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ARTICLE

Debunking Programmatic Supply Strategy Myths

February 8, 2019 — by MediaMath    

There are no excuses to base your supply and media strategy on assumptions about what works best. In the spirit of giving marketers and advertisers greater transparency into how the different modes of programmatic buying actually work, MediaMath has released a whitepaper based on research into our own data that sheds light on how PMPs and Open Auction actually perform according to some of the key metrics about which marketers care. We also approached some of our partners to help us confirm that what we were seeing is true across other aspects of the industry.

It is our hope that marketers can use some of the insights that we’ve gleaned to build better data-driven strategies that will help them accomplish their marketing goals more effectively. Here are a few surprising findings from our research.

The time spent troubleshooting deals impacts advertiser and publisher revenue

Only a third of deals begin spending on the first date they get set up—and more than a third of deals will not start spending before the end of the first business week.

Each day spent troubleshooting PMP deals is a lost opportunity to spend their investment and see a return on advertising. For clients with a fixed period in which to run their campaign and who see a direct ROI from their digital spend, this delay translates to substantial missed revenue opportunities.

PMPs do not always have higher priority than the open auctions

Fully 17.9% of all PMPs had a lower win rate than the open auction, meaning that advertisers are adding workflow difficulty, narrowing their optimization capabilities and taking on the sole accountability for supply chain cleanliness for no discernable benefit and a significant amount of the time.

Advertisers assume the risk (and the cost!) of fraud in PMPs

MediaMath consistently sees higher rates of sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT)—instances of fraud, such as bots acting as legitimate users, that require advanced analytics, significant human intervention and other measures to detect and mitigate—on media purchased via PMPs than on our Curated Market offering, which carries a fraud-free guarantee that perpetuates through the supply chain and incentivizes the publisher to keep fraud low. The rates of fraud that we report across PMPs are consistent across the same PMPs on other DSPs.

Download the full paper Supply Chain Excellence: How to Get Results, Avoid Fraud and Boost Your Total Buying to get a deeper dive into these trends and our guidance on how to use them to improve your data strategy.