springload

By Eric Picard (Originally Published on iMedia – November 20, 2013)

If we break down the way that buyers and sellers view the world from an advertising perspective, the buyer wants to reach a specific audience on quality publications. And the seller wants to sell as much inventory as possible at the highest price.

To these ends, each party has built their own set of processes, technologies, and methodologies. Historically, media buyers would come up with a plan for reaching ideal target audiences, identify publishers that match brand goals and have access to the target audiences, and then send RFPs over to those publishers. Once buyers passed along the RFP, control was largely out of their hands. Buyers could say yes or no to things, they could ask for clarification, and they could negotiate price. But the control over exactly which audience they reach or what pages their ads land on have not been in their control. That has reverted back to the publisher’s sales, account, and operations teams.

Publisher sales organizations, meanwhile, have spent an immense amount of time and effort coming up with methods of “packaging” inventory to ensure the most sales, at the highest price. They have created significantly complex packages — with combinations of highly desirable and aligned inventory to an RFP — with less aligned and less desirable inventory that they require the buyer to take in order to get the inventory they really want.

In conversations with media buyers, I’ve been told that they see their job as “forcing publishers to blow up packages and unbundle the bad stuff from the good stuff.” This tension between buyer and seller can be quite intense — because their goals are generally not seen as aligned. There is a problem of “information asymmetry” in this world, meaning that publishers have all the information about both the buyer’s goals and the publisher’s own inventory and audiences. Ultimately they package that inventory without much input from the buyer other than the original RFP and media plan. Buyers have very little information in this world and rely on the publisher to interpret the buyer’s goals properly and to deliver what they’ve agreed to.

Over in RTB land, media buyers have much more control. In this world, the “information asymmetry” goes in the other direction. Within a DSP or other buying tool, the media buyers specify the audiences they want to reach and the kinds of inventory that are acceptable — even down to creation of a white list of which publishers are acceptable. They use inventory quality vendors, verification vendors, data providers, and all sorts of techniques to gain control over the buying process.

In this world, publishers add very little value (basically none) to the buying process, and they exist with absolute data asymmetry. Not only do they not know why their inventory is being bought (they don’t get an RFP or media plan), but they also often don’t even know who is buying their inventory. They maintain very little control over the selling process in this circumstance, which rightly makes them nervous about RTB.

As the technologies and markets evolve, a new process needs to be developed where publishers and buyers can collaborate. This process must allow publishers to gain insight into the goals of the buyers such that they can make good decisions about where to invest in building content — content that attracts the kinds of audiences that buyers want to reach. And buyers need access to data that publishers have about their audiences (which they don’t normally make available to generic ad exchange buys) that can be bound together with inventory via private exchanges or even programmatic direct technologies. So between the buyer and the seller, we can come together with a strong handshake that drives the right kind of symmetry of information — one that drives the right business outcomes for everyone involved.