This article is a part of a series on our Programmatic Marketing Summit. More from the series:
Despite all the buzz surrounding Google’s return of third-party cookies to Chrome (for the time being), it was the last topic anyone wanted to discuss at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit that took place last week in Palm Springs, California.
Instead of being preoccupied with CTV measurement challenges, pricing, and transparency between CTV ad technology vendors, agency executives were much more concerned about the issues. DSP fragmentation, as well as fee structures, were also major concerns that arose during the town hall discussion at the event. The discussions were held under Chatham House Rules and participants are anonymous in exchange for their candor.
But there’s no standard user agent for CTV.”
“We’re always going to lose to Google and Facebook until someone says we just have to stop buying CTV, or lower our CTV [spend] and recommend diversification if you can’t do [measurement].” There is no standard user agent to use for CTV.
We’ll always lose to Google and Facebook unless someone says that we should stop buying CTV or lower our CTV.[spend]If you can’t do this, then recommend diversification. Facebook and Google will immediately say no because they do not want anyone to check their homework. As I’ve seen in the past, Roku isn’t very friendly when it comes to checking their homework.
They’re so worried that, frankly, we’re all taking their money and they’re not getting ad spend. They’re worried that we’re taking their money, but not getting ad spending. They will never stop cutting fees because the money keeps coming in.
You’ll catch them occasionally on some easy errors. We wouldn’t have noticed if they were more sophisticated or random, but they were laziness.
Pricing transparency is lacking. There are too many DSPs.
‘Trade Desk’ is the Spirit Airlines in the DSP world.
‘There’s probably a new DSP every week or an upstart telling you, ‘We’ve got the secret sauce’.’
‘When I onboard a new client, I evaluate their old agency based on how many DSPs or which DSPs were used.’ I use it almost as a competitive thing.” It’s ‘You want this data thing you need to operate. That’s $1.50 CPM. The way they’re calculated and buried in all the details is, according to me, meant to obfuscate the actual details. The middlemen have more power than we do as an agency. The middlemen are more powerful than we as an agency. They won’t let us use JavaScript. They don’t allow us to run much of them. We’re left to trust people who have historically not had our best interests at heart.
Check the quality of your inventory
I don’t believe there is enough AVOD stock to meet all demand.
The problem is that unsold inventory is being pushed into our premiums.
They’re selling shit, until you call them on it. The CPMs will remain premium CPMs as long as you don’t pay attention to everything about the CPM. You’ll see things on the list of added value. It’s just unsold inventory. It’s junk.” It’s not that CTV budgets are increasing because programmatic is more popular.
Programmatic spending is a matter of ‘trust’ and not ‘control’ for clients
They have to trust, not control. This is a major part of it. In [clients’] ‘s mind, I have to rely on the audiences that [media buyers] is targeting rather than being able to get my hands on actual data of targeting. They can’t see where the bottom line is coming from.”
Back in the day, it was common to place an ad in a place that the client could see, to silence them. It’s more difficult to do, harder to manage, and harder to communicate.
For those of us in the media who have been around for a while, it is exactly what we received on television, but they expect something different from CTV. This is the real challenge.
Linear buying was easier to understand and many clients understood it. They never questioned whether it worked. They just thought it worked. As we moved to a digital space like most advertising, we began to focus on last-click sales and cost-per leads. When we returned to [digital] suddenly, they asked, “How did this impact your bottom line?” They didn’t do that with TV.”
