. How does the loss of the cookie apply when looking at the in-app space with Device ID? Will this be the rise of fusing in-app and browsing identity?
Richard Sharp: Advertising on mobile apps is entirely executed using device identifiers referred to as mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs). The loss of the cookie has no direct impact on in-app advertising. While the ecosystem has struggled to find a scalable and accurate means to “fuse” in-app and browsing identity, the best solution here is via user authentication. That is why Oracle has built the capability to capture and activate consumer authentication across brand’s digital properties within the Oracle DMP.
Q. Comscore has recently illustrated that record numbers of users are migrating away from social platforms back to premium publishers for their news. How important is it for publishers now that don’t have paywalls to capitalise on this uptick in traffic to throw up some type of free wall in order to capture the first-party data they will need beyond the third-party cookie?
Ben Hancock: Firstly it’s great to see consumers are turning to trusted sources of respected news during these challenging times. Assessing the merits of having a paywall is a balancing act – yes there is value in subscriptions and paid for models but we’ve reached a place whereby consumers expect access for free. If a publisher installs a paywall they will lose a big chunk of their audience and need to ensure the subscription model will cover the lost advertising revenue. Publishers will still capture some first-party data without the use of paywalls and should incentivise users to keep coming back through a quality experience and content.
Richard Sharp: The question on whether publishers should implement “free walls” or “reg walls” now or at any time in the future is a difficult one because of the implications of the decision. It is a major business decision that should be made based on a publisher’s unique goals, advertiser client-base, and user-base. We feel any decision should be tested rigorously as the implementation of a “free wall” will undoubtedly have an impact on traffic volumes that will in turn impact advertising revenue. Alternative advertising solutions should also be considered and tested including on-site profiling (which can be done entirely using first party cookies) and contextual targeting.
Q. Are end-users taken into account? Or are we, the industry, thinking of the next best thing in our own interest?
Tanzil Bukhari: This is a fast-moving industry - both in terms of technology, and in terms of how consumers interact with content. Privacy and respect is necessary for sustainability. It’s not about the next best thing - it is about understanding the value exchange, and supporting a free, ad-supported Internet.
Sara Vincent: The first question any player in the industry should be asking themselves is, ‘What would be the best possible experience for the user?’ If your focus is on the user and what they actually want — as ours is — solutions built around deterministic, first-party data will likely become the clearest path forward. Whichever direction or form this ultimately takes, though, the proposition needs to have user trust and privacy at its core.
Q. What is your advice to advertisers in regards to their existing or upcoming decisions regarding adtech / martech systems that have been dependent on the current landscape?
Mathieu Roche: In our experience advertisers and agencies don’t fully understand their dependencies on third-party cookies for “basic” things like frequency capping and attribution. They should lean on their ad tech partners and ask the difficult questions, but also participate because a solution isn’t going to appear by magic, it needs to be built, tested and adopted by enough stakeholders to become a standard.
Tanzil Bukhari: DoubleVerify does not rely on cookies to detect fraud, deliver brand safety or measure viewability, therefore quality measurement solutions will most likely continue as before. There is a lot of interesting innovation happening around how we can use non-PII data to understand where consumers are in the buying process, and better predict performance. Advertisers should work with their ad-tech and mar-tech partners to understand how they are pivoting to address these issues.
Richard Sharp: Multiple strategies will need to be implemented to profile and target known/authenticated users, pseudonymised customers, and anonymous consumers. Adoption of a suite of solutions to address each user segment across the profile-ability spectrum (customers versus prospects across known/pseudonymous/anonymous identity) will be likely required. Advertisers will need to take an inventory of their own user-base and desired prospect targets across the spectrum of “profile-ability” to help shape their approach. We’ve seen customers of Oracle Data Cloud see the benefit of unlocking a suite of advertiser and marketer solutions that help them bridge the gap between Advertising and Marketing to deliver better consumer experiences and measure the impact of those efforts in this dynamic and evolving landscape.
