“Over the course of six months, they onboarded every MFA publisher,” Kane said. “Which is reasonable … that is a business incentive that SSPs have.”
Five years ago, an SSP tried to turn off low-quality supply, explaining that these websites perform well on vanity metrics like viewability but do not drive real business outcomes, said an executive who requested anonymity to discuss private company matters.
However, after turning off the inventory, agency clients of the SSP complained that their brand clients would be disappointed by the lower metrics. The SSP then sought to educate in-house brand media buyers, then CMOs and even CEOs, about the risk of relying on cheap, low-quality inventory, before realizing the task of removing this supply was more Sisyphean than expected.
“The entire fucking problem is marketing is a best guess of outcomes,” the executive said, noting the metrics so important to marketers are often unreliable. “Systems got built up on these complex incentives.”
Breaking the cycle
While buyers looking for cheap performance metrics may perpetuate the sale of low-quality inventory, some industry practitioners have found a different path. Kargo, for example, emphasizes quality over scale in its pitch to marketers, said CEO Harry Kargman.
“We are the most premium, so buy us first,” Kargman said. “There is a narrative that the internet is unlimited. If you want to actually curate and have the best stuff, that is a more narrow and carefully selected group.”
Kargo’s model is not replicable for all SSPs because it also sells proprietary ad formats that can only be purchased via its SSP, a bespoke offering that large SSPs—which function more like commodities traders—don’t have, said Justin Wohl, chief revenue officer at Salon, TVTropes and Snopes.
Instead of removing inventory they feel is necessary for business, Wohl said SSPs could siphon off low-quality inventory into private marketplaces instead of just placing high-quality publishers in these cordoned-off environments, making premium the norm, not the exception.
“You shouldn’t stumble upon the inventory. You should knowingly choose that lower class of inventory because you’re trying for some volume play and performance play,” Wohl said. “It seems like brands have been duped by [low-quality inventory] being represented the same way as SSPs represent premium inventory.”
Some buyers have no trouble separating the wheat from the chaff. Three years ago, Keri Thomas, performance media director at Iris Worldwide, created an inclusion list of preferred publishers to run ads on, after noticing placement reports from programmatic campaigns that would be embarrassing to show clients.