For at least as long as there has been a Lumascape, consolidation has been the check and balance on ad-tech proliferation.
But could we be about to enter another wave of merger and acquisition?
One platform exec thinks so. In this video interview with Beet.TV, OpenX’s senior director of buyer development says the new practice of header bidding, combined with a drive for trusted inventory, is going to disrupt the market.
“We’re just going to continue to see massive consolidation,” Joey Leichman says. “I think folks have already started deciding that they maybe don’t need to use 70-plus supply partners, and that they can limit themselves to whatever their number is, whether it’s three or five or 10 partners who walk the quality walk, so to speak, without sacrificing any reach or any scale.”
For Leichman, that is a far cry from the original programmatic promise, which was to make everything under the sun available. But times have changed, and – in a cycle ad-tech watchers have likely grown accustomed to – new software that aimed to make things more efficient is now driving a contraction.
“I think the original promise of programmatic, particularly when it was DSP buying, was you get to see every potential impression, and algorithmically you can select the best one,” Leichman adds. “But given, particularly, the proliferation of header bidding technology, that’s no longer the case. The DSPs can’t physically accommodate or technically accommodate all of the requests coming in, so now buyers are only seeing a slice of it.
“So, the natural evolution of that is buyers saying, ‘Well, if I’m only going to be able to see a slice, I want to see the best slice, so I’m going to consolidate now towards a set of partners who present to me high-quality curated brand safe inventory’.
This video is part of a series titled The Consumer First, a New Era in Digital Media presented by MediaMath. For more from the series, please visit this page.
