The open web is done; stick a fork in it. Banner blindness is near universal, search traffic has run dry and publishers are struggling for oxygen.
A consensus has emerged in recent years that the above statements are true, and that the open web as we know it is on an irreversible decline. Sure, certain corners of the web might be saved from extinction, like pandas preserved in zoos or display inventory nested within a curated deal.
In fact, the open web’s demise has been so thoroughly accepted as reality that during the remedy phase of the Google ad tech antitrust trial last year, Google’s attorneys and US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema seriously questioned whether open web display ads would even exist as a material source of supply in a few years’ time, and thus whether it even made sense to pursue a years-long remedy strategy.
But what if the conventional wisdom isn’t true? What if the open web is a genuinely useful and incremental advertising channel?
Eric Tilbury, VP of programmatic ops and solutions engineering at Inuvo, said to put a sword in his hand and he will stand as champion for the open web.
The ad industry’s missteps and mistakes over the past decade have “derailed what people think is valuable for a display ad,” Tilbury said. Done right, though, he added, display is one of the best bargains in advertising.
The value play
In other words, the value of open web advertising isn’t that the ad units are particularly compelling or attention-grabbing. It’s that everything else keeps getting more expensive.
“Display ads are like a cheat code,” Tilbury said, “because they’re so much cheaper than all the other channels.”
Even some longtime walled garden buyers are coming around to that math.
Cory Dobbin, founder and CEO of Otherside, a programmatic ecommerce agency that launched last year, previously led an agency called Shoelace for buying paid social, Shopify, Amazon and other direct-to-consumer ecommerce media.
He’s not what you’d call an open web programmatic evangelist. At one point during an interview with AdExchanger, he joked that display banners get genuine click-through rates on par with CTV. As in, pretty much never. “It’s definitely a volume game,” he said.
Still, a volume game starts to look a lot more attractive when the alternatives keep getting pricier. Meta, Google and Amazon each control must-have inventory that advertisers can’t do without, and they’re using that leverage to squeeze brand margins as customer acquisition costs continue to climb, Dobbin said.
“It’s harder to get your hands in an account and pull levers that actually make a difference,” he said, adding that it used to be fun to be a social marketer in the cockpit of the Facebook ad platform. But not anymore.
These days, based on briefings with multiple social agency buyers, the vibe is more like that trash compactor scene in “Star Wars.” Not only are the prices going up, but there are fewer and fewer levers left to pull as the platforms introduce more AI-driven automation.
Programmatic, for all its baggage, still hands buyers the keys. They get to pick the sites, the audiences, the bids – and they pay a lot less to do it.
That’s why, Dobbin said, “programmatic is shifting from a dirty word to being a little bit in style and sexy right now.”
He cited AppLovin as an example of a platform that’s successfully gotten ecommerce-native brands to consider programmatic in-app mobile game ads, which the category writ large had never really mucked around with before.
“There’s a renaissance happening,” Dobbin said, for media channels that have “been ignored and for good reason.” But now those channels are being rebuilt for performance-minded buyers and direct response advertising, with the ability to prove incremental new customers.
And this renaissance is just in time to attract new advertisers that are beyond fed up with Amazon, Meta and/or Google.
Redefining the open web
The open web’s prospects also look a lot better depending on how you define it.
Two years ago, The Trade Desk unveiled the SP500+, its list of top open web publishers. By TTD’s definition, “open web” means any high-quality publisher that allows open programmatic campaigns. That’s how the likes of Disney+, Spotify, Samsung TV, LG, Comcast, Hulu and many other subscription media platforms or device manufacturers made the cut, although few people would think of them as part of the “open web.”
Stretching the definition does have its benefits: Open web programmatic looks a lot shinier when it’s lumped in with streaming media.
CTV is a key part of Otherside’s approach to open web performance marketing, Dobbin said. But the creative doesn’t have to be fancy.
One thing that surprises many ecommerce marketers, he noted, is that they can take a handful of Facebook or Instagram vertical videos that perform well in social campaigns and repurpose them as CTV units. The jump from landscape-style TV to a vertical video ad experience with a Gaussian blur on the side “forces a context switch,” he said, “where you snap in for a second because your brain notices the shift.”
People don’t click on TV ads, of course. But having been exposed to a TV campaign, they’re more likely to recognize the brand and click when retargeted elsewhere.
Banner ads, rebooted
Taboola is another company that’s placed a big bet on the open web, including striking deals with Microsoft and NBC to be the exclusive reseller of their respective open web display inventory.
Blue-chip media owners like Microsoft and NBC don’t want to wrangle dozens of programmatic vendors just to monetize a bunch of banner ads that conventional wisdom, recall, treats as near worthless. Selling their inventory that way is “not a good look,” said Adam Singolda, CEO of Taboola, which is pitching itself as a one-stop alternative.
Taboola convinces companies to hand off their display inventory, he said, by promising to take the whole complex mess off their hands.
“It gives us the opportunity to make display ads great again,” Singolda said.
Even so, the old open web of long-tail sites and personal blogs isn’t coming back.
People who once would have built a site to show off their photographs and share camera reviews, or blogged about mountain bikes and biking are now almost all social creators, Singolda said. They make money through a mix of ad revenue-share deals and affiliate sales or sponsorships on social platforms.
The days of being able to earn a living from programmatic ads on your own website are gone. But Singolda is betting that the sites that survive will be able to charge higher CPMs for fewer impressions, because advertisers are getting better at measuring their value compared to the self-reported conversions you get from a walled garden.
Tilbury, meanwhile, believes that open web programmatic is badly undervalued, because the industry has always judged it based on metrics like clicks and match rates, which are mostly garbage. Advertisers would do better he said, if they focused on targeting the right sites and contextual environments, rather than chasing advertising IDs around the web.
Making that transition is tough, though, Tilbury said. Because here’s the catch: When marketers clean up their open web campaigns, the numbers often look worse, because the metrics were padded. Reach goes down when advertisers are judicious about where their ads appear, and click-through rates fall because most of the previous clicks were coming from junky, low-quality sources. And ROAS dips, too. Once advertisers stop chasing IDs, their ads start reaching people using browsers like Safari that disable the ad tech tracking.
But these are all good things, Tilbury said. And at least the open web’s numbers are honest, which is more than most marketers can say for the walled gardens.
Marketers know that they’re paying more on the walled garden ad platforms and getting less and less in return, even as the platforms continue to grade their own homework with glowing marks.
On the open web, it’s the reverse. When marketers put their ads on good sites with real human traffic, Tilbury said, they’re “serving a much more powerful ad at a cheaper price” than they could have found inside a walled garden.
So maybe it’s a little premature to stick a fork in it.
Long live the open web.
