Media Buyers Deserve Transparency From The Programmatic Supply Chain

Everyone wants to get value for money but, with marketing budgets becoming tighter, ensuring that client ad dollars don’t go to waste has become essential for media buyers and agencies.

In programmatic advertising, making sure you’re getting value for money isn’t always straightforward. The supply chain to get an ad from a media buyer onto a publisher’s site is often convoluted and confusing, with too many dollars not making it from the advertiser to the publisher.

Media buyers, planners, strategists and brands deserve a better way to programmatically buy ad placements online, and it’s up to the programmatic supply chain to deliver.

The Price Is Too Damn High!

Programmatic media buyers are paying too much to get their clients’ ads out to audiences.

The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s (IPA) Q1 2023 Bellwether Report showed that marketing budgets are increasing, with more than a fifth of firms recording an expansion and two-thirds keeping their budgets stable. But this growth in raw ad spend does not necessarily show an increase in value.

Transparent demand-side platform (DSP) MediaMath knows that planners and buyers are giving up margin and, accordingly, return on ad spend for their clients. Rather than being the result of slack media buying, the loss of return on ad spend comes directly from the inefficiencies in the programmatic supply chain.

In fact, the Cross Industry Programmatic Taskforce found that only 42 per cent of ad impressions were able to be matched from end-to-end. What’s more, around three per cent per cent of supply chain costs were completely unattributable. That might sound small but, remember, the programmatic advertising industry is valued at more than US$400 billion.

Given the economic climate and sharper scrutiny over ad spend, with every impression mattering more and margins becoming tighter, it’s essential to get a handle on where ad spend is going and where it is vanishing into thin air.

But without being able to see how a client’s money is being spent, it can be impossible for media buyers to know where to start when it comes to optimising supply paths and getting their marketing spend back on track.

Less In, More Out

The results for brands choosing a transparent DSP over a traditional platform might seem obvious — better visibility over media spend leads to less wasted ad dollars.

However, by choosing to work with a transparent DSP, brands and media planners will be able to fine-tune their budgets to achieve maximum reach, efficiency or conversion. In fact, with a transparent programmatic supply chain, media buyers will be able to better achieve success however it might be defined by a client.

One APAC B2C using MediaMath’s transparent platform almost doubled its share of spend in high-performing ad exchanges by reading into the pre-bid data and boosting scale on Supply-Side Platforms (SSP) that were performing well for the brand.

The brand was spending 83 per cent of its ad dollars in poorly performing exchanges and its cost-per-action (CPA) was at $4,652. But, once optimising through the transparent DSP, its CPA dropped by more than half and third-party measurement of ROI performance increased by almost 30 per cent.

A Year Of Efficiency

For media planners and buyers, this level of control and visibility over a client’s ad spend is going to become increasingly important in 2023.

When it comes time to pitch, whether for new work or to hold onto an incumbent’s account, being able to clearly demonstrate where ad spend is going and how much of it is coming back, would be invaluable.

What’s more, being able to track and keep a greater eye on programmatic ads will pay dividends as Google begins to depreciate the third-party cookie later this year.

So, you do the math. A 100 per cent transparent DSP makes sense 100 per cent of the time. But, in 2023, it makes even more sense than ever.

Want to know more? Check out MediaMath here or on LinkedIn.

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