Andrea Kwiatek will be presenting at Programmatic I/O, taking place May 20-22 in Las Vegas. Get your tickets here.
If marketers weren’t so obsessed with vanity metrics like viewability and click-through rate (CTR), the open internet would have less of a media quality problem.
Buyers could solve many of the issues they have with the open web by focusing more on driving performance outcomes, said Andrea Kwiatek, director of strategic partnerships at ad agency Goodway Group.
Viewability and CTR aren’t “awful metrics,” she said. “But when you rely solely on those metrics, you get awful experiences for your customers.”
Closer collaboration with publishers and SSPs helps buyers hit performance goals, avoid MFA and find content that better aligns with their brand messaging, she said.
Kwiatek spoke with AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: What was your main takeaway from Jounce Media’s SPO Summit last week?
KWIATEK: The open internet hasn’t grown – it’s been stagnant – and the walled gardens just keep growing.
We all want to do what’s right for our clients and the industry. So how do we address the challenges publishers are facing? And how do buyers, sellers and publishers work together to fix that?
News publishers realize buyers don’t want hard news, so they’re creating more gaming, lifestyle and sports content. Is that a good strategy?
That’s a great avenue [for advertisers] to support news publishers. We have to ensure marketers can trust their ads are going to deliver on that content. It’s also a good way to keep consumers engaged on these sites.
Some news publishers are reducing the amount of ad slots on hard news. That needs to be communicated to remind marketers that publishers are aligned with the market.
Do buyers have concerns about AI-generated content?
It depends on the buyer. We’re not ready to go all in because it’s so new.
I carefully test [AI-generated content] to see how it performs. I worry it could be a new version of high-impact ads for mobile apps and fat finger syndrome. We need to make sure generative AI doesn’t create the next level of vanity metrics.
Can marketers address their brand safety concerns by working more directly with publishers?
100 percent. We’re helping publishers test using their contextual signals to curate inventory versus using verification providers. Publishers can get more nuanced because they know their content and how their editors write.
I’m not saying verification providers’ offerings are bad. But you can get a lot closer to what you want to achieve when you work directly with a publisher.
Curation is moving from the buy side to the sell side. What do you think of that trend?
DSPs control what bid requests are available for buyers. When you work with an SSP and a publisher in a programmatic sense, you have more control over what audiences you’re trying to reach. An SSP has many data signals you may not get to target or play around with in a DSP.
What supply-path optimization trends are you watching?
We’ve cut down the number of SSPs we work with to control fraud and the use of vanity metrics, and to better understand what we’re buying. Even publishers are cutting SSPs to reduce duplication in the supply chain.
But there are still too many SSPs and new ones popping up that don’t bring enough value – especially in CTV where there’s too much fragmentation. We need more consolidation.
Is there an ideal number of supply paths?
It’s hard to say there’s a magic number. Some SSPs have exclusive inventory. But you could get down to four, maybe less, and not lose scale.
What was your reaction to Google’s most recent third-party cookie deprecation delay? How much uncertainty did that introduce into this year’s media plans?
It was frustrating, because we were excited to rip the Band-Aid off. We want to get rid of cookies and move marketers more toward actual performance outcomes.
[The delay] also means Google’s solutions are not reliable, which makes us want to move away from Google. We can’t rely on them to dictate how we work with our clients.
Did a lot of your clients budget for Privacy Sandbox testing?
No, and I wish they would. They don’t want to set aside a large budget to test something new when something else already works.
It’s more about using a smaller budget to prove the effectiveness of not using cookies. But some partners still rely on cookies for performance. Measurement solutions and the different IDs need to stop using cookies to build their ID graphs. But while cookies are there, they’re still going to use them.
What post-cookie solutions do you feel positive about?
Contextual has been around a long time. Clean rooms and some newer collaboration platforms bring unique value. Retailers have loyalty data that could aid measurement.
I just don’t like the ones that are still relying on cookies.
Do some buyers actually like MFA, and if so, why?
The buyers that like it have clients that rely on vanity metrics. As long as buyers are asking for it, it’s still going to be there.
We have to get marketers into a mindset that vanity metrics are not good for the consumer experience. Consumers don’t convert when there are seven ads moving around on one page.
Is paid traffic inherently bad?
The overmonetization of paid traffic is what’s bad.
Were you surprised by Forbes operating that secret MFA subdomain?
I wasn’t surprised. I was really, really annoyed that none of the verification providers knew about it, but Adalytics could figure it out.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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