Since Denmark’s third-largest media house, Jysk Fynske Medier, started bringing in programmatic demand, CPMs for non-direct sold inventory have risen more than 300%.
Its portfolio of sites, which includes everything from local news to classifieds to daily deals, attracts 3 million uniques and 500 million page views per month.
Though small, Denmark has a highly competitive publishing industry. Because Jysk Fynske Medier is located outside of the capital, where most of the media agencies set up shop, it was always at a disadvantage when it came to direct sales from smaller advertisers, its primary revenue driver.
Programmatic changed that, connecting the media house’s high-value users with media companies, raising the value of its unsold inventory.
Before programmatic, Jysk Fynske Medier ran CPC campaigns but had minimal ability to optimize. These low-click campaigns led to low revenue for the publisher.
Having migrated to programmatic, Jysk Fynske Medier can now decline these underwhelming CPC campaigns, said the publisher’s head of business intelligence, Tim Gerken.
Jysk Fynske Medier uses four SSPs, seven ad networks and two ad servers to access that demand. This isn’t ideal, Gerken admits.
“We don’t want to use this many SSPs,” Gerken said. “The waterfall is inefficient. It’s creating a lot of discrepancies, slow load times, and a lot of inventory goes missing when you pop them in all these different systems.”
He’s temporarily complicating things by testing a new ad server, Adform’s programmatic publisher ad server (PPAS), which eliminates all the passbacks that come from working with multiple partners. It plugs directly into Adform’s demand, via its DSP and buy-side ad server.
The goal will be to implement Adform’s ad server across direct and programmatic campaigns in the future. The ad server includes a “perfect priority” technology that allows competition between direct and programmatic impressions. Enabling such competition has become an in-demand feature for publishers as programmatic rises in CPMs and popularity.
“We want to use one ad server for programmatic and direct sales so they can compete,” Gerken said. “I also want to be sure I don’t miss any [high-value programmatic] retargeting campaigns because the direct sales team hasn’t sold any inventory.”
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Jysk Fynske Medier, which started testing the solution in February, hopes to have it implemented across all its campaigns by the end of the year.
It is one of about 10 publishers testing the PPAS, Adform CMO Martin Stockfleth Larsen said.
With its publisher ad server as well as other publisher solutions like a DMP, it hopes to build a full stack on the sell side to complement the one it’s already built on the demand side.
That might make Adform an appealing “media-agnostic” alternative to Google, Larsen said. “Publishers are struggling to compete with Facebook and Google, and the only way they can do that is through more efficient platforms where they have full transparency.”
