A blog for programmatic sellers.
Adomik was created to help digital media sellers (publishers, networks, media holding companies, and any ad supported businesses) effectively value inventory and optimize their programmatic ad revenue. Put simply, we help publishers make more money in today’s complex and dynamic programmatic world.
Our blog’s raison d’etre stems from the fact that today’s programmatic marketplace favors buyers because the majority of the investment into programmatic has been focused on buy-side technology and buyers have effectively leveraged these tools. We’ve seen hundreds of millions of dollars invested into DSPs and buyer-focused DMPs. As a result, the programmatic marketplace is currently imbalanced and sellers are struggling.
As buy-side investment has occurred publishers have continued to rely upon direct insertion order campaigns to generate the majority of their revenue as they fight a retreat against programmatic. The publishers basic argument has been that when selling programmatically, CPMs go down. Unfortunately for resisting publishers, programmatic display isn’t going away: programmatic ad spending in the U.S. grew 137% in 2014, representing $10 billion in total spend, or 45% of the U.S. digital display ad market, according to eMarketer estimates. Its difficult to argue with 45% of the market and still growing. Mobile, video, native, and all other content-driven markets are also experiencing steep programmatic growth. The digital media market is being consumed by programmatic and most publishers are ill-prepared with the technology, training, and information required to operate confidently within this new environment.
Issues that further exacerbate the reluctance many sellers face as they are pulled into programmatic are as follows:
- DIFFERING BUYER VALUATION CRITERIA: As is well publicized, one of the hallmarks of programmatic is the fact that all buyers do not use the same criteria when determining the value of each impression. Modern audience buying illustrates this issue: When a user lands on a page, a travel retargeting company sees a fundamentally different asset than a car company whose dealer site the same user visited yesterday. While this innovation has made display a more powerful channel, it has caused publishers to worry that they are not able to price appropriate to value — a worry worsened when publishers don’t fully understand the landscape of activity on their inventory.
- MARKET IMMATURITY: Many of the tools that we will be using for the next 10 years are still being defined and standardized. Consider that the terms programmatic direct, programmatic guaranteed, programmatic premium, and programmatic reserved all mean essentially the same thing. Further, tools like Deal ID and PMP exist — and will eventually address publisher concerns about committing their premium inventory to programmatic — but effectively using them is still a work in progress, hence sellers remain tentative dropping brand-quality inventory into programmatic.
- RELATIONSHIP QUESTIONS: Most sellers lack the analytics to glean insights on what’s going on in their inventory and hence suffer from the inability to engage in meaningful dialog with buyers to create stickier long-term relationships. Worse yet, when sellers do get smarter and increase pricing for more competitive inventory, relationships with buyers that seek high margins become more complex, requiring deeper human dialog.
A key benefit of programmatic for buyers is the ability to quickly and inexpensively collect and analyze data. Which segments produced what outputs? What publishers performed better? Which exchange had better cookie matching? The collection of this data combined with their own proprietary data has allowed them to consistently improve their strategies and performance. In the case of programmatic, more data is generally better. As a result, buyers have appropriately leveraged the new reality of cheap data processing power combined with relatively expensive and sophisticated software to make programmatic work for them. Publishers now need to do the same. Most of today’s current publisher technology can only tell how a direct campaign is performing, but not deliver understanding of who is interested in and buying the 45+% of a publisher’s impressions sold through programmatic channels.
Adomik was formed to rebalance the programmatic marketplace.
Adomik provides an equalizing set of tools to publishers. We start by analyzing the publisher’s bid-level data from exchanges. This data provides discreet seller-centric data on each auction. With their “trading data”, publishers understand bidder information, value of bids, frequency of bids and other data which Adomik then combines with a publisher’s first-party audience data and other signals to empower our clients to appropriately value their inventory, expand conversations with premium buyers, optimize overall revenue, and more effectively use deals to protect premium inventory.
This is an exciting time for adtech and those who have helped push the industry to where it is today. However, many on the sell-side have an uneasy feeling regarding the imbalance in both the technology that they use and the information they have at their disposal to manage yield.
We will author our content with the goal of sharing and improving the knowledge among the sell-side, specifically: the yield manager, the CRO, the VP of Programmatic and anyone else tasked with managing revenue for a seller of programmatic media — the folks who are facing today’s muddy and ever-changing waters of programmatic selling, and facing the current market imbalance.
As with our software platform, this blog will endeavor to empower digital sellers with the data and knowledge so that programmatic yield management becomes more scientific and less mysterious — and give the sell-side the same confidence the buy-side has operating within programmatic channels.
While today Adomik provides an analytics and optimization software platform for supply-siders (and we carry the expected bias), we seek the same balanced and sustainable marketplace that other parties to our market seek. As a company serving this market we believe we have an obligation to do what we can to help both the buy and sell sides to conduct efficient, effective, and mutually beneficial commerce. Knowledge is a key component of that obligation (hence the blog).
As all markets are ongoing conversations, so is this blog. We look forward to the dialogue. We look forward to the arguments. We look forward to the growth and the shared knowledge. We hope that the Adomik blog will become a trusted source for cerebral discourse, debate, and innovative thinking about our industry.
Regards,
Nicolas Schueller, CEO
Jonathon Shaevitz, President and COO