Australian publishers are readying themselves to launch on private programmatic exchanges, even though caution still extends to open platforms for fear of CPMs being “trashed”.
Speaking at last Friday's Media Summit, APEX CEO Pippa Leary says that a recent trip across Europe proved to her that there is a “tsunami of publisher platforms erupting” across the continent and that publishers in Australia are starting to realise “that real-time bidding and programmatic, as a style or form of buying and selling media, is unstoppable because of the efficiencies and value of it.”
“There’s no putting your head in the sand,” she said.
Leary explained how publishers are coming together to “mirror the scale of open exchanges,” but they have one important difference, “every piece of inventory is 100% premium.”
The APEX boss was joined on the panel by Bohemia managing partner Brett Dawson, who said he welcomes the move, and thinks it's likely that there will be a widespread move from open exchanges to a whole different set of private exchanges.
“The way we will transact will be more like Groundhog Day,” he said. “We will have specific relationships with specific publishers who have excellent premium inventory.”
Leary pointed to the an increased need to develop private exchanges because of the ongoing problems of fraud and arbitrage.
On fraud, she revealed that, from a sample taken from 181 websites in the US last year, some 23% of all video impressions and at least 11% of display were created by bots, causing a leakage of $6.3bn US dollars. “It’s a massive problem,” she said.
Allure Media – the Australian publishers of Gizmodo and Business Insider – CEO Jason Scott, said that his company is open to trading on both open and private exchanges in Australia, but is currently biding its time.
“We’ve made a conscious decision to stay out of open exchanges while the first couple of tranches wash through in Australia,” he said.
“We’ve seen a lot of publishers get hurt because their CPMs have been trashed, and clients have come out the other end saying, ‘well, that was cheap, but did it get results?’ We’ve been waiting, watching and getting counsel from the US about what to do.”
The Guardian last month, in partnership with CNN International, the Financial Times, The Economist and Reuters, launched a global programmatic private marketplace, named the Pangaea Alliance, which allows advertisers to buy to the publishers' premium advertising inventory programmatically.
The Guardian Australia will be the lead seller of the Pangaea Alliance in Australia, until a global sales team has been established. It has just been announced that expansion is planned before the end of the year, potentially creating a two-tier system of publishers and inventory.
Email Nicola at nicolariches@yaffa.com.au.