I’ve been ruminating about what marketers really want from their programmatic vendors since attending last week’s Possible conference in Miami.
The conference included nary a mention of tariffs or macro-economic headwinds. Nobody wants to be the downer when everyone is expensing drinks in the sunshine.
But the lack of interest in tough realities reinforced the feeling that brand marketing and programmatic tech exist in different universes at times.
Within a CPG brand pyramid, there might be one or two individuals whose remit includes the messy programmatic channel.
“Isn’t that all just going to be agentic AI?” said a media buyer for a large regional convenience chain when asked which DSPs and ad tech vendors they work with.
Throughout the conference, I made a point of asking similar questions of media buyers from some fairly large brands, including household name businesses that spend tens of millions of dollars on digital ads. It’s surprising how often marketers do not know the programmatic vendors in their supply chain or even the distinction between a DSP, SSP and other three-letter acronyms.
Despite programmatic tech adoption, this world of three-letter acronyms is as foreign to some digital marketers as reading a medical journal. Brand marketers can exist in a place blissfully ignorant of the goings-on of the Chrome Privacy Sandbox, a place where they clicked “yes” for Performance Max but know nothing of it. The distinction between deterministic and modeled attribution is irrelevant, as are the terms themselves.
The easy button
Programmatic is thorny, difficult, quixotic.
What marketers seem to want most of all is for media buying to be easy.
And when it comes to simplicity, the biggest media and ad tech platforms cannot be matched.
Brian O’Kelley, of all people, gave an anecdote during a panel at the Possible show, regarding his wife looking for help to promote her podcast.
“I just pushed the button on YouTube that said ‘Boost,’” he said. New listeners and comments come in. “And then she’s like, ‘You’re the best husband ever in advertising.’”
The new Google Search AI bidding product, called AI Max, which launched on Tuesday, was described in its blog post announcement as a “new, one-click feature suite.”
And the AI-based CTV bidding product introduced by DV360 on Monday was likewise described as a “new one-click feature.”
Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview a week ago with Ben Thompson of Stratechery, put it pretty succinctly: “In general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out.”
Pure and simple
The big platforms can’t be faulted for their focus on providing simplicity above all else. Advertisers are clearly clamoring for an easy button.
One ecommerce brand leader I spoke to at Possible said he’s never messed about with open programmatic inventory but has begun evaluating DSPs as the company ramps up CTV and streaming media ads. He asked to speak anonymously to discuss the potential vendors involved. And he also said that the Amazon Ads pitch compared to other open DSPs is its “simplicity.”
It’s not that the Amazon Ads UI is so elegant or intuitive, he added. But setting up and optimizing DSP campaigns is an involved process. It takes time and effort to figure out how to reach a scaled target audience for your product and to begin seeing attributed results materialize in sales numbers. With Amazon, this entire process is “essentially a toggle switch,” he said.
And it’s not something those DSPs could easily replace, he said, because in large part Amazon’s simplicity is rooted in the marketer’s confidence in Amazon’s first-party data. Amazon has all those people logged in on Prime Video, Fire TV, Twitch, etc. If The Trade Desk suddenly reported the same audience reach as Amazon at the same relatively cheap CPM rates, it would be a red flag, he said, not a reason to celebrate.
Another marketer, this one from a well-known household cleaning supply brand, said their company has also evaluated DSPs for streaming media. Their default DSP is The Trade Desk, with DV360 involved as well, they said, speaking anonymously to discuss the company’s vendor strategy.
A big advantage for Amazon, they said, is that it can go for TTD’s open programmatic business. The cleaning brand has a large budget with Amazon already because it’s such a large retailer for them and owns valuable inventory. Another DSP can’t crack into that.
But there’s a certain kind of advertiser who’s trying to establish clear lines of sight between a DSP and a network of SSPs. They have particular CTV private marketplaces or programmatic guaranteed deals they want to set up using specific deal IDs. That’s The Trade Desk’s turf (and other indie DSPs). However, Amazon Ads is approaching enterprise marketing orgs, including this cleaning brand, and advocating to be the de facto DSP for streaming and CTV.
Amazon’s pitch, as paraphrased by this marketer, was that programmatic streaming campaigns will be simpler and more effective as a “one-click extension” of the company’s existing Amazon campaigns.
But, they added, it’s not like TTD can go to a brand and say, “Hey, your Amazon media buys could just be a simple switch in our platform.”
