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Ad industry veteran and event stage mainstay Amanda Martin is taking on a new role as Mediavine’s SVP of partnerships and business strategy, the company announced Tuesday.
Martin will be moving from the buy side to the sell side after a nearly eight-year stint at ad agency Goodway Group, where she was most recently SVP of corporate development and strategic partnerships.
A role on the sell side is appealing to Martin considering the industrywide focus on data privacy and transparency, which is reshaping how partners on both ends of the supply chain interact.
“The sell side has an important role to play in bringing solutions to the table because the buy side can’t solve these issues on its own,” she said. “The two sides have to get closer together to be more cohesive and transparent. They can’t work through intermediaries and set it and forget it like they could at the beginning of programmatic.”
Martin spoke to AdExchanger.
AdExchanger: How is your new role similar and different to your previous work at Goodway Group?
AMANDA MARTIN: My job was to connect to the sell side in the most efficient way possible. We wanted most of our dollar to go to the publisher, and we wanted our media spend to have the most bang for its buck – not by chasing low CPMs, but by chasing high-value content and visitors. Now, I’ll be switching sides and bringing the publishers to the buyers.
I’ll also be taking on a leadership role at Mediavine and working to help craft the future of the organization. And Mediavine has such a great voice, but it can be louder in the industry. So, I’m going to help magnify that voice.
Does your experience bring something unique to Mediavine’s leadership?
I started my career on the sell side. When I went to Goodway, it came with a steep learning curve. Now I have a lot to learn about the sell side because there’s been so much advancement in the time that I’ve been on the buy side. But there aren’t many people in our industry who’ve crossed between the two sides, so there’s not a lot of shared knowledge.
What are some ways the two sides can communicate better?
The data an agency buyer can see is different than what a publisher can see, from who’s buying their ads, where the money is coming from and what CPMs they’re garnering. That’s where we need to close the gap. Buyers and sellers should have far more transparency into how inventory is being sold and communicated in the bidstream.
Some publishers are doing more direct business through curated marketplace deals with agencies. Will that be a priority for Mediavine?
Mediavine is already curating those direct buying options. But the price discovery of the open exchange is extremely important for both sides. We need to keep the value proposition of open exchange price discovery while also prioritizing the direct buying value of premium inventory.
Mediavine recently removed autoplay and muted in-stream video ads from its sites, since these were reclassified as out-stream video by the IAB Tech Lab. How is that going to impact the ad experience across your portfolio?
It’s the right decision, and if publishers don’t make those decisions, the buy side is going to curate the inventory to avoid the placements they don’t want. At Goodway, we were moving away from buying autoplay muted ads. It’s the direction buyers are going in, and it’s easier for publishers to control what their inventory looks like than it is for buyers to weed it out.
What’s your take on the argument that SSPs have become commoditized?
The SSP market is commoditized because there are 80-plus exchanges. With so many exchanges, you’re watering down the supply path, you’re not necessarily adding a ton of value, and you can’t justify your take rate. But that doesn’t mean that the role of an SSP isn’t important in the monetization of publisher sites—just that having 80 of them is not necessary. A stronger, smaller SSP market would benefit both sides.
Alternative IDs have been pitched as a third-party cookie replacement. But with so many IDs to choose from, how can publishers find the right one?
In the ID space, the publisher is the major decision maker. [The winners are] going to be [which IDs] they pass [in bid requests]. Mediavine can be the conduit to publishers working out what IDs they need to be passing and how they can garner more first-party data from their visitors. It’s going to be multiple solutions.
What do you think of contextual advertising’s reemergence?
Contextual was the first thing buyers tested against cookies. And we could replicate results and performance just as well with contextual. But because there’s been delay after delay in getting rid of the cookie, the need to change course hasn’t really materialized. But contextual and native are going to play huge roles. Buyers will go to them immediately when the cookie finally does get deprecated.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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