COLOGNE – As publishers have worked to clean up the digital media ecosystem, advances like header bidding have lifted their revenue. But it’s all still a work in progress, according to PubMatic Co-Founder & CEO Rajeev Goel.
“One of the biggest issues right now is trust and transparency across the ecosystem,” says Goel. “We’ve all seen over the last couple of years all sorts of horrible headlines about fraud, about bots, about fees, about auction dynamics. All of these different things that have led marketers to distrust the programmatic ecosystem.”
But he believes the ecosystem has worked hard over the past 18 months “to improve that on a dramatic scale,” Goel explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent DMEXCO 2018 conference.
As a result, publishers have enjoyed increases in revenue and CPM’s for their inventory. As header bidding has “exploded onto the scene,” more of that inventory is monetized programmatically.
“One of the key things that we are focused on is open source capabilities like our OpenWrap technology, which just won an award from Digiday, which is a very open and transparent header bidding solution for publishers,” Goel adds.
Even though PubMatic is on the sell-side, it knows that advertisers and buyers more and more want to know where is their ad spend is going and what they are getting in return.
“So we’re actually spending more time than ever with the agencies and with the advertisers alongside our publisher clients to help connect the two directly,” with PubMatic as the enabler “to execute their business strategy on top of our technology platform.”
Going forward, the company is putting considerable resources into growing its mobile app and video business. “These are now significant portions of our business and we see them becoming even bigger in 2019 and 2020. So we’re really excited about our omni-channel monetization capabilities,” Goel says.
As SSP take rates decline across the industry “we see that as a huge opportunity to make our own business more profitable but also to lower costs for publishers and marketers by continuously lowering the cost of our platform and the cost of delivering technology.”
This video is part of a series produced at DMEXCO 2018 in Cologne titled: “Finding Success in a Time of Transformation.” It is presented by PubMatic. For segments from the series, please visit this page.
