Blurring lines between Programmatic & CPC Media Buying

To create a distinction, CPC mostly operated on Native Inventory while display/ heavy ad formats were filled by programmatic direct or PMP.

In the last few years, there has been a worldwide surge in programmatic direct/PMP media buying across display and native advertising. For all premium publishers this has become a steady source of revenue and is a welcome shift from opening inventory in open auctions. It's also an elite club for brand advertisers and premium publishers to mingle and ensure brand safety, fraud protection, targeting, etc. With the increased demand for greater ROI on marketing efforts, today’s media plans have either a mix of both or one of the following two objectives:

1. Targeting specific audience (demographic/interest/retarget) based on a media plan

2. Generate better CTR / post click metrics / Viewability

Merging of Native & Display

CPC campaigns over adtech platforms from various publishers also work to serve the second objective. To create a distinction, CPC mostly operated on Native Inventory while display/ heavy ad formats were filled by programmatic direct or PMP. This soft boundary lasted only a couple of years, and the lines are now blurring.

For example, Adwords (CPC demand) is one of the largest buyers on the DBM (Ad Exchange) while fill rates on the programmatic pioneer, Adsense continue to fall. Native mediators like Outbrain, Taboola and Colombia pipe in demand that is more categorized for display ads. On the other side, ad formats on publisher sites reflect this change with distinction between native and display getting confusing at best.

This merging of horizons can also be witnessed on Adtech platforms. Pure performance CPC platforms are now essentially driven by Machine Learning. Publishers now coordinate with a host of algorithms internally to generate a better response on their dedicated inventory.

The evolving world of DSPs

While traditionally, DSPs originated as auction coordination engines with advanced targeting options for buying inventory on unlimited SSPs and exchanges, they eventually evolved towards deeper goal optimizations. In spite of these benefits involved, an edge that performance platforms like Adwords, Facebook Ads, Outbrain, Taboola, Colombia, etc. have over their DSP counterparts is the advantage of sitting on the page and having access to user behavior minus the latency that dilutes user experience in RTB auctions associated with DSPs.

Advantage Colombia - Marrying DSP with intelligence and data

An interesting challenge arises at owned and operated large networks like Times Internet, where agencies may want to run programmatic direct deals, as per advertiser or global mandates, even though its internal performance platform Colombia can generate 50% better performance. Fortunately, Colombia has been able to marry DSP & Colombia’s intelligence to a certain extent and bring some lift compared to a standalone DSP workflow.

It will be interesting to see how programmatic and performance ecosystems evolve with more innovations both on the demand and supply side. For publishers, it means Inventory/AdOps Strategy, Sales Organization and Network/Indirect Strategy will all get even more integrated.

To know more about Colombia, visit www.colombiaonline.com