“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Lauren Fisher, GM of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.
Supply-path optimization remains a hot industry topic. The conventional thinking is that it promises greater efficiency and cost savings for buyers and sellers by removing underperforming or unnecessary middlemen. And for ad tech partners, it poses a threat to their established role within the programmatic supply chain.
While supply-path optimization (or demand-path optimization, if you’re coming at it from the publisher side) allows both sellers and buyers to be more selective about which ad tech partners they allow to participate in programmatic auctions and setups, such selectivity isn’t solely rooted in cost-based decisions or efforts to get a leg up on the competition for access to unique supply/demand.
Increasingly, advertisers and publishers see the value in SPO to get closer to one another’s audiences – specifically, to the proprietary data sets that come with a privacy-forward promise of greater performance vs. third-party cookies.
Yes, supply-path optimization is a hot topic, but identity is the topic these days. It’s one that’s stoking the fire on the convergence of programmatic supply and demand.
The deprecation of third-party cookies and limitations to MAIDs are reconnecting buyers and sellers. Working more closely with publishers or advertisers is consistently among the top three tactics that US buyers and sellers are employing in light of privacy-related changes, according to research Advertiser Perceptions has fielded on this topic over the past 18 months.
A desire for greater oversight into which parties may be touching audience data becomes even more important as buyers and sellers look to bring their proprietary data sets to the equation. Demand for privacy-friendly access to this proprietary audience data is driving buyers and sellers closer to one another’s ad tech.
Case in point: DSPs are actively working more closely with publishers to better understand how to package and build for proprietary audiences on a contextual level and offer advertisers more direct access to publishers’ premium inventory and first-party data – think The Trade Desk’s OpenPath. Plus, advertisers already work closely with SSPs to set up programmatic direct deals and PMPs to get closer to a pub’s audiences.
But simply looking to close the gap between buyer and seller isn’t always the most efficient path forward when looking at the totality of one’s programs – at least not today given the continued fragmentation of the ecosystem.
True, SSPs enable advertisers access to unique data sets or premium inventory from publishers. But advertisers will still likely need to work with many SSPs in order to buy across the digital landscape. The same is true for publishers looking to make their audiences or high-demand inventory like CTV available to DSPs capable of reaching the right demand sources.
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Today, that inevitably means building a closer relationship with the opposite side’s ad tech partners. In this light, SPO isn’t an anti-ad-tech effort – far from it. It’s a clear indication that buyers and sellers want ad tech partners that can grant them a front-row seat to their audiences and premium content. Whether that’s a DSP or SSP, our belief is that buyers and sellers ultimately won’t care: They will seek partners that can offer them a more holistic, privacy-safe view of audience reach, frequency and performance from their programmatic advertising.
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