Podcast: Forrester's Quality Equation

Welcome to episode No. 16 of AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here.

The mainstreaming of programmatic has forced marketers to get serious about quality – both the quality of overall customer experience and individual ad impressions.

In a recent report, Forrester Research said this issue could lead marketers to scale back on programmatic in the short term and accept higher prices for verified inventory.

“We’re not saying pull out of programmatic. That’s absurd,” Melissa Parrish, Forrester VP and Research Director, explains in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks.

“We’re saying, take advantage of the controls you have. Once you do that, we’re talking about an environment where the inventory becomes more premium, more selective, better targeted.”

To get there, marketers need to keep a close eye on their partners: agencies, publishers and tech vendors. They need to leverage existing quality-control technologies, such as blacklists, whitelists and verification tools. And they need to align internal and external incentives.

Sounds like a tall order, but it’s all doable using resources available today.

“I don’t think it’s that huge of a leap from a technology perspective,” Parrish says. “I don’t think it’s that huge of a leap from an agency relationship perspective. The biggest leap is the marketer taking control in ways they haven’t previously felt comfortable doing. … It’s not a five-year plan because we’re waiting for the technology to meet our needs. It’s a strategic, cultural change.”

The appropriate degree of control is up to each marketer. Bringing programmatic entirely in-house, as Netflix and a smattering of others have done, is impractical for most brands.

“They know these are not things they can do on their own. The size of the team it would require is a non-starter, so it’s not necessarily that they want to bring that in-house. It’s that they want to have a stronger hand in what happens.”