Comscore, iSpot, Nielsen, Innovid and VideoAmp Among Initial Providers Certified by Magnite
NEW YORK, June 16, 2022 — Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform, today announced it has certified Comscore, iSpot, Nielsen, Innovid, and VideoAmp across its CTV inventory to simplify measurement activation and facilitate more transparent programmatic transactions between buyers and sellers.
As TV consumption shifts from linear to digital, the industry is reconfiguring how to plan, transact, and optimize premium video advertising across all screens. Measurement firms are investing heavily in technologies to help buyers and sellers solve for fragmentation. Magnite’s expanded integrations with these emerging currency providers will give CTV buyers and sellers greater flexibility and choice in the solutions at their disposal to facilitate the value exchange.
“CTV advertising operates on many different currencies today – from self-reported audience impressions to third-party outcome-based guarantees,” said Kristen Williams, SVP, Strategic Partnerships at Magnite. “Magnite works with a variety of measurement and attribution experts to provide our clients with a range of solutions to transact. Without a standardized form of measurement at play, Magnite’s role as an independent technology platform is to enable easy activation of any measurement solution that brings greater transparency to TV transactions while building trust across our diverse client base.”
“GroupM is testing a number of different currency providers and it’s essential for these solutions to be embedded within existing workflows,” said Bharad Ramesh, Executive Director, Research & Investment Analytics at GroupM. “Magnite’s integrations with a range of providers will help us remain flexible as we evaluate various measurement services for transactional use-cases. Our ability to plan, transact, and optimize interoperably will help us collaborate with supply partners more effectively and deliver better results for our clients.”
About Magnite
We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. In April 2021 we acquired SpotX to further enhance our CTV business and better help our clients in this rapidly growing market. Anchored in bustling New York City, sunny Los Angeles, mile high Denver, historic London, and down under in Sydney, Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.
Media Contact:
Megan Hughes
203-979-4806
mhughes@magnite.com
Video marketplace brings together environmentally conscious content creators, publishers and buyers to drive impact via programmatic advertising
NEW YORK, June 15, 2022 – Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform, and Primis, the leading Video Discovery platform for global publishers, today announced the launch of Sustainable Stream, a video marketplace that connects environmentally-conscious content creators with publishers and advertisers. Sustainable Stream will generate funding for the production and distribution of content related to combating climate change and provide publishers and advertisers with high quality content on this topic.
“Sustainable Stream was designed to create a continuous cycle of support for content creators that focus on climate awareness, amplifying that through respected publishers, and to make it easier for brands to dedicate their programmatic investments to this important cause,” said Adam Soroca, Chief Product Officer at Magnite. “We are excited to establish this initiative with Primis to help encourage more sustainable practices in the advertising industry.”
“Content is a key part of driving action to solve climate change but it lacks the reach and scale to make a difference,” said Rotem Shaul, Co-Chief Executive Officer at Primis. “Our technology provides publishers with an engagement-based video unit that connects content creators, generates new inventory and monetizes it. This is where we saw an opportunity to work with Magnite to make a difference. Leveraging this within Sustainable Stream, we can curate and deliver content that resonates with audiences and change their behavior.”
“We are pleased to collaborate with Primis and Magnite on the Sustainable Stream initiative,” said Jana Meron, SVP Programmatic & Data Strategy at Insider, Inc. “The new platform powerfully addresses the need to tackle climate change, which is in perfect alignment with the mission of Insider’s Sustainability section. We believe in the power of content to help create meaningful change.”
“We are pleased that Reuters’ independent and impartial reporting on climate change can reach even more people through this effort,” said Gwyn Edwards, Senior Channel Partner Manager at Reuters. “We hope our video coverage – sourced from across Reuters’ global newsroom – will help increase understanding of this important topic.”
To learn more about Sustainable Stream, please click here.
About Magnite
We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Anchored in bustling New York City, sunny Los Angeles, mile high Denver, historic London, and down under in Sydney, Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.