Q. How do you convey the value exchange to users?
Sara Vincent: Publishers have a challenging task on their hands to not only identify what the value exchange is for their users, but how to maintain it. The good news is that users are still dedicated to consuming content that matters (perhaps now more than ever) and we’re confident that users will continue to put trust in the digital publications and brands who bring them value. It’s not about ‘conveying’ the value exchange, per se, it’s about delivering the content users are after in a trusted environment. Our role is to ensure that publishers are able to maintain addressable media and focus not on the technology (that’s our remit), but on the value exchange, enabling them to continue maintaining users’ trust.
Q. Do DSPs have a responsibility to be involved in this conversation, or will they just work with whatever the final solution may be?
Mathieu Roche: DSPs have a major role to play because adoption will help define what the final solution(s) will be. If they don’t join the conversation and test the various options, there will not be a solution.
Richard Sharp: DSPs will be a critical execution channel for programmatic Open Web advertising, which does still have a future in many cookie-less scenarios. Every player in the space has a voice in the conversation. Oracle has had numerous engaging and promising conversations with DSPs to offer advertisers unique solutions across both known and anonymous targeting.
Q. What about accountability in all of this? In terms of as tech: if Publishers have this one-to-one understanding, are SSPs then bound to adapt to every publisher’s data set and pass those signals along to DSPs-Advertisers?
Mathieu Roche: This is exactly what we want to avoid because it doesn’t scale. No publisher has the power to command custom adoption of its own taxonomy by all buyers & ad tech platforms. We need a standard currency for each publisher’s data asset to be available to buyers via ad tech platforms, at scale. This is how we can help publishers monetise these assets to their true value.
Q. The bigger problem is, even if the industry gets together, how is the management, maintenance and validation of IDs going to happen in a transparent manner?
Richard Sharp: This could be addressed by a few solves. One way is for a third-party, agnostic industry body to step in to provide the framework, if not the means to manage, maintain and validate any future ID space. The other way is for all players in the space to adhere to the strictest interpretation of global privacy laws and provide the mechanisms to easily surface and provide controls for consumers to manage their data and identity. Ultimately, it will probably be a bit of both.
IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day took place on 28th April and with 1,500+ attendees it is one of the largest virtual events in our industry. Featuring speakers from IAB Europe member companies and advertisers CNN, Bloomberg Media, BBC Global News, Double Verify, The Trade Desk, Xandr, HelloFresh Vodafone, the event was split into panel sessions to address and debate the industries hottest topics from post-cookie to programmatic in-housing.
The In-Housing - Lessons Learnt and Best Practices Panel
The last panel explored the trend of in-housing programmatic buying, a trend which appears to be
increasingly popular amongst advertisers. The panel explored the realities of in-housing, best practices and how agency and technology partner relationships are evolving.
Ilona Lubojemska, Director of Client Services, The Trade Desk moderated the panel and was joined by:
Event Recording
Watch the event recording here.
Audience Poll
We ran a poll during the panel to ascertain how the attendees representing brands are approaching programmatic buying. The results show that a hybrid approach is taken by most:
Key takeaways of the panel discussion as cited by Ilona:
The main takeaway around in-housing is that there is no ONE approach brands can replicate when bringing programmatic trading into their organisations. With in-housing it is important to understand the roles the technology partners and agencies play and include them in the process. An open dialogue with the partners is especially important when it comes to establishing new ways of working and keeping on top of innovation, ensuring we have got the right talent looking after programmatic trading and we keep data at the centre of it all!
Audience Q&A
The panel received some audience questions that they didn’t have time for. The panelists have provided their viewpoints on some of those questions here:
Q. For the brands, if you had the opportunity to buy as direct as possible on the inventory of trusted publishers, would you divert money from other channels towards these new channels or not?
Carlotta Meneghini: What we're trying to do is to bring as many media activities as possible under programmatic buying to centralise strategies, spending control and frequency. From our programmatic perspective we aren’t interested in buying inventory directly from a single publisher because we wouldn't control the exposure of our communication. We evaluate inventory on specific KPIs that bring together efficiency, and brand safety.
