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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Eric Picard, vice president of strategic partnerships at MediaMath.

Five years ago, if I told anyone in our industry that I wanted to buy or sell “premium” inventory, we’d all picture the same thing: inventory that was bought or sold directly between a media buyer and publisher’s salesperson. Maybe it would be home page inventory or a section front, a page takeover or rich unit. Or perhaps it would just involve a specific publisher that we agreed equated to “premium.”

New programmatic technologies are radically changing how we think of inventory overall, especially the term “premium.” Inventory is no longer one- or two-dimensional – the definition has become much more complex. It is a multidimensionally defined set of attributes that includes traditionally “publisher-controlled” inputs, such as page location, dimensions of the creative, category and content adjacencies. But today there are additional overlaid attributes that flesh out the definition.

Advertisers can bring their own data to the dance, which we’ll hesitantly call “first party,” and overlay additional data sources, which we’ll hesitantly call “third party.” And beneath the surface level attributes are underlying components that can be much more dynamic. These components can help predict how effectively an impression can drive a campaign’s goals or outcomes.

Programmatic buying platforms historically were tied to open exchange inventory, but increasingly, they are used as primary buying platforms across open RTB, private marketplaces, direct publisher integrations and even to support direct buys. This more holistic approach ultimately leads to a “programmatic first” point of view, as the new inventory definitions being rightly demanded by advertisers become their starting point on media buys. While RTB “only” represents 20% to 40% of budgets today, it’s clear that the rapid growth of programmatic will drive these broader inventory definitions across the buyer-seller boundary.

Achieving Symmetry

Publishers are embracing the newly empowered media buyers, allowing them to bring their own data for direct buys. They are also allowing buyers to connect directly to their ad servers for programmatically enabled direct buys and buy-side inventory decisioning in real time. For the past few years, the asymmetry of information in programmatic – publishers had no idea why advertisers bought their inventory on the exchange – has been a sore point.

Publishers point out that if buyers work with them, they can open paths to the inventory, inclusive of audiences, that buyers are looking for on the exchange. As we see more collaboration between buyers and sellers on these points, pockets of highly valuable inventory that were lying dormant inside the publisher’s ad server (dare we say “premium”) will suddenly open up.

To use a mining analogy, publishers previously sold unrefined chunks of ore to media buyers, who found a variety of metals inside, but only some of it was valuable to them. So buyers started buying inventory through other marketplaces that allowed them to use their own tools and data to locate the chunks of ore that contained the metals they cared about. Now publishers are saying, “If you’re willing to pay us what you think that metal is worth, we can find more of it than you’re getting on those secondary marketplaces. But you have to work with us to get access to it.”

This new approach is both exciting and refreshing. The industry is getting over old suspicions and reluctance to share information. The asymmetry is becoming more symmetrical, and everyone involved gets more value. Days are still early, and only the most advanced players are figuring out how to make this work, but it won’t be long before this new way of defining “premium” is the standard.

Evolving Definition

How do we define “premium” in this new programmatically enabled world? Premium inventory matches the advertiser’s holistic goals, inclusive of where the ad will run – publisher, category, page location or format – and the multidimensional profiles of anonymous users behind the impressions, including first- and third-party audience data definitions, as well as geographic, demographic and other data elements provided by publishers and other parties. The advertiser believes the premium inventory will help fulfill their goals and drive outcomes that they desire.

That’s a mouthful, eh? How about this: Premium inventory matches the goals of the advertiser well enough that they’re willing to pay a premium for access.

Follow Eric Picard (@ericpicard) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.