About Primis
Primis is the leader in Video Discovery. Our video ad monetization platform increases publishers’ revenue by helping users discover high-quality video content. The company’s video discovery technology is used by 100s of digital publishers, empowering over 350M uniques with an engagement-based video experience.
In May 2021, we launched Sellers.guide, a free resource to shed light on the ad tech supply chain by comparing ads.txt files with sellers.json. Last month, we released the Wizard, an automated tool to clean ads.txt and help publishers regain control of their inventory.
Media Contact:
Kar Yi Lim
917-658-1994
klim@magnite.com
In the last two years, the world has moved into a more digitally connected paradigm: hybrid work, e-commerce shopping and streaming digital media are the new normal. The UK’s consumption habits have fundamentally shifted, presenting new challenges and opportunities for online advertising in a more fully connected world.
From our clients and partners at Magnite’s eMpower digital event, here are some key trends to note for 2022 and how the industry is adjusting to our new paradigm.
1. Quality over quantity.
The world looks to the UK for some of the best and most authoritative media. Be it digital newspaper subscriptions or BBC broadcasts, we’ve seen a flight to quality in both consumer purchasing power and advertiser investment.
Top earners in the UK are particularly invested in quality media channels and prepared to pay for them. To meet demand, media providers have extended their broadcast offering in digital spaces — be it ITV Hub or BBC iPlayer with much success.
This has presented an opportunity for brands to reach engaged, actionable audiences in a trusted environment. A recent IPA study found that brands that run ads alongside quality media such as digital news channels drive pricing power and profits. The study found that with the rise of fake news and misinformation, brands that advertise on news channels are perceived as more trustworthy and of higher quality — two factors driving brand growth.
Significantly, premium content is also driving viewership. Audiences are going wherever their favourite programs are streamed — be it a Pluto app or subscription service.
With quality top of mind, there’s been a rethink of how to run ad campaigns. Here, the goal of the supply path is to provide the best possible route to the most meaningful media.
2. Overcoming fragmentation for omnichannel impact.
With the explosion of platforms and varied viewing habits, there is quite a lot of fragmentation across digital media. One challenge for buyers is how to prioritise different formats. Marketers are now working backwards from their target audience and focusing on the channels that attract specific segments. A central access point to all online video inventory (OLV) can reduce waste and bring more transparency to ad planning and performance.
Meanwhile, categorising content has become more efficient so publishers can serve ads in their best context. Once a laborious, manual process, a creative review is now becoming automated with the ability to efficiently attribute volume, quality and even language to ad creatives.
However, these tools and advancements have yet to reach critical mass, with many publishers and media suppliers still struggling to understand the nature of the ads they’re serving. Here, consolidation of CTV tech infrastructure and more industry standardisation would make publisher operations more efficient to focus on optimising yield.
Overall, as greater consolidation streamlines supply, the adoption of open solutions will better serve the ecosystem at large. Programmatic will flourish if the industry cooperates to build common standards across formats to improve technical efficiencies.
3. Data is being future-proofed for a cookieless world.
With a cookieless environment on the horizon, finding new ways to reach audiences and addressable groups is a priority. Media platforms will need to future-proof data and monetise audiences differently.
The focus will need to be on transparency from an operational perspective to deliver for brands. Fewer brands are throwing budgets into closed programmatic systems. They want to make informed bidding decisions, see inventory’s true value and access insights to drive campaign outcomes.
Here, new solutions are evolving to pass meaningful data to brands while keeping it privacy safe. Features that are evolving allow publishers to pass valuable content parameters such as genre, series title, language and network to DSPs via Open Real Time Bidding (ORTB) content fields. This helps leverage contextual data to maximise reach and increases inventory value by sharing content metadata with buyers.