Q. How do you see the future of independent agencies that offer programmatic services to their clients and even to global agencies at some specific cases?
Oliver Gertz: Agencies can provide know-how from their larger teams working across clients and technologies. We also expect that advertisers will see that in-house teams are not more cost-effective nor are they driving higher ROI and then look for hybrid models of in-house and outsourced work, but the ideal setup is much more integrated and agile vs. the old “send a briefing and wait” agency model.
Stefanie Scognamiglio: Independent agencies can play an important role in driving new product adoption or customised solutions for their customers. I would expect some consolidation in the market, but they are very close to their customer’s needs and their ability to innovate and adapt to the industry will determine their continued relevance.
Q. Will the clients still need you, if you as the network agency build up all their knowledge?
Oliver Gertz: Knowledge is not static and especially in such a fast evolving area such as programmatic it is essential that you have continuous learning. That learning, however, is often mainly test and learn rather than formal training, so agencies that learn across technologies, clients and countries will be able to provide outside-in expertise that evey in-house team needs.
Q. How does in-housing provide more transparency to advertisers, in a world where agencies offer full available transparency to their clients?
Carlotta Meneghini: I think agencies and customers, as we know them today, have goals that are aligned for the most part. However there is a part that will never be aligned just because they are different companies with different business models. In-house models allow clients to have transparency not just in terms of programmatic chain's costs but also regarding the choice of inventory, of technologies to test etc.
Stefanie Scognamiglio: Transparency gains span beyond access to information. In-housing can help build knowledge internally on how to evaluate the shared information and take an independent point of view. A confident well-informed understanding of options is the basis for brands to take broader ownership of decisions and results.
IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day took place on 28th April and with 1,500+ attendees it is one of the largest virtual events in our industry. Featuring speakers from IAB Europe member companies CNN, Bloomberg Media, BBC Global News, Double Verify, OMD, MediaCom, Google and OpenX, the event was split into panel sessions to address and debate the industries hottest topics from post-cookie to programmatic in-housing.
The State of Supply Path Optimisation Panel
The third panel of the event addressed the technicalities of supply path optimisation and whether it has delivered on its promise to streamline buying via programmatic platforms. The panel also looked at this from a publisher perspective addressing demand path optimisation (DPO).
Daniel Knapp, Chief Economist, IAB Europe moderated the panel and was joined by:
Event Recording
Watch the event recording here.
Audience Poll
We ran an audience poll during the panel to understand what has driven the demand for SPO and revealed the key driver, according to the attendees, is the demand for more transparency. However, most think it is driven by a number of reasons including change in auction dynamics, demand for transparency and pressure from regulators with half of the audience voting ‘all of the above’.
Audience Q&A
The panel received more audience questions than there was time for. The panellists have provided their viewpoints on some of those questions here:
Q. Advertising is a publisher's core-business. They should have been leading transparency since the very beginning. How do you think all these transparency initiatives will impact on publishers results? Why do you think it took so long to get started?
Tom Fryett: You could say advertising is an agency’s core business too. I think buyers and sellers were always trying to find one another and give each other transparency to foster trust - but also ultimately to do more business together. The tools improve over time. We derived a huge amount of insight from IAB initiatives like Ads.txt which has been enhanced by Sellers.json and the supply chain object. We have the resource and tech on our side to analyse this data at scale and use it to make investment decisions. I think truly premium publishers will benefit and if they have a scarce and desirable audience to advertisers, they will be rewarded by this work on both sides to have transparency.
Simon Baker: Advertising was a publishers core business but subscription and paywall revenue have overtaken ad revenue in multiple examples and that's excluding live events.
Regarding transparency, I don't think either the buy side or sell side set-out intentionally to create a murky world - it's something that's naturally happened with multiple players in the programmatic ecosystem. If the question is should publishers have done more to protect their inventory from the outset then the answer is yes. The awkward truth is bad decisions are sometimes made when focusing on short term revenue pressures.
