Considering the many challenges publishers are facing, is now really the time to pit pubs against each other?
The Trade Desk seems to think so.
In his news-making appearance at last week’s Prebid Summit, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green made the case that the division between the sell and buy sides of programmatic advertising is mostly overblown. According to Green, the true “us vs. them” storyline in programmatic is between “quality publishers who are taking home less than they should be and publishers that are taking home more than they should.”
Green also forcefully pushed back against critics of TTD’s new offerings for publishers, such as OpenPath, a direct-to-publisher integration, and the OpenAds auction wrapper that’s a forked version of Prebid, changed only to require Transaction ID (TID) sharing.
In Green’s view, publishers with better quality ad experiences should benefit from products like OpenAds, while publishers that rely on what he calls “supply-chain shenanigans” like bid duplication, bid caching and ID bridging should be worried.
“The only people who don’t benefit from all the efficiencies we’re talking about are those that duplicate and obfuscate and sometimes lie,” Green said.
Ad Networks vs. Publishers
Green isn’t just trying to create a distinction between publishers that want to compete for ad revenue solely on the strength of their audiences and those that rely on SSPs or ad networks to maximize yield.
The Trade Desk is also growing more vocal in its opposition to the influence that publisher ad networks like Raptive, Mediavine and others wield in steering programmatic standards from the sell side.
For example, Green mentioned “quality publishers who often pay a lot of money for content” as good actors in his Prebid Summit speech.
“There are those that create the content,” he said. “And then there are those that sell it for them, and then there are those that resell it.”
Two sources who attended the summit told AdMonsters that they saw these statements as Green taking shots at publisher ad networks, which invest more in monetization tech than in content creation. In practice, TTD wants to lump ad networks such as Raptive with SSPs in the “resellers” bucket, rather than count them as publishers – even when the ad networks are authorized as direct sellers by publisher clients.
Because of those direct sales relationships, ad networks often speak from the publisher perspective at industry events and represent publishers in industry trade groups like Prebid. But some insiders bristle at the idea that sell-side vendors take the mantle of “publishers” when, strictly speaking, they’re ad tech vendors.
Another dynamic is that Raptive and other publisher aggregators tend to represent the long tail of web publishers. In contrast, TTD’s priorities seem to be moving toward more premium, brand-name publishers, as well as retailers and broadcasters.
Plus, ad networks and long-tail pubs are commonly associated with the auction mechanics The Trade Desk decries. And, in TTD’s telling, the tricks the long tail uses to draw more revenue are taking revenue away from premium publishers.
Transparency Benefits Everyone
However, the ad networks aren’t buying TTD’s framing that they’re in opposition to independent publishers.
When asked for comment on Green’s apparent digs at ad networks, Raptive Chief Strategy Officer Paul Bannister told AdMonsters, “We don’t have any opinion.”
Meanwhile, Freestar chose to highlight the common ground it shares with The Trade Desk, which has been a top demand partner for the ad network through its OpenPath offering.
“In every marketplace, there will always be a small number of bad actors,” said Heather Carver, Chief Revenue Officer at Freestar. “The focus shouldn’t be on casting entire categories of companies as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but on building a level playing field where transparency and quality win.” She added, “We couldn’t be more aligned with The Trade Desk on that goal.”
Carver mentioned as an example of its commitment to transparency that Freestar has “always passed Transaction ID,” as well as supporting other inventory filtering the demand side has pushed for.
“Others may chase quick wins under the guise of ‘yield optimization,’” she said, but “it is only reasonable to be honest about what exactly it is that you are bringing to market.”
Lazar Rubin, CEO of ad network Next Millennium Media, agreed that “TTD is absolutely right that supply-chain inefficiency is holding our industry back.”
However, “the reality is more nuanced than a simple binary of good and bad actors,” Rubin said. Rather, everyone should be focused on whether their supply-chain partners on both sides are adding real value that justifies their take rate, he said.
While Rubin conceded that Green’s rhetoric on TIDs and resellers has been “strong,” he said “the underlying principle is sound: Transparency creates market efficiency.”
Rubin said he supports universal TIDs as a tool that “ultimately rewards publishers delivering genuine value.”
But he pushed back on Green’s characterization of yield optimization as “shenanigans.”
Bid request duplication, bid caching, ID bridging and similar yield monetization tactics aren’t shenanigans, he said. “They’re essential tools for extending addressability in a privacy-forward world.”
Advertisers may see the matter differently, since they feel they’re being sold a bill of goods. But desperation is the only law, apparently.
“Especially in the long tail, these tactics are often crucial for survival,” Rubin said. Small publishers don’t have the depth of first-party data, direct demand or sophisticated yield operators that larger publishers have.
Rather than ridding the supply chain of the tactics the long tail needs to thrive, he said, the path forward should involve “transparency” into the publisher’s mechanics.
That being said, there are certain yield optimization strategies that detract from industry efforts to promote transparency, Carver said.
“It can be hard to say what is definitively in or out of bounds,” she said. “However, things like ID stuffing or duplicating the same ad request with different attributes are blatantly across the line and should be cleaned up ASAP.”
And, for what it’s worth, Carver believes the heated rhetoric around topics like Transaction IDs and reselling is promoting more honest communication about “things everyone knew were happening but wouldn’t talk about.”
This is a moment of evolution for the ecosystem, Carver said. “By investing in trust, transparency and solutions that make quality supply easier to identify and transact on, we can collectively minimize the impact of the bad actors on those of us who do play by the rules.”