Andrew Smith.
The shift from the open internet to more walled gardens, and the consequent commoditisation of media buying as a result, has meant advertisers are having to rethink the way they approach digital marketing.
For a company like DoubleVerify – a software platform that focuses on digital media measurement, data and analytics – this has resulted in more clients leaning into personalisation, brand safety solutions and an increased focus on attention metrics.
DoubleVerify’s SVP of product strategy, Andrew Smith, said that one of the major reasons the media buying landscape is changing is due to the shifts in audience behaviour and content consumption habits.
“In the US, for example, two months ago we moved from mostly measuring web-based impressions to where we’re now social-first,” he said.
“We went from being heavily open-web, programmatic, bid-based measurement, a lot of display; but now, we're seeing more video impressions than ever before.”
As both where advertisers buy media and the ways that they do so evolves, however, those audiences are losing their like-for-like comparability, as its harder to compare ROI for a display ad versus a short-form social video or a CTV spot measured against a retail media activation.
Smith said this means a lot of buyers are now handpicking and curating the media they're buying.
“We're seeing big brands effectively take an inclusion strategy versus an exclusion strategy and now they're building internal teams to examine and curate every property that they're investing in,” he told AdNews.
As well as seeing more programmatic guaranteed deals, where a publisher and advertiser negotiate a price and terms for inventory that's reserved (guaranteed) for that buyer, Smith said that DoubleVerify is also seeing more curated private marketplaces in programmatic buying too – essentially, an auction with a limited audience of advertisers selected by the publisher.
The biggest trend he has seen shaping media buying this year though is algorithmic bidding, a process designed to improve campaign delivery based on specific business goals.
Unlike standard bidding strategies, custom algorithms consider multiple factors in order to optimise against multiple KPIs simultaneously. By cutting down manual transactions, advertisers can save time and bid more effectively on ad placements, improving performance and reducing media waste.
Perhaps seeing the take-up of this trend in the market, DoubleVerify last year acquired Scibids, an AI-powered digital campaign optimisation company.
Leveraging demand-side platform impression level data feeds (including price), first party data and measurement data provided by the brands or their agencies, Scibids AI dynamically generates custom bidding algorithms for clients aligned with the advertiser’s KPIs and desired outcomes.
The acquisition expanded DoubleVerify’s real-time, campaign optimisations solutions and lets the company combine its media quality and performance data that includes viewability, contextual and attention signals with Scibids’s AI technology and real-time optimisation algorithms.
Smith said that while the planning process has always been about reducing complexity and reducing the universe in which ads are bought, a technology like algorithmic bidding means advertisers can feed all of the data sets and possible opportunities into the algorithm and it does the planning for them.
“You can work towards one KPI and then do a secondary KPI once you hit that; these are all things you couldn't have done in the past,” he said.
“It's a total shift in thinking around media planning and we've been able to show a reduction in time spent to execute the campaign.
“You might think, well, what are these people going to do now? The reality is they’ve got a lot more to work on – our Global Insights report from this year showed those surveyed spent 25% of their week manually optimising campaigns - so a technology like this is really going to help them be more successful.”
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