Daniel Knapp: Transparency by itself does not have value. The ability to look into a system needs to be paired with the ability to make sense of it, and then to take appropriate action. This is hard to do, and most publishers are not set up for this. Algorithmically traded markets, whether in finance or advertising, remove institutional knowledge about how the market operates from the ultimate buyers and sellers, and even from intermediaries.
Q. Can you please elaborate on inconsistent auction dynamics?
Shane Shevlin: This refers to the type of auction that an SSP runs for OX traffic. It can be first, price, second price or it can be something in between. Jounce Media’s “RTB Supply path Benchmarking Report” from last year (2019) reported that the average publisher transacts open auction demand through 17.5 distinct supply paths. Each of these paths will result in different economics, with some paths offering much less value along the way. This both affects the planner/buyer putting their budgets on the line with extra fees for longer paths and the platforms who incur additional cost managing the extra bid listening costs, managing slower response times etc.
Q. Will publishers need SSPs in the future? Isn’t the market working hard to skip at least one -SP, be it the D or the S?
Tom Fryett: We love the “Death of the X” metaphor in this industry. DSPs and SSPs will evolve to meet new challenges. They won’t go away completely but they won’t necessarily look the same in the future. It will be driven by the economics of demand and supply - TV content is very expensive to produce, has long lead times and you tend to have fewer, premium ad placements around it - therefore DSPs and SSPs will evolve to make the process of buying that type of supply more efficient, rather than shoving it into a Display way of working.
Krzysztof Lis: I don’t think that this will be the case. If a DSP wanted to integrate closer with the publisher, it would eventually mean that the DSP created it’s own SSP, right? The only reason to implement this DSP/SSP hybrid would be to get the new, additional, unique demant that comes from this DSP. But from that hybrid’s perspective it would be beneficial to open their inventory to other DSPs as well -- so we’d end up pretty much in the same place, as we are now.
Lisa Kalyuzhny: We covered this question during the session - this was a hot twitter topic 5 years ago - and seems that people are keen to bring it back up. For us to live in a transparent environment with an honest holistic auction - we need both sides of the equation and for those sides to work together not be a single company. Otherwise your auction is no longer a “fair” auction - you are favoring your own demand or supply - and that hurts both the advertiser and the publisher.
Daniel Knapp: Publishers will always need specialist partners that can manage and tap into demand in a programmatic world. The resources and scale required go beyond what a single publisher can provide in-house. But a few years from now, this may not (only) be a classic SSP function as we know it. The beauty of the programmatic marketplace is the democratisation of supply and demand. But the economics may not add up in the long-term. The Walled Gardens partly excel because they compress supply and demand technology into one offering. Outside these gardens, there is a drive to maximise working media and also to differentiate as a tech provider - for instance through exclusive relationships. We already see direct relationships between DSPs and publishers, and also between agencies and SSPs. There is a risk of the programmatic pipes becoming less open and more proprietary. The benefit is a potential world where technology becomes a more utilitarian infrastructure than it is today, akin to a software service layer like in CRM. But for the sake of a fair market, this can only work if monitoring and audience systems are in play - a kind of ‘net neutrality’ or ratings agency like Standard and Poors for programmatic pipes. We will see a lot of changes in the Lumascape over the next few years. Yet far from meaning the demise of the SSP, it means that everyone in the value chain will need to innovate to create a more advantageous market position.
Q. Is demand path optimisation (DPO) not just regressing to the old waterfall world where the publisher makes the decision on which SSP they want to prioritise and creating a more fragmented market for buyers?
Krzysztof Lis: Hopefully not, as the waterfall did not have many advantages over header bidding and other currently popular implementation methods. Also, one can easily add different priorities to specific demand (using deals) in header bidding. I think that would be the preferred method of doing it.
Simon Baker: No, I don’t think DPO is a regression. The old waterfall world basically consisted of plugging in every SSP, ad network, reseller and anything in-between and hoping for the best. DPO is a data led approach so we can understand exactly the value each partner is bringing to the table especially from a unique demand perspective.