Publishers are preparing for an identity overhaul by building a first-party relationship with users and becoming more selective about demand sources. Advertisers are judging their spend more holistically. Sales are the result of smart planning, creativity, and branding, all of which can boost ROI even when brands can’t track every impression.
An omnichannel future.
Post-pandemic, brands are buying in both linear and nonlinear environments and looking to reach consumers across touchpoints to chart a path to purchase and raise visibility. High user engagement across channels — be it display, mobile, CTV and audio — has given marketers a chance to win incremental reach on their campaigns by diversifying their media mix. Here, the UK is at the forefront of leadership with growth and investment in meeting challenges of nonlinear. As the industry adapts, the goal for SSPs is to provide the highest quality choices for brands — delivering access to quality media with efficiency and scale.
Magnite technology will be the access point for programmatic buyers
NEW YORK, June 14, 2022 – Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform, today announced it has been selected to extend programmatic automation to DIRECTV’s traditional television inventory. The initial launch will focus on VOD, with the end goal of DIRECTV enabling additional linear inventory programmatically within the next year.
“DIRECTV Advertising aims to make all our inventory, including our traditional television portfolio, easier to buy and accessible programmatically,” said Matt Jamison, Group Vice President, Digital & Demand Partnerships at DIRECTV Advertising. “Bringing our linear VOD assets under the Magnite umbrella will give buyers the efficiency and targeting capabilities of programmatic, as well as holistic frequency and campaign controls across our full content portfolio.”
Beginning with its pioneering work in addressable TV in 2012, DIRECTV Advertising has been a leader in delivering customized, convergent solutions for its customers by employing Emmy-award-winning advertising technology and media solutions across screens. DIRECTV Advertising seeks to drive collaboration across the ecosystem by working with agencies, advertisers, and industry leaders to ensure marketers can seamlessly buy audiences at scale and evaluate impact using trusted data and proven technology solutions.
“Introducing the advanced capabilities of programmatic buying to traditional television environments will benefit both sides of the TV industry and we’re pleased to be helping one of the largest TV providers do just that,” said Matt McLeggon, SVP of Advanced Solutions at Magnite. “Magnite and DIRECTV have long worked closely together on the streaming side of the business. Now, programmatic buyers will be able to reach DIRECTV satellite subscribers through our platform as well.”
About Magnite
We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Anchored in bustling New York City, sunny Los Angeles, mile high Denver, historic London, and down under in Sydney, Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.
About DIRECTV
DIRECTV Advertising is a pioneer in the converged addressable space, delivering industry leading audience-based, digital, and innovative media solutions. Employing our decades of experience, we empower advertisers to address and engage their audience at scale while continuously measuring campaign impact against brand goals to unlock insights and optimize future campaigns.
Media Contact:
Kar Yi Lim
917-658-1994
klim@magnite.com
More US homes watch CTV over cable and satellite, and 90% of CTV viewers watch ad-supported content. With its powerful reach, CTV has now become a staple of advertisers’ marketing mix. Yet, to capture the full value of CTV, the viewing experience on streaming platforms has room to grow. To bridge this gap, buyers, sellers, and technology partners must work cohesively to increase campaign efficiency, ad experience management, and proper utilization of data to deliver a better user experience.
Joseph Hirsch, general manager at SpringServe, joined Magnite’s Matt McLeggon, SVP, advanced solutions and Travis Hockersmith, VP of platform+ at VIZIO, during this year’s AdExchanger Programmatic I/O Event to discuss how innovations to the CTV user experience can enhance content discovery and advertising receptiveness. Here are four key takeaways.
1. Monetization and user experience aren’t competing goals.
In the early days of CTV, publishers often had to choose between revenue and ad quality. However, the two have a correlated relationship. The best way to maximize long-term monetization is to drive user experience.
With ad exposure, “watch minutes” are less important than driving engagement and campaign outcomes. Given 90 seconds of ad time, a publisher might ask, “How can I maximize value while not duplicating ads and respecting competitive separation? What outcomes am I driving for the brand?”
