How to Curate Digital Ad Supply in 2020
As marketers explore curated approaches to digital ad inventory, they need to maximize the impact of every programmatic ad purchase. Here’s a checklist for getting the most out of every impression. Shares, Alex White, COO of Peer39.
Supply path optimization reached a tipping point in 2019, as marketers looked to maximize their efficiency and find the shortest path an ad had to travel before it reached the publisher and the end consumer who’d ultimately see that ad.
For years, advertisers took a very detailed approach toward their audiences and simply sought to find inventory that appeared in front of those audiences. The rise of SPO represents something new: a curated approach to inventory. But it’s only the first step.
Curation for cost and media transparency are critical, but as advertisers continue to strive for relevance and suitability, they’ll need to look at other factors for curating their supply going forward. Here’s a checklist for approaching supply curation, with the goal of maximizing the impact of each programmatic ad purchase.
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1. Ensure Quality Opportunities for Impact
Throughout the 2010s, viewability became a major buzzword in programmatic buying. By this point, experienced traders know that qualifying as viewable doesn’t necessarily guarantee an impactful impression. Curation in 2020 means going a step further to make sure that ads are not only viewable, but avoid cluttered pages and appear in content-rich environments. This also means avoiding banner farms, parked domain pages, and other less credible publishers.
2. Define Suitability for Your Brand
Brand suitability began catching on in 2019, but it was often misunderstood by brands and agencies as a new version of brand safety that simply factors in the number of ads per page. Suitability can – and should – be much more nuanced than that, with each individual brand setting their own standards for suitability. Brands should strive to identify aspects of a publisher that make the page suitable for a brand and then curate their inventory so that it only includes publisher pages that fit those characteristics. This means steering towards content-rich environments, rather than those cluttered with ads, or assessing the difference between an article page and a homepage.
3. Get Realistic About News Content
While the concept of curation denotes a tighter selection of inventory, brands shouldn’t approach the process with an eye towards cutting away or eliminating entire content categories. Instead, they need to examine what they might have been afraid of in the past to uncover untapped opportunities. For example, in the quest for safe and suitable content, many brands have been overly cautious about what kinds of stories their ads appear next to. This has led many to eschew hard news.
This approach throws the baby out with the bathwater, eliminating a massive swath of valuable content that consumers engage with daily. There’s no need to simply lop off an entire section of content. Insightful curation uses a scalpel instead, finding the value in previously untapped categories.
4. Value The Implied Third-Party Endorsement Again
The rise of programmatic swung the pendulum of media planning all the way over to the audience side, decoupling it from media. The net result was that brands placed less value on the cachet of media brands like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, and the implied endorsement that came with running ads in those publications. That’s not to say that advertisers completely abandoned this thinking and these prestige publications, but it might not have been a badge of honor for CMOs that it once was.
Unfortunately, publishers suffered as a result, and many have faced difficulty selling their brand to advertisers who value audience above all else. For proof, think of how many times you visit a site with five ad units on a single page, and every single ad is for the same advertiser. It happens daily, and it’s a sign of wasted, inefficient, poorly curated ad spend. In 2020, brands need to work to swing the pendulum back toward page environment and reap the benefits of aligning their messages with trusted media brands.
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5. Check Bid and Buy Decisions
Demand-side platforms have been widely adopted, to the point where many buyers may view DSPs as commoditized and not bother examining the minute differences between platforms. But not all DSPs function in the same manner. Some will only bid on users with a cookie match (or “known” users), while others will bid on inventory regardless of whether the end user is “known” or not. Optimized supply curation necessitates a DSP that can make bidding and buying decisions regardless of a cookie match between platform and supply partner.
There are trillions of impressions available to advertisers through RTB, but only a fraction of those are right for an advertiser. Brands and agencies are cutting out supply partners as they look to get more control over where their ads appear, and throughout 2020 they’ll dig even deeper into ways to curate their supply. Sophisticated advertisers will use the tools at their disposal to cherry-pick the impressions that best align with their goals and sensibilities, and next are using a combination of user, quality, contextual and situational targeting tactics against their curated supply to achieve their goals.