Daniel Knapp: I see DPO as a key innovation for publishers to take control over their inventory. It is not a regression to the waterfall because it does not imply putting different SSPs into a fixed, hierarchical order. Different SSPs have different strengths. The type of demand they bring the consistency and diversity of demand all vary by time of day, number of relationships, etc. Real DPO is using data science to be the conductor of an orchestra of SSPs: allowing each to play out their strength. In addition, DPO creates data and insight. This business intelligence is critical for more informed and constructive discussions with publishers and SSPs on how to best evolve their partnerships. It also helps publishers understand their buyers better, arm their sales teams and create better offerings. Of course there is a difference between ‘buzzword DPO’ and ‘deep DPO’ mentioned here. But done smartly, it is a far cry from waterfalls.
Q. How do publishers see bid shading by SSPs?
Simon Baker: Bid shading is something that's been happening on the buy side under various different names for years. You could argue there are transparency issues but it’s a tactic that most buyers are using either publicly or privately to deliver the most effective rates for their clients. I would expect most publishers are seeing higher clearing rates than second price auctions so this would not fall into their top five programmatic issues to resolve currently.
Q. Would transparency of QPS cost help publishers and advertisers understand the impact inefficiency has on the ecosystem? If so, would they be willing to pay for this bandwidth?
Tom Fryett: QPS cost is a technical challenge that has real-world impact on the shared interests of user, advertiser and publisher. If you delve into SPO you learn a lot more about the infrastructure of the ecosystem which enhances the way you plan and buy. It's a good thing for stakeholders to understand the different challenges different parts of the chain might be experiencing to inform working with one another, even if it does mean learning another acronym.
Q. Do you think that in the future there will be just one technology, which will have the functionally of SSP & DSP, a kind of hybrid of DSP & SSP? Which will essentially limit 350 Ad Exchanges and X-number of DSPs?
Tom Fryett: Further consolidation in the space is a likely outcome of the wider economic situation in the world today, but one technology underpinning emerging over time is unlikely as people will continue to invest in innovation in a market the size of ad tech.
Lisa Kalyuzhny: I agree with Tom - further consolidation will continue - it started with companies closing before GDPR and we’ve continued to see ad tech challenged by regulations and policies. The one technology removes the fair auction and long term becomes detrimental to both advertisers and publishers. It prevents the advertiser from holistically identifying the best impression and the publisher from seeing all possible impressions or interests in its inventory.
Daniel Knapp: I concur with Tom and Lisa. I tried to address my thoughts on this in the comment on if publishers need SSPs above.
Q. With a lot of the new SPO initiatives in place (e.g. supply chain object and sellers.json), how does the panel feel about blockchain companies looking to become another part of the supply chain? Will they go away?
Tom Fryett: Decentralised solutions and smart contracts seem like potentially clever solutions to some of the problems discussed by all sides today. The format doesn’t need to be blockchain necessarily and the simplest solutions are often best when it comes to fostering transparency. Just look at Ads.txt - a humble text file has helped buyers find inventory from authentic sellers - it wasn’t perfect but it was a huge leap forward and has a very low barrier for entry for all involved to use it. Sellers.json and the supply chain object enhances OMG’s ability to verify authenticated partners.
Lisa Kalyuzhny: Blockchain companies were a huge trend in the US about 18 months ago - and then the holding companies realised that they didn't need another hand in the ad tech cookie jar. They had the tools necessary to do their own audits - this opened up conversations with SSPs / DSPs and the IAB. Until blockchain can support the QPS necessary for our industry, it's a buzzword without much behind it.
Daniel Knapp: Blockchain lives off the promise of transparency. But there is a problem. A leger creates the potential for insight, but not actual insight. What is recorded still needs to be analysed. If that is really granular, as it needs to be, Blockchain can’t help, it is advanced and costly data science. Blockchain approaches also suffer from an application gap: there is no path to action. In addition, recording transactions in a ledger itself is insufficient data to understand real market dynamics. This requires experimentation: throwing stones in the pond to test reactions. The business case of blockchain approaches for programmatic was unclear as Lisa mentioned: another media model to live off the chain is counterproductive. Yet the thinking behind what became manifest as blockchain approaches is hugely valuable: how to create transparency and a fair ecosystem. Some blockchain companies have pivoted to pursue these core questions with other technologies and business models. This will create more and real value in the long-term.
