Despite all the excitement in our industry about programmatic buying and selling of inventory (via ad exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, and a variety of direct-to-publisher vehicles like private exchanges and private marketplaces), the vast majority of dollars today are still spent the "old fashioned" way.
Since display ads began being sold in the mid-1990s, very little has changed in the way that the vast majority of ad dollars are spent. Most ad dollars are spent via a guaranteed media buy -- either a sponsorship (the brand is placed on a specific location for all impressions served to it) or a volume guarantee (ad space of a specific volume is reserved against either a specific location on a page, or a specific group of pages, but will rotate out dynamically on a per-page view).
Sponsorships are great for buyers and sellers because they're easy to manage. The buyer gets a fixed location, takes over every impression delivered to that ad location, and the seller doesn't need to worry much about over- or under-delivery. (Sometimes they will sign up for a volume guarantee here, but many times they don't.) And generally while sponsorships tend to yield low CPMs for the publisher, the ad buys are frequently for solid brands and the size of a sponsorship tends to be large on a dollar figure, if not large on CPM basis (e.g., it may be a multi-million dollar buy, but the CPM is probably low).
The oft-misunderstood publisher benefit of sponsorships, despite the low CPM, is that the cost of sales tends to be much lower. A sponsorship buy can be executed quickly and doesn't require a lot of labor after the fact. I'll discuss more about the issue of cost of sales when I touch on efficiency. But don't underestimate the importance here.
Guaranteed volume-based buys are in many ways the cause of vast problems in our industry, despite being generally more lucrative and higher yielding on a CPM basis than sponsorships. First, they tend to be very sales and operations intensive, which means the cost of sales is often extremely high (frequently above 30-40 percent, and sometimes significantly higher for some of the most complex campaigns). There are several reasons why guaranteed volume-based buys are complex and costly.
First is that when inventory is sold in advance, there is some degree of prediction involved to determine how much inventory of any specific type or location will exist in the future. This inventory prediction problem is still one of the biggest issues we face as an industry. The ability to predict how many users will visit a specific section or page of a site is quite difficult on its own. Given the guaranteed nature of these buys, the prediction methods need to be extremely accurate, and getting accurate predictions is hard, even just based on seasonality and one or two locations. Once additional parameters, like various types of targeting, frequency capping, and various competitive exclusions are applied, the calculations are near impossible to calculate accurately.
This difficulty with predicting specific inventory in advance is the root of the second problem -- optimizing buys on the publisher side during the life of the campaign. This rears its head in general, but much more so when the buy is targeted. Most buyers have no idea of the complexity of delivering these buys and how much work happens behind the scenes at most publishers to pull it off. Frequently there are daily (sometimes multiple daily) optimizations done behind the scenes to make sure a targeted campaign delivers against its goals. This can involve making changes to prioritization in the ad delivery systems, spreading the buy to larger pools of inventory, and bumping lower-paying campaigns out of the same inventory pool (at least temporarily) in order to ensure delivery.
Most publishers are not aware of the vast amount of labor done by ad agencies on their buys across publishers in order to ensure that advertiser goals are met. This can range from just ensuring that volumes that were agreed to are met, to ensuring that click or conversion rates driven by the buy are meeting a performance goal (for the direct-response advertisers). In either case, the amount of work done by agencies to optimize these buys, frequently across dozens of publishers, is huge.
Buying and selling inventory must get more efficient
This brings us to our first big problem that must be solved. Media buying and selling needs to get more efficient. If you compare efficiency (i.e., costs) of buying and selling traditional media versus online media, there's a very clear difference. I've been told by numerous sources that the efficiency is between 10-15 times less efficient for big spenders for buying online versus offline media. And certainly there is a similar lack of efficiency for selling of online media.
One way that both buying and selling can become more efficient is through basic automation. Much of the back and forth of a media buy between buyer and seller is manual. There are not simple standard efficient means of automating the media buying process. There are numerous tools on the market that try to do this in the guaranteed space, but adoption has remained small so far. Between TRAFFIQ (full disclosure: I run product and engineering at TRAFFIQ), Centro, FatTail, isocket, Donovan Data Systems, DoubleClick, and others, there is plenty of choice to automate buying and selling of guaranteed between systems focused on the buy or the sell side of the problem.
And despite the promise of programmatic buying and selling removing much of the inefficiency from the space, most publishers are so worried about putting premium inventory into exchanges that we are still relegating exchanges to massive repositories of remnant inventory. Publishers must start using the private exchange and marketplace functionality that's available to represent premium inventory.
This doesn't mean that salespeople go away, and it doesn't mean that publishers lose control of their inventory. It just means that much of the inefficient order-taking and campaign optimization that is done on both sides of the media buy can be removed from the system and automated. Sales become a more evangelical process, less work goes on behind the scenes, and salespeople stop spending so much time "order-taking." Today publishers can set dynamic floor prices against exchange cleared inventory, buyers can automate their bids, and at the end of the day, the whole marketplace can get more efficient.
Publishers often say they don't want this to happen because they fear a drop in the CPM of their guaranteed buys. The reality is that the cost of sales is so extreme on guaranteed media buys -- especially targeted or frequency-capped ones -- that publishers could easily skim 20-30 percent off their floor price if the cost of sales was significantly reduced.
One major reason that we're having such trouble in the display industry is the predominance of performance or DR spend in our space. This overemphasis on DR for display has huge consequences to our space -- from depressed CPMs to a focus on metrics and methodologies that require a lot of work. This leads us to our second major change that must take place.
