SPO-MG I Don't Believe It
Thoughts on Supply Path Optimisation
(If you get the image associated with this article and the heading then let me know - I thought it might have been a bit niche!)
Supply Path Optimisation – the topic on a lot of people’s lips. Lets get into some of the details.
Premium
Argh. If I see another pithy definition of ‘premium’ again it’ll be too soon. I thought we had all agreed that ‘premium is in the eye of the beholder’, not some blanket categorisation for every single advertiser about type of content, format, directness etc.. Advertisers need access to data before determining which ads are adding value for them, every advertiser should start doing this… see next point.
Log file access
Apparently in an ANA board meeting Marc Pritchard said that all advertisers should demand access to their log files. I mean, I’m unsure what most advertisers can actually do with them, but hooray! They should (reasons to come below)! Statements of intent like these make me optimistic about the future of digital advertising and in particular advertisers leaning into technical aspects which can create significant gains.
Log file matching
Heads up a tangential story incoming… my slightly strange aunt used to breed dogs and used to eat the dog food before giving it to her dogs, apparently this was a good way to taste the quality of the ingredients as dog breeding is an expensive hobby (well that’s what she said anyway). I decided that TPA digital should channel my Aunty Diane through our TPA Labs accelerator and buy our own ads. Hey – if we’re recommending things to clients, we should know if they work! We setup our campaigns across mweb, app, desktop and tablet and matched the DSP logs with the SSP logs from Xandr to match impressions from DSP to SSP.
Note, this was not a sponsored engagement, we just wanted to see if SSP logs could add any value.
The results on TPA collaboration with Xandr are here.
I don’t want to undermine the hard work of my team that worked on this, but we all collectively agreed that this wasn’t difficult to do and once done it works hard ongoingly. This ofcourse was one DSP, one SSP and one advertiser – but you can see a world where advertisers start to do this themselves.
SSPs
What a wild year 2023 has been for Supply Side Platforms. EMX are done and dusted. Yahoo have decided to shutter their SSP offering (to much surprise). The market consolidation is on. There will be winners but there will be more losers.
Magnite and Pubmatic don’t think they’ll be the losers and in their respective earning calls spoke about how well placed they are. Seb from Digiday (industry legend) wrote a great piece on SSPs here.
James in my team wrote an excellent thought piece on the Future of SSPs here (well worth a good 5 minute read).
Use Cases
Myself and my team get approached a lot about SPO and it comes from all sorts of angles (a bit like in-housing did back in the day, transparency leading the way and often incorrectly).
See below for 7 positive use cases for SPO, some more well known than others. Feel free to reply and add your own!
Financial Transparency
Identity Resolution
Ad Verification
Sustainability
Diverse Owned Media
Technical & Commercial Partnerships
Efficiency AND Effectiveness
The AdPod Season 3
The AdPod podcast series is about to re-launch with amazing guests. This series will have a new episode released every Monday morning (US time) for 12 weeks. We’ll be covering ad fraud, measurement, trade press, the job market, media pitching, digital media education and much more. I’m super excited by this series – I hope you love it as much as I do.
Anyway, enjoy the rest of your week and chat soon.