Q. @Simon Baker: as a publisher, what are you doing to skip this programmatic ecosystem as a whole? Directly talking to brands (or their agencies) and creating great deals based on mutual possibilities and data.
Simon Baker: Firstly I want to clarify we have no intention of skipping the programmatic ecosystem. We are here to facilitate transacting with our clients and agencies from direct IO to programmatic channels - it’s totally their choice. One noticeable trend is most of our direct business is content led where standard display is migrating to an automated world due to the efficiencies involved. Data is not the dividing point between direct and programmatic, a number of our new data led digital products are built with a programmatic first mindset.
IAB Europe’s Virtual Programmatic Day took place on 28th April and with 1,500+ attendees it is one of the largest virtual events in our industry. Featuring speakers from IAB Europe member companies CNN, Bloomberg Media, BBC Global News, Double Verify, Integral Ad Science, OMD, MediaCom, Google and OpenX, the event was split into panel sessions to address and debate the industries hottest topics from post-cookie to programmatic in-housing.
The Programmatic Transparency: Where are we now? Panel
The second panel of the event addressed one of the key topics in our industry - transparency in the programmatic supply chain. The panel explored whether we have made progress in achieving transparency, which industry initiatives have made the most difference and whether COVID-19 is impacting the priorities around transparency.
Clementina Piazza, Programmatic Director EMEA, Integral Ad Science moderated the panel and was joined by:
Event Recording
Watch the event recording here.
Audience Poll
We ran an audience poll during the panel to understand how COVID-19 is impacting the prioritisation of transparency; the majority (92%) of the attendees stated that it is either more of a priority or remains at the same level.
Key takeaways of the panel as cited by Clementina include:
Transparency is a vast concept and its definition has changed quite a lot over the years to become nowadays focused mainly around financial and supply chain transparency, mainly due to the rise of programmatic as a widespread way of transacting digital media.
Dedicating a whole session to it manifests in itself that there is still work to be done. A lot of the transparency and trust issues that we have seen coming up in the past have not necessarily come up deliberately. They have come up because of how intentionally or unintentionally complex we have made this ecosystem to be, which in turn has created a fertile ground for loopholes and ambiguity.
However, it is evident, especially in Western Europe, that we are now at a stage where there is awareness around what the major issues are and we also have a number of initiatives that are working to address those issues. The desire for greater transparency has been equally driven by both sides of the ecosystem and is evident in initiatives such as the IAB Europe Supply Chain Transparency Guide, ads.txt, app-ads.txt, supply chain object, sellers.json, the IAB Gold Standards and the JICWEBS standards. The big worry however is for such initiatives to be properly policed and for breechers to see tangible consequences from their misfits.
With more than a third of buyers still thinking that transparency is a barrier to investment, resources such as the IAB Europe Supply Chain Transparency Guide are proving incredibly valuable. The guide provides in fact a short cut into best practices as it includes questions that any responsible player in this ecosystem should want to answer.
Even if the general consensus is that the current situation related to Coronavirus hasn’t made transparency any less important, it’s fair to say that this unprecedented situation and the unforeseen challenges it has at times lowered transparency’s position in people’s agendas.
Speaking of involuntary consequences, drastic approaches have been seen from a large number of advertisers and marketers around blocking delivery on Coronavirus-related content and the News category as a whole. Doing so puts quality journalism at a high risk of not being able to be properly funded. It also puts brands in a position of not being able to capitalise on delivering against relevant content, at a time when the number of users visiting news sites, and taking their time in doing so, has never been so high.
Audience Q&A
The panel received lots of questions from the audience with more than they had time to answer! The panelists have provided their viewpoints on some of those questions here:
Q. What are your thoughts around recent announcements from certain DSPs requesting SSPs for a Single Supply Path to Publisher Inventory?
