These days, media-buying agencies don’t want to accept cookie-cutting technical solutions.
After years in which they felt at the mercy of software platforms, more are now exerting more control than ever over how they find and buy ad inventory.
Case in point – Magna Global sets stringent requirements for the supply-side platforms (SSPs) it works with, and now wants to go beyond the supply-chain information historically provided to it by demand-side platforms.
“Even when a partner is telling you that they are transparent or that they’re supplying some transparency to you, it’s hard to get that at scale when you work with so many different partners,” confesses Jean Fitzpatrick, Magna Global marketplace development VP.
So Fitzpatrick is getting strict.
“When we look at SSPs … we ask them to declare a lot of information. We ask them about their partnerships with companies that can do verification. We ask them about how much inventory they have and what kind of inventory they have.”
But Magna Global is doing more than that. The agency is using an evolving variant of supply-path optimization (SPO), a method demand-side platforms (DSPs) use in order to streamline how they interact with supply-side platforms (SSPs).
“It means something different to the different groups within programmatic,” Fizpatrick adds. “For us, it’s taking a look at what the DSPs did and going a layer deeper … creating more control along the entire path than we may have had in the past.”
SPO has been around for a while, but Fitzpatrick says it is changing. “It’s really evolved and I think, at this point, for a lot of buyers, what it means more than anything is looking at those technology partners in the supply space and starting to consolidate those.”
This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic. For more videos, please visit this page.
