48 months of Programmatic Trading

Over the last 48 months, I’ve lived in Singapore helping Dentsu Möbius (now rebranded as DM2) make sense of programmatic trading and set up its South East Asian trading desk initiative, moved back to my adopted city of Melbourne, Australia and took charge of programmatic trading at demand-side platform, MediaMath for its largest client in Australia, Coles Supermarkets Australia and now I find myself living in London heading up global trading and ad operations at a mobile platform start up, Unlockd Media.

It has been a whirlwind 48 months (and I am only referring to moving countries!) I think it is fair when I say I have first hand experience of how the whole value chain of the digital advertising industry is coping with the change that we now call programmatic trading. Right from media agency land to savvy ad technology platforms, down to media-owners trying to extract maximum value from a fast evolving ecosystem running away from under their noses.

Here I reflect on what I have observed during my 48 months of setting up programmatic business units.

1. Programmatic knowledge is still only skin deep

Many agencies, advertisers and publishers still do not fully understand the various components, benefits and opportunities of the programmatic trading industry. Many still have only a vague idea of the key talking points.

When an “expert” gets the basic functions of a DSP, SPP, ad exchange etc…confused, alarms bells go off in my head like a rave party banging on.

2. Trading Desks still trying to figure out how to extract value from programmatic trading

Because of point #1, agencies are still trying to figure out how best to make a margin from the advent of programmatic, often hiding layers upon layers of “fees” in their programmatic media buys. Advertisers on the other hand are asking should I do this in-house to save costs and retain control? Publishers are asking, how can I make more yield per impression? 

People are asking how can I make more money, take more control and retain better data for future campaign and trading deployment. The result is many are still figuring out how to get to that promised land called programmatic utopia.

3. Traders are not doing their jobs right

So you’ve decided to set up a trading desk, the problem is many so-called traders are simply campaign managers masquerading as new school “Traders”. They are not trading, merely setting up your digital campaigns with new tools (start date, end date, CPMs, caps and creatives done) and checking it every so often.

Programmatic is NEVER set and forget!

What trading strategies do you have in place to achieve performance for your advertisers’ campaigns? What yield optimisation are you employing to extract yield for your programmatically traded inventory?

4. Data is the new oil and guess what? You have it too!

Big organisations have established CRM platforms to help them when it comes to customer loyalty and retention, traditionally offline advertising mainly focussed on feeding these CRM platforms (coupons anyone?) and there wasn’t a scalable solution to unify and digitise these datasets. 

Everyone in the digital advertising industry wants 1st party data, well guess what? I believe you already have some form of these data (CRM, email database, offline data, purchase data, loyalty cards etc…) many of these undiscovered data are merely unpolished (in an analogue format), which until recently we had no way of onboarding to make these data digital and “targetable”.

Look deep into your portfolio business and I am certain there is data to be found.

5. Mobile has arrived but mobile apps (with its cookie-less environment) is making retargeting and cross device targeting challenging

This is a tough one to solve as it needs a whole of an industry approach to get everyone on side, unfortunately, because the mobile world is (let’s face it) an Android monopoly (discounting Apple and iOS as they are not in the ad tech business anymore, remember iAds?), there will inevitably be a strong reliance on Google. 

We need to come together to figure this one out, otherwise an unsustainable walled garden scenario will become the outcome for the mobile world.

6. Viewability has become a hot must-have

Blind adherence of a metric from a very lazy digital advertising industry means we have digital agencies/planners and advertisers slapping on a number and forcing everyone to it without applying considerations to such mitigating factors as context and frame of mind of the consumer.

N.B. Don’t even get me started on mobile viewability measurement, because if there is no end-to-end SDK integration, you will not be able to measure this.

7. Adblocking

Adblocking has shone a light on how badly ad quality, targeting and relevancy is in our industry. The industry either has to change or someone has to buy these guys out to remove the spotlight…My bet is on the latter.

The last 48 months has been challenging and illuminating and I have met a great number of really smart people and well-meaning companies.

There is no doubt programmatic trading brings with it a lot of benefits and potential, however, we sometimes need to slow down the pace of change (and gratification) a little and first be good at what we are doing or are trying to do before we get distracted by the next great must-have and truly understanding why and what we are doing it for.

Without the application of effort, we are simply running around half-empty pretending to know-it-all and risk building up a house of cards.

We need to be better as an industry! What do you see as key learnings and take-aways over the last 12 months?

Share your comments and get in touch....happy new year everyone.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Unlockd.