Add Vibe.co to the list of CTV ad platforms that are kicking supply-side resellers to the curb.
On Thursday, the self-serve, SMB-focused startup announced the launch of Certified Supply. Through this new solution, buyers will only be able to transact on ad inventory secured through either direct integrations or through deal IDs from an opt-in whitelist of publishers and supply-side partners.
Developing this new solution took the better part of a year, Co-Founder and CEO Arthur Querou told AdExchanger.
According to Querou and Franck Tetzlaff, fellow Vibe.co co-founder and chief technology officer, focusing on direct publisher relationships will provide better transparency all across the supply chain, reduce duplicate bid requests for inventory and allow Vibe to offer better technical support for the platform itself.
Because when a problem occurs, said Tetzlaff, “you know who to call and how to debug it.”
When open is too open
Although moving to direct supply was always the ultimate goal for Vibe.co, the platform originally operated on the open market as a way to better establish themselves as a business. Now with this transition away from the open market, their team can afford to focus more on accuracy and less on boosting match rates, Tetzlaff said.
For most, this might seem like a contradiction, as higher match rates are usually associated with higher household reach (and, therefore, with increased performance). But because the SMB advertising clients Vibe works with are looking for such specific, hyper-targeted audiences, more doesn’t always mean better.
“We don’t have the big budgets from holdcos,” said Tetzlaff. “So, we can be very picky and more precise and have a lower match rate than others.”
Which isn’t to say that Vibe didn’t make a good-faith effort when it initially entered the open market. “But, at some point, when it’s too open, it starts being an issue,” said Tetzlaff.
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As an example, Tetzlaff shared a recent test that the Vibe team performed before enacting Certified Supply, which revealed some of the supply issues with the CTV open market. First, they triggered an ad to run on a TV in their New York office, and then they checked the back-end of their platform to see how many bid requests they got for that ad break.
In a perfect world, there would be only one bid – maybe five, if you counted all the slots in a single ad break, said Tetzlaff. But in their test, it ended up being closer to 500.
That high volume of bid requests likely came from all the duplication that occurs when multiple CTV resellers offer the same inventory, said Querou.
Then there’s the effect that fraud can have on the ecosystem. In fact, Querou noted, Vibe accelerated their plans for Certified Supply, in part, because of a conversation he had with a prospective client, which claimed to be buying ESPN inventory at $3 CPMs on another DSP.
Just to set a baseline, the typical range for something providers would label as “premium content” (a group ESPN is most certainly a part of) can be anywhere between $25 and $60.
“It’s a terrible situation, because the only thing you can tell them is, ‘You’re getting frauded,’” said Querou. “Three-buck CPMs do not exist in any world.”
Resellers selling resellers
Despite all of the valid concerns about fraud and duplication, not everyone in Vibe’s network thinks of resellers as the villain of the story.
Like Philo, one of Vibe’s certified supply partners. The streaming cable provider first began working with Vibe over two years ago, and integrated directly with the platform very early into their partnership.
Philo’s sales team is only made up of two people, so they work with some “direct resellers” to achieve scale with specific types of advertisers, said Head of Advertising Partnerships Aulden Kaye Yi.
The real problem, Kaye Yi added, is “resellers selling resellers,” which she defines as “companies that are aggregating aggregated inventory and provide very little transparency into what is being included and how performance is determined.”
Vibe’s prioritization of direct publisher relationships reflects a growing movement toward curated marketplaces of programmatic CTV inventory, said Kaye Yi, which will be beneficial for the entire CTV publisher ecosystem in the long run.
Assuming, of course, that those publishers are able to get certified. Right now, Vibe.co is prioritizing premium inventory, which they define as coming from subscription-based services – meaning, not a whole lot of room for new or independent FAST channels.
Well, not yet, at least. But once Vibe has a better sense of how the direct supply in its ecosystem performs on an incremental basis, the platform will have an easier time verifying the quality of smaller, more niche publishers, said Querou.
After all, “you have to start somewhere,” he added.
