Mobile ads are becoming increasingly personalised, but are publishers and advertisers in sync with their data? of mobile ads and what’s lacking in the ecosystem. Omer Efrat, Inneractive’s Director of Product Management, takes a look at why ad exchanges (SSPs) should work directly with agencies to offer audience packages.
In the 1990’s, during the early days of the Internet, it promised to deliver advertising that’s relevant to each viewer’s individual wants and needs. Twenty something years later, most of the ads that we see in our connected devices are far from being personalized. Over seventy percent of consumers surveyed said they are frustrated when they receive generic marketing that isn’t relevant to their interests or past purchases. The boost in adoption of ad blocking tools is yet another indicator that consumers find ads not only irrelevant, but also intrusive and annoying.
Meanwhile, traditional publishers have been turning into content-creation agencies, and experience declining online revenues from their owned and operated properties. Facebook is stealing ad business by promising sizable audiences and granular targeting at competitive prices. In this new environment, publishers are depending on the algorithm of the Facebook feed to gain exposure for their content, potentially compromising their journalistic ethics and standards. There is a big gap between the personalized campaigns and logic trees coming out of ad agencies and the actual ads served by programmatic buying tools. How did we get here?
The answer is fairly simple. The roles of the different players in today’s ad tech value chain are not optimized for delivering on the promise of ad personalization.
The ad supply chain is split down the middle: Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) engage with agencies where Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) engage with publishers. SSP’s typically offer publishers access to multiple buyers of advertising, but don’t really offer any added value that can promote the goal of personalization.
DSPs have traditionally assumed the responsibility of segmenting audiences by connecting with various Data Management Platforms (DMPs), without the benefit of having ownership of first party data that reside with advertisers and publishes. This was, in part, due to their ability to offer attribution information, however, now that there are specialized attribution vendors this is no longer a value proposition held by DSPs.
We propose instead that SSP’s should work directly with agencies through their trading desks to offer audience packages across publishers. This service will enable the industry to make a shift to selling audiences from offering real estate.
If you think about it, SSPs already have access to all the data required to execute a buy, including audience segmentation. Similar to Facebook, SSPs are able to track users across publisher sites to build a richer profile including dating preferences, favorite sports teams and news interests. Location density also improves data accuracy by providing numerous geo signals on the same user throughout the day. With the in-app mobile environment, SSPs can also benefit from more explicit and implicit data that developers gather on their more engaged users.
Despite their narrow historical role, the SSP is actually the only entity that has the ability to aggregate all of this data and create a robust, holistic user profile across publishers, devices and environments (mobile web and in-app). Giving to SSP a more central role, will enable it to leverage this rich data and finally optimize personalization and create a triple win by driving value to publishers, advertisers and consumers. Data driven personalization is a mission that we all, as an industry, should aspire to accomplish.
By Omer Efrat
Director Product Management