Emily Roberts: It’s certainly a very good step in the right direction and many more vendors are looking to follow suit. It is a great step towards greater transparency and to make the ecosystem clearer, and from a publisher perspective it works incredibly well. I would like to see more initiatives like that in the industry.
Gavin Stirrat: A lot of the transparency and trust issues that have come up in the past have not necessarily come up deliberately. They have come up because of the complexity of technology, and initiatives like this certainly help to simplify such complexity. Due to nobody’s fault we ended up having a multitude of ways to connect to publishers' supply and that does not appear completely transparently to Demand Side Platforms. So by asking exchanges to pick a single route complexity is removed and efficiency is created, facilitating transparency into the path from demand to supply.
Q. Does blockchain play any part in programmatic supply chain transparency in the future?
Clementina Piazza: The underlying technology of blockchain has vast potential and applying blockchain to some of the aspects that underlie supply chain transparency is definitely not out of the question. There have actually been recent applications from companies like Mediaocean and Amino Payments that have partnered up to enhance the end-to-end “PO to payment” view of contractual media commitments. Doing so, they have been addressing one of the core demands from the ecosystem which is to deliver programmatic media supply chain transparency from a financial and contractual workflow perspective.
Q. Do you feel that agencies have a lot to answer for in regards to the lack of financial transparency and are using ad tech as an excuse?
Gavin Stirrat: I think that the entire value chain has a role to play in terms of where we are today and the still existing concerns. Every group of companies in the supply chain has done something which has contributed to potentially building mistrust. Every single part of the value chain has felt pressure as market-shares shifted and that sometimes pushed different groups into doing things that are not necessarily completely transparent and so there have been examples over the years that have been heavily publicised where there has undoubtedly been lack of transparency. I do think that we are moving past that world and from advertisers, to agencies, DSPs, SSPs, Exchanges and Publishers, every single group of companies now understands the areas of transparency that impact them and their direct partners.
Andrew Buckman: Everyone has a part of responsibility in this. This whole ecosystem has evolved in trying to catch up with technology and some people have taken advantage of that and some people try and run ahead of the curve to find new ways of doing business. I think that we all have now reached a state of consciousness where we have realised that to instantly take advantage of niches/gaps is no longer acceptable and that we really need to work together to ensure that each aspect is considered fairly.
Emily Roberts: I don’t think that the whole market has mistrusted. The real issue I have found with programmatic is that we have made it so much more complicated than it needs to be and that’s why we have ended up having loopholes. I don’t think that the majority of people go around the market trying to mistrust each other. From our perspective, agencies do an incredibly good job to navigate such a complicated market. And although we are now seeing changes being made that are going to help making it easier to navigate, it still is such a complicated market.
Q. When you talk about transparency, what specifically is it you're talking about that needs to be made more transparent to users that is not currently?
Andrew Buckman: There are specific examples of this in the IAB Europe Supply Chain Transparency Guide which you access here. Transparency is about understanding the business model of the people you deal with, understanding the data they collect, what they do with it and who they share it with, and understanding the ethics and practices or your partners.
Q. Is there a difference in market drive for transparency region by region?
Ross Webster: In my experience, working with global brands, transparency and the enforcement of it goes beyond market nuances. However, I guess every market reacts to it differently.
Emily Roberts: Yes, unquestionable variations from market to market. I can only speak for EMEA but even in this region there are expansive contrasts. The highest focus on transparency can certainly be noticed in Western Europe whilst in other countries is either not so much of a priority yet or it’s ingrained from the beginning, as we can see in some of the emerging markets.
Q. Do you think due to the current pandemic, transparency is more important since advertisers want to know more and more about changing consumer behaviour?
Steve Wing: Our immediate priorities have of course shifted but transparency is as important and even more perhaps. If anything the enhanced level of scrutiny that marketers, brands and publishers are exercising around how to get through this period is making transparency even more important.
Gavin Strirrat: People care deeply about transparency, on both the sell and buy side of our ecosystem, but COVID creates amazing challenges, some more expected than others, and dealing with all of this, on top of the emotional load, has meant that, while still undoubtedly important, transparency has slipped down people’s agenda a little bit.