Unfortunately, sometimes a perceived revenue boost is chosen at the expense of quality. For example, ad operators often focus on fulfilling all ads. They may remove frequency caps to meet KPIs or revenue targets. But in doing so, they’re doing a disservice to advertisers and the streaming service. It’s all about striking the right balance.
Given the level of fragmentation in the CTV ecosystem, managing pacing, frequency, fill, and price efficiency can be a daunting task. Adopting technology to streamline ad delivery helps improve performance and monetization.
2. Personalize ad content to create a “lean back” experience.
For many streaming platforms, content recommendation is a primary driver of viewer engagement. But the industry can do more to improve personalization overall.
Unlike social formats where audiences can swipe past undesirable content, creating a “lean back” experience with multiple hours of content requires a different approach. On CTV, audiences interact with content (and ads) in a more engaged, focused way. It’s all the more important to ensure the ad content is relevant and seamlessly delivered.
Leveraging the right data makes media work better — for every impression, a campaign is more likely to drive an outcome. In CTV, user profiles play a pivotal role. User profiles supply first-party data that helps build a holistic picture of the viewer: their interests, hobbies, and content preferences.
OEMs are also playing a vital role in personalization. From where an OEM sits as a touchpoint between the audience and screen, they get an intimate look into viewing behavior, be it by genre or selection habits, which can inform ad delivery. For example, if someone loves romcoms, a brand can pair romantically-themed ad creatives that complement that genre and programming.
Overall, personalization is data-driven and requires a human touch and common-sense practices. For example, paid placements are becoming more popular on CTV home screens. It’s essential to hit the right ratio. Selling out the home screen won’t drive the best user experience.
3. Creative review is key.
Understanding the underlying asset is fundamental to constructing a final ad break that meets user expectations when delivering an ad. Using tools to understand an ad’s associated metadata can help identify attributes such as volume, image quality, and even language to improve performance. Without a unified view of your advertising creatives, it’s nearly impossible to deliver a seamless viewing experience.
It’s important to have tools to monitor creative placements. However, creative review can be time-consuming. Traditionally, the creative audit process has involved manually approving each piece of creative before the ad server processes it.
To help with this, automating certain parts of ad approval and ad queues can make the process more efficient. For example, SpringServe’s BingeWatcher streamlines the creative review workflow by providing a fully-automated, easily scalable, and highly flexible technological alternative to manual review.
4. Learn something from linear.
Linear TV ads are often so seamless that they disappear into the background of the user experience. What linear lacks in 1:1 targeting capacity and data-driven audience insights, it makes up for in reach and quality. This is perhaps why linear is still a mainstay of video marketing budgets, even as marketers invest in CTV for incremental reach.
One issue still facing CTV as opposed to linear is ad fill. Sometimes, a publisher can’t fill their ad pod due to various tech and demand issues and end up with content gaps. This usually happens while streaming live events like sports games, political speeches, or concerts where programming lasts longer than the publisher anticipated. In this case, the end-user can end up with a dreaded “we’ll be back” static slate between ad breaks. A way to solve this is to add more diversity and depth to ad inventory. Ideally, if one ad isn’t pacing well because of its budget, a publisher would have enough depth to fill that slot with something else.
As more communication, collaboration, and transparent practices are adopted across digital video, issues such as ad fill and performance quality will become easier to tackle. The next step will be to get ad experiences in the two environments — linear and CTV — to work together more congruously.
Closing the gap between audience expectations and ad performance is key to unlocking CTV’s full value. As competition heats up to win over audiences and reduce churn, CTV media owners would do well to focus more on providing an impeccable experience rather than maximizing ad revenue in the short term.
L’Oreal Singapore worked with Magnite to launch an OTT campaign to generate greater brand awareness for their range of Extraordinary Oil Hair products.
