Advertising performance and media quality are top of mind for buyers. But open web publishers lack tools for signaling their high-performing media in programmatic bid requests. So there is a surfeit of vendors and data suppliers looking to fill the need.
Gamera, a media quality measurement startup for publishers founded in 2022, announced on Tuesday it raised $1.6 million to promote the tools it’s already built. Gamera’s new backers include The Trade Desk’s venture capital arm TD7 and ad tech VC firm Aperiam Ventures.
In addition to its media quality measurement platform, which is based on code-on-page integrations with publishers, Gamera offers publishers direct sales support for a monthly fee and a chatbot-equipped analytics dashboard to understand their most lucrative inventory. For the analytics product, pubs are charged based on how often they query the chatbot.
The company also functions as a data layer that SSPs or ad buyers can use to curate private marketplaces (PMPs). Gamera collects a share of CPM for curated deals.
Protect the web
In case you were wondering, yes, Gamera is named after the giant turtle monster from the Japanese kaiju movies.
Gamera’s co-founder and CEO Gareth Glaser told AdExchanger that, much like the Gamera of movie fame protects the planet and its children from threats, his company aims to protect the open web from demonetization by buyers who mistakenly tar the entire channel as low-quality inventory.
In addition to co-founding Gamera, Glaser is a former chair of Prebid.js and previously founded programmatic header bidding company RTK.io, which he sold to Magnite (known at the time as Rubicon Project) in 2019. He also publishes an ad industry newsletter called “Gareth Hates Ad Tech.”
Glaser said he was inspired to launch Gamera after writing about the problems publishers cause themselves by inconsistently labeling their ad inventory, as well as how agencies and DSPs optimize publisher inventory at the domain level.
Glaser felt that, rather than assessing pubs at the domain level, a smarter approach involved using placement-level signals to identify specific ad inventory buyers want, and to make those signals easily digestible by ad-buying platforms.
However, he added, the OpenRTB spec that underpins programmatic auctions doesn’t include fields where publishers can indicate inventory information such as click-thru rate (CTR), which might help distinguish certain units.
With that limitation in mind, Gamera provides media quality signals such as an ad placement’s viewability score and the number of other ads on the page, plus performance metrics such as CTR.
In that sense, Glaser said, Gamera is looking to complement the work that companies like Sincera and DeepSee have done to establish media quality measurement as an industry in its own right by expanding into measuring performance as well.
Code on page
But to access page-level publisher performance metrics, Glaser said, Gamera must pursue code integrations with publishers.
Sincera, DeepSee and many other publisher analytics tools rely primarily on bot crawlers, Glaser said. But while a crawler can assess how many ads are on a page and the viewability of those ads, he added that bots can’t track information about how well each ad placement performs. That requires code on the page.
Besides, bot crawlers don’t always receive the same ad experience that humans see. For example, if a website detects that a visitor is a bot rather than a human, some ads don’t even render.
Plus, because Gamera has code-level integration, Glaser said it can operate a UI that surfaces for publishers which of their ads perform best and which users bring them the highest lifetime value (LTV).
This UI also features an LLM-based chatbot to field publisher queries like how to boost yield from their top-performing placements and audiences. And while Gamera provides placement-level data to SSPs and curators for building PMPs and deal IDs, the audience data and LTV measurement is only visible to publishers.
Sell-side integrations
Freestar started using Gamera’s platform last January and has already integrated its code across its entire publisher ad network, said Lindsay Valdez, Freestar’s VP of audience strategy.
Freestar has been impressed with the Gamera UI’s ability to identify which inventory moves the needle for performance marketers, Valdez said. For instance, one of the sites in Freestar’s network, Food52, saw that its travel-focused content brought more ad revenue than expected for a food-focused blog, she said. This prompted Food52 to create more travel content.
Google Analytics and Parse.ly, two common publisher insights tools, give a sense of which pages drive traffic, she said. But just because a page attracts more readers doesn’t mean advertisers are interested in buying ads on that page.
“You’ll have entire editorial teams chasing things that don’t make any money, and that is a gap that Gareth’s tool fills,” she said.
However, so far only a few of Freestar’s sites have actually tested selling inventory using Gamera-provided signals and its direct sales support, Valdez said. For example, Gamera recently worked with CVS to package some of Freestar’s inventory into a PMP with 25% higher CTR than average.
Such PMPs based on Gamera’s data are currently available through SSPs Media.net and Index Exchange.
Gamera’s ability to provide CTR data has resulted in some performance-focused buyers increasing their spend by 5% to 15% when those signals are present in bid requests, said Karan Dalal, COO at Media.net.
On the road map
Gamera already has most of its product suite developed. The next step is getting the word out.
Glaser said that with the new funding, Gamera will look to build its sales footprint in the UK and US markets. To handle publisher outreach, Gamera recently hired Jeremy Amigo as VP of publisher development, which brought the company headcount to five.
As for the product road map, Gamera has tentative plans for a CTV publisher product, Glaser said. But that’s a long-term goal.
In the short term, he said, Gamera is focused on growing DSP, SSP and other buy-side partnerships. Once DSP integrations are sorted out, Gamera’s product could expand beyond direct deals and PMPs to open-auction bidding, Glaser said.
Gamera can’t take its eye off publisher accounts, either, since those are the source of its performance data.
To that end, Glaser said the company wants to help as many publishers as it can to improve their standing with programmatic advertisers and translate their impression appeal in a way ad tech platforms can understand. And Gamera is not being picky when it comes to publisher partners.
The service is open to “literally everyone,” Glaser said. “If you’re a low-quality site, we’re going to figure it out.”
