Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi will officially release a tool called Quality Index (QI) at the end of this month, designed to streamline inventory sources, manage multiple KPIs and cross-check viewability.
QI has been in Beta since late 2014, and will be part of an internal UI called the VivaKi Operating System (VOS) Platform that VivaKi is building for media buyers and planners.
The new tool is necessary following the decentralization of Publicis’ VivaKi trading desk earlier this year. This dispersion of programmatic knowledge means agency employees must get up to speed about how automation works, said Arzu Karimova, VP of advanced analytics at VivaKi.
QI helps campaign managers and media planners at Publicis agencies with pre-planning and in-campaign optimization. It enables them to find inventory that fits their campaign goals and objectives by exchange, DSP or site.
“The challenge is managing multiple goals,” Karimova said. “Increasingly, brands are looking for multiple KPIs. This tool is built to bring performance and verification data under one umbrella and allow analysts and brands to evaluate their campaign performance based on multiple KPIs.”
The tool also helps solve some viewability discrepancy issues, said Brian Zaben, VP of programmatic strategy and analysis for Publicis agency DigitasLBi (which is using QI), because it brings together reports from various viewability partners.
“Our analytics teams spend a lot of time manually consolidating reports from the DSPs and our viewability partners,” Zaben said. “We need third-party validation of viewability within our platform partners and those insights are needed more and more readily. QI allows us to get those insights quickly and more frequently.”
Publicis is under increasing pressure to combat fraud and boost transparency, said VivaKi’s VP of solutions consulting, Justin Moreno. QI’s “human CPM,” which helps campaign managers weed out bot fraud by removing inventory sources with low rates of viewability, is designed to address those concerns.
“That’s really valuable for the planning stage,” Moreno said. “We can get to campaign goals faster by isolating inventory sources and navigating not only inventory verticals but client verticals. We can start the campaign with a robust list of inventory sources that set the stage for success early on.”
When DigitasLBi saw low viewability with a financial services client, it used QI to compare inventory sources and uncover and remove the source of non-viewable impressions. It then reallocated client spend to inventory sources and publishers with higher rates of viewability.
“We saw an increase of viewability across the board,” Zaben said.
Though Publicis’ agencies have begun adopting QI into their workflows, agencies haven’t yet shared many details about the tool in client meetings and negotiation as it’s still in beta. In the coming months, Publicis hopes to consolidate more of its proprietary tools into the VOS Platform.
The hope is to give programmatic team members a single UI to access different solutions. In addition to the QI, the VOS Platform will also include an analytics toolkit for predictive modeling and campaign measurement, as well as a DMP for audience management and segmentation.
“Getting to that single UI is about 75% done,” Moreno said. “The single sign-on could be completed as soon as the end of the month. The next step is rolling it out.”
Moreno said all of Publicis’ agencies are using QI in some capacity, though usage differs from one agency to the next depending on how developed their in-house programmatic teams are.
Publicis clients will likely hear more about the holding company’s propriety tech in the coming months as VivaKi’s decentralization continues. In the meantime, from DigitasLBi’s perspective, programmatic decentralization has been a success.
“It’s something we needed,” DigitasLBi’s Zaben said. “With budgets now over 50% programmatic across clients it doesn’t make sense to have it siloed in a trading desk. Having hand-in-hand planning, activation, insights and analytics all sitting together across programmatic traditional buying is where we needed to go. For us it has been a tremendous step forward.”
“We’re better for it,” Karimova agreed. “Brands want to know how their campaigns are managed, planned and executed. Decentralization brings agency traders closer to those operations.”