L’Oreal Singapore wanted to generate greater awareness for their range of Extraordinary Oil Hair products in the local market. They needed a solution to extend reach beyond UGC and social platforms, with the ability to target females ages 25 – 40 interested in beauty, cosmetics and hair care.
Download the case study to discover how Magnite successfully delivered a 92.7% completion rate across OTT, exceeding UGC and social platform performance.
Following a rebrand of several of its AVOD (ad-supported video on demand) services, Video Solutions is aiming to take its new combined offering global, supported by Magnite and SpringServe.
In April 2022, Video Solutions AG, the media company that owns and operates AVOD channels Watch4 and W4Free, rebranded the services under one name – Wedotv – to combine resources and simplify their offering as they go international. We spoke to Philipp Rotermund, CEO at Video Solutions, to find out more about the rebrand and what it means for the future of their AVOD services.
Can you give us a brief overview on Wedotv and the kind of content you offer?
Wedotv is an advertiser-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) portal in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In addition to a large selection of movies and series, we offer viewers exciting documentaries as well as a variety of content from the lifestyle, comedy and automotive sectors. Wedotv is available on streaming devices like Roku, Apple TV, Samsung Smart devices and Amazon Fire TV; smartphone platforms like Android and iOS; cable providers like Netgem TV, Metrological; and directly on the web at www.wedotv.com.
What were the reasons behind the recent rebrand to Wedotv?
With two different brands – W4free in the UK and watch4 for the German speaking countries – the effort in maintaining two websites, two apps etc was immense. Furthermore, all marketing activities were planned almost separately since we had two different brands to promote. With one brand, all activities pay into the one brand, making our global expansion more seamless.
How does the rebrand impact Wedotv’s AVOD proposition?
Part of the strategy to combine our AVOD brands was to streamline the underlying processes in order to simplify and strengthen our ad offerings, and maximize efficiencies and growth opportunities. To do this, we decided to adopt a solution that combines Magnite’s programmatic infrastructure with SpringServe’s ad serving platform and tools, which will stand us in good stead as we look to expand internationally.
What does a combined SSP and ad server offer you?
Before we used Springserve, we worked with a different SSP in individual markets and for individual products such as our FAST Channels or the VoD offerings. With the migration to Springserve and Magnite, we will have all our inventory in one place, so we can easily monitor its performance, and will be able to react quickly to changes.
Ultimately, it’s always easier to work with one provider rather than many – making the account setup more efficient than before, and easier for us to manage multiple demand sources from one platform. We can also better implement unified decisioning to control how our demand sources compete to ensure that we always achieve the optimal ad set that pleases the buyer whilst providing a quality user experience to the end user.
What is it specifically about SpringServe’s ad serving solution that originally attracted Video Solutions to work with us?
We had been searching for a holistic ad serving solution for quite a while. Springserve is the solution which is able to connect us to the programmatic world of advertising as well as enable classic I/O campaigns across all platforms on which our inventory is made available. Which means we are not limited to online video, or VOD advertising, but we are also able to sell ads dynamically on our linear offerings around the globe. Besides the great functionalities of SpringServe, we are also extremely happy and satisfied by the level of dedication and support from the SpringServe team.
What are the short term and long term goals for Wedotv?
Wedotv aims to become the main provider of curated free films, television and sports across the world whilst remaining completely free. Doing so whilst continuing to expand globally means having a reliable international tech provider that knows the business well, which is why we chose Magnite and SpringServe. In the short term, we will of course promote our brand in our key territories, but mid to long term we want to roll out our service globally and launch additional thematic FAST channels across all territories. For this we need a tech provider that can work internationally as well and that’s what we have found with Magnite and SpringServe.
Changing attitudes towards privacy, new data protection laws and the deprecation of primary identifiers means brands and publishers will need to rethink their data strategy to navigate the new privacy-centric landscape. With marketers doubling down on data-driven advertising, what does the future of audience targeting and marketing attribution look like?
