I recently returned from a fun trip to New Orleans to connect with our customers and to meet some new faces. While the days were very productive and full of interesting content, I’ll leave that reporting to Digiday. For the purposes of this post, I’ll focus on the three recurring themes that surfaced in many of my conversations with North American publishers.

Trending Topic 1: First price could be an opportunity for publishers
I think the sentiment here is pretty positive on the move to first price in the header. That said, there are reservations about unprepared buyers turning publisher supply off, as well as concerns about transparency in these new auction mechanisms. We have some customers that state seeing an initial lift in pricing, and others that have seen this initial lift then a stabilization below these initial levels. I think pubs remain optimistic and are trusting their monetization partners are “doing the right thing”.
Trending Topic 2: PMPs are still where we want to go but are tough to scale
Pubs remain bullish on PMPs but report getting less than outstanding results from buyers looking to reach scale across quality supply. Not a surprising reality, given buyers have grown used to the ease and reach of The Duopoly. Obviously, we see mixed results with our customers but, I’d recommend this white paper on fixing PMPs we produced a while ago which is still relevant today.
Trending Topic 3: The one that won’t go away: fraud
I keep hearing this in the market. Pubs are struggling with misrepresentation of their traffic in the marketplace. Both sellers and buyers are trying to find ways to reduce fraudulent traffic, which is no easy feat. Publishers seem happy so far with the development of ads.txt but we still have a long way to go.
Feel free to reach out with any further thoughts! Have a great finish to Q4!

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data driven programmatic publishing programmatic events