Ross Webster: It is also interesting to note how conversations around transparency, particularly for companies such as ourselves focused on location intelligence, are now more than ever heavily focused on the privacy side of things. As such, we have started working more and more with governmental organisations and NGOs around how to understand people’s movements. So for us it has really raised questions around what can and can’t be shared with regards to consumer’s privacy.
Q. We found that over 40% of content which references Coronavirus is not negative content, and brand suitable for many advertisers. How do you feel the brand safety approach needs to adapt from marketers during and following COVID-19?
Emily Roberts: I think it is about having that conversation with your main publishers to ask them what they are doing. No publisher wants to cause brand safety issues for an advertiser so it is important that we all come together to discuss what we can do to prevent it. I think there is also a very different conversation to be had on whether you are a platform or a publisher.
Q. As a buyer, how is it possible to ensure that my ads won't run against negative Coronavirus articles without blacklisting Coronavirus as a keyword? Will publishers take responsibility for this?
Emily Roberts: The BBC has a list of brand safety commitments that we reassure advertisers with, so not only can we block negative Coronavirus news on our platform but we give advertisers the assurance that if they are not happy with the content they have run on we will give them their money back. I think it is vital that publishers are prepared to lay down such commitments as it shows great confidence and trust in their content.
Q. Are advertisers missing a trick by not embracing the Coronavirus for positive advertising campaigns as mentioned by Emily?
Emily Roberts: I think it is sometimes easier to avoid all content related to COVID-19 because of the scrutiny around brand safety, which from what we have previously seen in the industry is perfectly understandable. However we have seen great successes in other mediums where advertisers have embraced the positivity around the community spirit that we have all felt, which has worked really effectively.
Andrew Buckman: It is a massive miss, also because now is the time when consumers are appreciating more than ever the great work that is put in by quality media outlets, as they actually have time to read articles and opinion pieces in depth, helping them to form opinions and understanding what the big picture is. In the wake of the realisation of the damage that such drastic measures are provoking we have seen in some countries across Europe industry organisation lobbying and supporting local governments around this topic- an example is the UK culture secretary Oliver Dowden stepping in and speaking to advertisers and brands and saying that there is a need for pragmatism and to do all that is possible to prevent the negative impact that doing so has on news publishers. On top of that, the IAB, AOP, Newsworks and the IPO all issued guidance aimed at advertisers and agencies and it’s great to see that some agency groups like GroupM and Universal McCann have actually taken a stance around advising their clients against block listing all Coronavirus related articles.
Q. Advertising is a publisher's core-business. They should have been leading transparency since the very beginning. How do you think all these transparency initiatives will impact on publishers results? What you believe is the reason behind it took so long to get started?
Steve Wing: The reason why there is still a lot to be done comes also from the fact that transparency is a huge area and it means many different things to different parties - from supply chain transparency all the way to transparency of auction dynamics, to industry standards, fraud mitigation, brand safety and even to open source initiatives like pre-bid.js, which are designed to create open, collaborative and inspectable standards with transparency baked in from the start. So, it’s a really big area and we have been good at defining all those areas that constitute it. We shall also never forget a lot of the work that has already been done, the many years people have been working hard to address issues around transparency, as we all believe that transparency grows the market and, as such, it is an absolute necessity. This is at the basis of initiatives like the IAB FAQs, launched in 2019, the IAB Europe Supply Chain Transparency Guide, ads.txt, app-ads.txt, supply chain object, sellers.json, IAB Gold Standards and the JICWEBS standards. Many of these initiatives have had the aim of creating a neater way for brand investment to reach publishers and as such will continue to have an increasing benefit in enabling publishers to effectively monetise their inventory.
Q. Do you think the younger generation, being more clued up at an earlier age with technology and use of their information by advertisers, are a ticking time bomb to cause an 'ad-pocolypse' ?
Andrew Buckman: No, I think the younger generation has less qualms about sharing personal and sensitive information than people of my generation do. They are certainly more aware but I think they place less stock in the use of their data to target messaging towards them.