Magnite spoke to leaders from True Digital, South China Morning Post and Publicis Media Precision during “Asia: Transformation of User Identity,” a panel discussion for the APAC region to explore what’s next for data-driven advertising in a rapidly evolving identity landscape.
Future of Identity Solutions
To tackle the developing identity landscape, advertisers and publishers need to review current strategies and seek alternative solutions to identity.
“Run an audit of where you are standing today,” says Stefan Priemer, data & product APAC, Publicis Media Precision. “Brands need to make a significant investment on data and technology, but the question remains on how to analyze and activate it.”
“For advertisers, significant spending goes into native Google and Facebook audiences, and a lot of clients are actually not too dependent on third-party data,” he added. “However, keep in mind the limitations with data ownership and measurement in the walled garden platforms.”
Ching You Sing, advertising platform & delivery lead at True Digital says, “We took a drastic approach transitioning from advertising ID-based segments to user single sign-on ID as the new ID solution when Apple restricts access to IDFA and followed by Google starting 2022.”
To manage the changes surrounding audience identification, publishers are investing in various identity solutions, including prioritising first-party data and integrating with universal identity solutions.
For South China Morning Post, which withdrew from the open marketplace in Asia in 2021, first-party data is key.
“The publishers are the closest to the users, and we do not want it to be obscured by third-party data. We want to enrich our data and make it available and accessible to brands by visualising the data they are buying and ultimately deliver a greater return on media investment for advertisers,” says Kenny Cheung, director of product, innovation and partnership, South China Morning Post.
For True Digital, their identity strategy includes a mix of leveraging first-party data and third-party identity solutions. “We took a big step on re-architect post cookies. We now adopt identity that can interact and complement each other, including our TRUE proprietary ID, and UID 2.0 (in pipeline) for cross-platform usage of TrueID CTV, Mobile Apps, Website and E-wallet to help with hyper-targeting,” says You Sing.
“The way forward is for publishers to integrate with the biggest identity players in the space and stay agnostic to identity providers,” says Priemer.
Quantity: Targeting at Scale
With the deprecation of cookies, audience targeting is evolving. Publicis acknowledges that this will have a strong impact on measurement, where “targeting would be impacted in terms of volume.”
“The scale of advertiser first-party data is still relatively low. This has a lot to do with brand readiness to not just collect first-party data, but also to store and manage it,” says Priemer.
The importance of working with the right partners is key. “Working with partners, SSPs, etc. to tap into publisher data is a very important solution for brands who can’t scale their own. Understand what identifiers are readable and how you can overlay the data that you have with your inventory,” he adds.
Publishers are developing targetable ID solutions such as clean room technology to enrich advertiser first-party data in a secure environment.
“We have built an audience graph taking signals including user event-based data across platforms and endpoints that touch our users. Advertisers can then put their first-party data on our platform and convert them to look up for targetable IDs. This will allow advertisers to set up preferential audiences and analyze reach and frequency and run different attribution models. That’s a long-term approach,” says You Sing.
However, the question of whether clean room technology adoption will scale remains to be seen in Asia. “One reminder is that targetable IDs have limited scale. The use case should not just be limited to one-to-one targeting,” says Cheung.
Quality: Data Beyond Targeting
While targeting at scale remains an issue for publisher identity solutions’, advantages also lie in new insights brands can gain.
From the agency perspective, it is important to understand how to leverage their data, an area where publishers can step in to help brands build up their first-party data profile. “It’s not just using data for targeting but to help enrich my own data as a brand and understand more about the IDs, including audience demographics, interests, etc. Brands usually collect IDs but don’t know much about those,” says Priemer.
South China Morning Post highlights the importance of using ID solutions to gain insights to scale activation.
“It is important to see how audiences have been interacting with the publisher’s content to make informed decisions that shape your strategy. We have seen an increase in SCMP’s audiences because they are looking for a trusted, alternative take on news. We want to build a forum where they can directly engage with our content,” says Cheung.
