Managing a header-bidding system – even just for display inventory – is too in the weeds for most publishers to handle on their own.
And with advertiser budgets flowing toward online video inventory, publishers of all sizes have expanded their video offerings, with many dabbling in CTV.
But selling display, video and CTV inventory programmatically on the open web requires a sophisticated tech stack, which means publishers without in-house resources to manage a heavy technical lift often turn to vendor services for a solution.
That’s a wrapper
My Code, a publisher network that specializes in multicultural media, manages display and video inventory across nearly 800 sites under its umbrella. It is also looking to expand its owned and operated network, which currently includes about a dozen sites.
Because of the complexity of programmatic sales across such a diverse portfolio of sites, including a mix of owned and third-party clients, My Code has relied on PubMatic’s OpenWrap unified bidding solution for the past two years.
“We were looking for a Prebid solution because we realized we didn’t have this huge engineering team that can constantly stay ahead of everything in ad tech,” said Mark Murrin, My Code’s SVP of business development, echoing a common complaint by publishers about managing Prebid tech.
“We had a close partnership with PubMatic on the SSP side, and saving resources by essentially outsourcing our ad tech to PubMatic’s engineering team made a lot of sense,” he said.
My Code’s publisher network is constantly growing, and most of the smaller publishers it brings into the fold don’t come with existing Prebid integrations or omnichannel monetization infrastructure in place, Murrin said.
“We’ve been able to bring heavier ad tech knowledge to a smaller publisher base to help them implement monetization for their site in addition to what our media sales team is doing,” Murrin said. “And a big part of why we’re growing our owned and operated portfolio is because we can streamline the ad tech without having to build huge teams to operate [those businesses].”
Checking IDs
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By farming out the backend management of its tech stack, My Code can also experiment with different third-party vendors and alternative ID solutions without disrupting its day-to-day operations, Murrin said. “We’re really heavy into Identity Hub, where cookieless partners plug in, and [managing] that is not something we would necessarily be able to do ourselves.”
My Code receives monthly reports breaking down the effect of its assorted ID partners, which has allowed Murrin to be deliberate about planning My Code’s post-third-party-cookie strategy.
“Now that we’re about a year into this, we have a baseline set of information [to measure ID partners against] as we’re trying to win quarter to quarter and year to year,” he said.
Pricing floors
My Code also wanted to integrate machine-learning-powered pricing floors, which come with a feature PubMatic recently added to the OpenWrap platform.
“[Pricing floors] are an example of something that we would not be able to build ourselves,” Murrin said. “And there are third parties out there that do similar things that we’ve looked at, but the thought of trying to figure them out in our workflow made my operations team’s heads explode.”
My Code has also implemented Google’s Optimized Pricing, but the lack of transparency into how it optimizes auction mechanics and its tendency to favor demand from Google products like AdX over other demand partners left a lot to be desired, Murrin said.
Given the many roles Google plays in the process, from acting as an ad server and demand partner to setting price floors, it’s worth having a third party to compare against, he said.
Implementing pricing floors has had a significant impact on My Code’s business, Murrin said, although he declined to share specifics on revenue.
“We’re driving higher CPMs with auction pressure, and we’re able to scale to more partners in a faster fashion,” he said. “The third-party connections are taken care of, and the speed of the auction is faster than what we had before.”
Must CTV
In addition to expanding its publisher count, My Code is also looking to diversify into new media channels, particularly CTV.
“CTV is a growing part of our business, and there’s definitely a lot of appeal, especially as more and more dollars are going to connected TV,” Murrin said. And the company’s OpenWrap integration should help its publishers manage their programmatic inventory as they expand onto CTV platforms.
“The challenge with [adding] new platforms is [that each platform has] different reporting, different billing,” he said. “Having everything in one place lets us compare, manage and optimize efficiently across all platforms.”
