Buyers want to cut out tech partners and their associated fees when possible.
One buyer, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive industry relations, wishes that more programmatic guaranteed deals, which are direct with a single publisher, could be transacted without a demand-side platform.
“You’re buying inventory from the same seller. Now you have to pay The Trade Desk to do the same,” instead of paying one fee to the publisher to transact programmatically, the buyer said.
Two other buyers said that when figuring out where to prune tech partners, they’re more willing to cut out supply-side platforms than DSPs, where so much buying data across media types is already stored.
“There are a lot of hops that happen,” said Matthew Kramer, head of brand investment at Media.Monks. The agency wants to “eliminate some of those unnecessary hops. It could be multiple SSPs a publisher is working with.”
MiQ asks publishers how they would prefer to be bought and then prioritizes that path, Koenig said. MiQ also works with SSPs to minimize the number of extra tech partners added to transactions.
At Havas Media Group, it’s already table stakes to work with SSPs that are clear about what percent of a campaign is going toward working media (the actual cost of the advertisement), rather than tech and data fees, said chief activation officer Mike Bregman.
“We have excluded certain partners and certain SSPs because we weren’t able to get the full level of transparency and visibility,” Bregman said.
More paths don’t have to mean more problems
While Koenig has been an advocate in the industry for SPO initiatives in CTV, she said that the pathway proliferation in streaming isn’t all bad.
“When so much spend is consolidated into one SSP or one DSP, it drives prices up,” Koenig told ADWEEK. “There is a lot of benefit to working with more partners in CTV, or at least testing new strategies.”
But this does make choosing the right path to buy media more of a challenge, said Friedman.
“Being a professional media buyer is not supposed to be easy,” Friedman said. “As an industry, we need to embrace difficulty.”