Furthermore, when it comes to measurement, brands in Asia historically focused less on attribution. “Given that investments into sophisticated multi-touch attribution was behind more mature markets in the US and Europe, the impact of cookie deprecation is somewhat limited here. As alternatives, brands can look into marketing mix modeling approaches, which might not be as granular as attribution modeling, but is independent of log level cookie reliant data,” says Priemer.
Watch panel discussion here
By: Ashley Wheeler, VP of Seller Accounts at Magnite
In a previous post, we discussed The TradeDesk’s optimization away from Open Bidding with the launch of OpenPath, the industry’s overall shift to more transparent and direct paths, and the value that SSPs bring to publishers. Here we highlight how these market shifts will give publishers the power to forge more intelligent, direct paths and better showcase their audiences to buyers.
The publisher-powered future
Recent industry shifts have placed increasingly more power in the hands of publishers. Programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals (PMPs) are booming, and according to eMarketer, by the end of 2022 programmatic direct (which includes guaranteed and preferred deals) will account for 74.4% of US programmatic ad spend. PMPs provide publishers with premium rates and demand for their inventory, and provide buyers with access to data and differentiated inventory, fraud protection, brand safety, and increased transparency. They are a critical component of the buyer-seller relationship and their importance will only grow as buyers become more reliant on publisher first party data to find their audiences.
In the absence of third party cookies, buyers will no longer be able to create and transmit audience segments across the open internet. In cookie-less environments, publishers hold the most valuable insights into user interests and behavior, making their first party data and models such as Seller Defined Audiences (SDAs) critical to buyers’ future audience strategies. This shift will give publisher-controlled, first party data a pivotal role in audience creation and a brand’s ability to reach addressable audiences at scale.
Closer relationships between buyers and sellers will help optimize the pipes through which media transacts and will place the onus – and power – with publishers to provide the environments, inventory and first party audiences to drive desired outcomes. SSPs will continue to help ensure that those paths include the protections and controls needed to preserve publishers’ data, their consumers’ privacy, and their ability to participate in the economics of data federation.
Seller-defined strategy based on first party data
Introduced by the IAB Tech Lab’s Project Rearc, Seller-defined audiences (SDAs) provide a way for publishers to communicate first party audience attributes in an OpenRTB bid without revealing user identities. Publishers utilizing SDAs need to curate users into standardized audience cohorts based on the IAB Tech Lab Audience Taxonomy of 1,600 demographic-, interest-, or purchase-based attributes. This standardization ensures commonality in the way that audiences are defined for both buyers and sellers alike. Publishers can also leverage custom taxonomies in SDAs, but only when approved by the IAB Tech Lab.
SDAs – like programmatic direct and PMPs – will require a thoughtfully coordinated first party data strategy so that publishers can gain a granular view of their users using content to accurately define and showcase audiences. By pinpointing the most valuable audiences, publishers are able to differentiate their inventory across open and premium marketplaces. For instance, direct sales teams can use this data to package and sell their most prized inventory to buyers via PMPs, thereby driving competition and yield whilst building direct bridges to advertiser and agency partners that benefit from improved campaign performance.
What this means for publishers
Build on your audience and content intelligence
Publishers will need to build a holistic view of audience, content, and site page performance – including contextual, behavioral and revenue insights – to spot trends and identify audience opportunities that can then be translated into better performing SDAs, programmatic direct deals and PMPs.
Make first party data interoperable
In the cookie-less future, publishers will own and share first party data on their terms to enable transactions with relevant demand opportunities. To do so, publishers will need to remain ID agnostic in their supported audience solutions, and ensure that they are attaching matched data to an ad request in a privacy-forward manner. Enabling addressability across different transaction types and media will hinge on the publishers’ ability to create, protect, and activate audiences in different forms, ranging from SDAs and data matching tech, to first party audiences for programmatic direct and PMPs.
