Mediaocean CEO and Co-Founder Bill Wise was an early guest on AdExchanger Talks in 2017, less than a year after the podcast launched.
During that episode, Wise made a rather bold statement: “Fast-forward another 12 months, and I don’t think SSPs will be around. I’m calling for the death of the SSP.”
Clearly, supply-side platforms are still kicking, and they’ve managed to show their value, Wise says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. But there was a compelling case to be made back then for the end of SSPs, he argues.
“With header bidding,” he says, “you don’t really need an SSP.”
And he’s sticking to his contention that pureplay SSPs are no longer viable thanks to a growing emphasis in programmatic on curation and supply-side optimization.
Consider the increasingly blurry line between supply-side and demand-side technology as SSPs go direct to buyers and DSPs strike direct relationships with publishers.
“There’s going to be more of an open architecture where, yeah, SSPs will always exist for remnant display and mobile; you know, an open web – and for CTV, maybe one,” Wise says, calling out Magnite as the cream of the SSP crop.
“It’s done the best job of catering to the largest broadcasters and brands,” he says. “But now you have The Trade Desk, and they bring a ton of demand.”
With TTD going straight to publishers with OpenPath and SSPs leaning toward the buy side, he says, “all of a sudden, they’re all just conduits between supply and demand.” And the SSP category’s continued survival aside, the buy side has a more strategic position in the ecosystem.
“There’s a reason why the largest publicly traded DSP is worth $25 [billion] to $30 billion,” Wise says, “and the largest publicly traded SSP is worth one and half or $2 billion.”
Also in this episode: A counterpoint POV to the recent TTD pile-on, Mediaocean’s CTV strategy and an update on its $500 million acquisition of Innovid. Plus: Wise’s decision around 15 years ago, which he still regrets, to pass on investing in The Trade Desk when it was still just a startup. (That was “probably the most unwise decision I’ve made,” Wise says.)
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