‘Trade Desk is the Spirit Airlines of the DSP world’: Overheard at the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit

Keep reading for some of the insights that were overheard during the discussions at DPMS.

Quotes have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Measurement and attribution challenges persist

“In my view, we’ve been handicapped as marketers by not having enough information to tell a positive story around what CTV is bringing to the bottom line.”

“They provide you a data dump of what happened, or you might get an image pixel. But there’s no standard user agent for CTV.”

“We’re always going to lose to Google and Facebook until someone says we’re just going to have to stop buying CTV, or lower our CTV [spend] and recommend diversification if you can’t do [measurement].”

“The walled gardens, if you say this needs to be measurement to check them, they’re going to say no. Facebook and Google immediately will say no, because they don’t want anyone checking their homework. Roku is not usually very friendly with checking their homework, as I’ve experienced in the past.”

Trust and transparency woes leave marketers handicapped

“The networks are handicapping marketers’ ability to invest more in their properties because we don’t have enough information to make the case.”

“Everything is confusing around the media space right now for clients, period. They’re so worried that, frankly, we’re all taking their money and they’re not getting ad spend.”

“We need to put the screws to DV360, because they are a multi-million dollar company that gets so much of our money that, based on the transparency reports we’re seeing, are letting so much through the cracks.” 

“The only way you can speak is by turning things off [in programmatic spend] and seeing what breaks.”

“We’re the ones that have to incentivize them to [be more transparent in fee structure]. They’re never going to stop cutting fees, because the money keeps rolling in.”

“Once in a while, you’ll catch them on some easy mistakes. If they were more sophisticated, more randomized, we wouldn’t have noticed, but they were lazy.”

There are too many DSPs, and pricing transparency lags

“Trade Desk is the Spirit Airlines of the DSP world.”

“There’s probably every week some other DSP or some upstart saying, ‘We got the new secret sauce for you to try us.’ It’s exhausting because it takes a long time to even get a contract for DSP with all these commitments.”

“When I onboard new clients, I judge their old agency about how many DSPs they were using, or which DSPs they were using. And I use it almost like a competitive thing.”

“It is getting very expensive because they tax on it. It’s, ‘You want to use this data thing that you kind of necessarily need to even operate. That’s $1.50 CPM.'”

“The fees for Trade Desk and most of the DSPs — but Trade Desk is maybe the worst offender — get wildly out of hand very quickly. The way that they’re calculated and buried in all the details is purposely, in my opinion, meant to obfuscate the actual details.”

Criticisms of ad tech middlemen

“I had to deal with Nexxen and they gave me a bad deal, and I had to go back to them five times to be like, ‘You keep putting FAST AVOD in my premium channel.’ Sharing things like that with each other will help us [push for greater transparency in the industry.]”

“We’re in a weird industry where, unlike most, supply and demand is determined by the supplier and the demand provider, our pricing is determined by everyone in between, and we have no insight into that supply chain.”

“We don’t really have a voice that’s pushing this, because the middlemen control all these different trade groups and stuff. The middlemen have more power than we do as an agency.”

“We’ve all collectively let this layer in the middle grow — this ad tech layer that’s extracting a giant tax and providing very little in return.”

“The publishers control all the inventory, and the middlemen control all the ability for us to check that inventory. They don’t let us run JavaScript. They don’t let us run much to check them. So what we’re left with is trusting people who historically, don’t have our best interest at heart.”

Inventory quality check

“I do not believe that there is enough AVOD inventory out there to satisfy all the demand that’s coming in.”

“The problem is that this unsold inventory is being pulled into our premiums.”

“They’re selling shit until you call them out on it. The CPMs are premium CPMs until you are actually paying attention to every single thing about that CPM and calling them out. Then you see stuff on the added value list. All it is is unsold inventory. It’s junk.”

“Not every agency is equipped, especially ones that are linear going into digital, they are not equipped for the nightmare that they run into of the spammers and the bots and everything they’re going to get hit with.”

“It’s not necessarily that programmatic budgets are increasing for CTV. It’s that legacy channels, which advertisers have lost confidence in, they’re now going to CTV because they feel like it’s more of a premium type of media, but [advertisers are] also being taken advantage of because of that.”

Clients having to ‘trust and not control’ programmatic spend

“They’re having to trust and not control. That’s a big piece of it. I have to trust the audiences in which [media buyers] are targeting as opposed to actually being able to put my hands on data of targeting, in [clients’] minds. They can’t see the absolute bottom line lead come in.”

“Back in the day, we used to put an ad where the client could see it, just to shut up the client. That’s harder to do now, it’s harder to manage and it’s harder to communicate.”

“For those of us who have been around media for a long time, it is absolutely just the same exact things that we got in television, but now they expect different for CTV. That’s really where the challenge is.”

“Linear buying just was easier to grasp and a lot of clients understood it. They never really questioned if it worked. They just felt it worked. As we moved into a digital space, like a lot of advertising, we started getting down to last-click sales, cost-per-leads and all that. When we moved back into [digital] video, all of a sudden, it’s, ‘How did this impact the bottom line?’ They didn’t ask that question with TV.”