Find partners that support and protect you across all audience solutions
Magnite is focused on building holistic audience solutions that enable buyers and sellers to transact across all possible audience solutions, preserve publisher data and yield, and provide publishers with the necessary controls to determine when and how to federate their data. Companies such as Carbon and Nth Party created best-in-class technology around these requirements, which is why Magnite acquired them. Meanwhile, products such as Deal Discovery help improve workflows between publishers and buyers in the creation of PMPs.
Getting closer to the action(able)
SSPs have a unique position in the auction that allows them to bring buyers and sellers closer together while providing the tools needed to optimize audiences, ad quality, brand safety, and yield. SSPs can also ensure publishers’ audiences are available to all demand opportunities in a privacy compliant way. As the industry continues to shift towards more direct paths, the power and opportunity is in publishers’ hands to showcase their first party audiences to buyers at varying levels of addressability across all the ways buyers might want to transact. To do so, publishers will need to carefully evaluate and leverage partners that support them in this endeavor and provide protections and controls for their data and users.
Added layer of protection enables Magnite to better assess news-oriented inventory credibility and help prevent the monetization of misinformation and disinformation across its platforms
NEW YORK – May 24, 2022 – Magnite (Nasdaq: MGNI), the largest independent sell side advertising platform, announced today that it has signed with NewsGuard, an organization that rates news sources for credibility and transparency, as part of its ongoing commitment to brand safety and inventory quality. NewsGuard will enable Magnite to better assess the credibility of news-oriented inventory and help prevent the monetization of misinformation and disinformation on Magnite’s platforms.
“Brands and agencies want to know that their investment in programmatic advertising isn’t supporting the propagation of disinformation and misinformation on the Internet,” said Timothy Jasionowski, Senior Vice President, Brand Safety at Magnite. “NewsGuard will help ensure our global exchanges offer news and information sites that meet Magnite’s standards for transparency and journalistic integrity.”
NewsGuard works with advertisers, agencies, and ad tech companies to help protect brands from ad placements on sites spreading false narratives and instead direct their ads to trustworthy news sites. Magnite will have access to NewsGuard’s detailed trust ratings for thousands of news and information sources developed by a team of trained journalists using a specific set of criteria that assesses the credibility and transparency practices of each site.
“Advertising responsibly on news by investing in high quality journalism and avoiding unreliable news isn’t just good for the world—it’s also good business,” said Matt Skibinski, General Manager at NewsGuard. “We’re thrilled that Magnite has taken this proactive step toward ensuring news publishers on its platform are credible and transparent—and that its clients can support quality journalism through high quality, premium inventory.”
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About Magnite
We’re Magnite (NASDAQ: MGNI), the world’s largest independent sell-side advertising platform. Publishers use our technology to monetize their content across all screens and formats including CTV, online video, display, and audio. The world’s leading agencies and brands trust our platform to access brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory and execute billions of advertising transactions each month. Anchored in bustling New York City, sunny Los Angeles, mile high Denver, historic London, and down under in Sydney, Magnite has offices across North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC.
About NewsGuard
Launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides credibility ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information sources. NewsGuard rates all the news and information sources that account for 95% of online engagement across the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, and Italy.
NewsGuard’s ratings are conducted by trained journalists using nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a news source repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. Based on the criteria, each source receives an overall trust rating, a trust score of 0-100, a score on each of the nine criteria, and a detailed “Nutrition Label” explaining the rating and providing examples of the site’s editorial practices. Advertisers, advertising agencies and advertising tech companies license NewsGuard’s ratings to direct their programmatic advertising toward legitimate journalism and avoid misinformation. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review the ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.
Media Contact
Kar Yi Lim
klim@magnite.com
+1 917-658-1994
Matt Skibinski
matt.skibinski@newsguardtech.com
+1 973-818-4698