WPP’s media-buying group GroupM has launched GroupM Premium Marketplace, a programmatic advertising marketplace that is supposed to increase transparency and efficiency.
The marketplace is meant to provide GroupM clients with “direct and advantaged access” to high-quality publisher inventory that is underpinned by new standards for performance measurement.
In theory, this should reduce opportunities for fraud and inventory misrepresentation in the programmatic media-buying supply chain.
The service is powered by two major supply platforms (based on geography) and built on a global partnership GroupM has entered into with ad tech companies PubMatic and Magnite.
In 2020 a landmark study revealed how little money in programmatic advertising goes to publishers and how little of the money is able to be properly accounted for, even when analysing the premium end of the open-web advertising market.
The study, carried out by PwC and commissioned by advertiser trade body ISBA with the Association of Online Publishers (AOP), found that 15% of the £2bn programmatic supply-chain costs are “unattributable” – known as “the unknown delta”.
Yesterday a cross-industry Taskforce, backed by trade bodies including ISBA, the IPA and the AOP, launched a toolkit to help advertisers.
GroupM Premium Marketplace has launched in the Europe, Middle East & Africa and North America regions. It will launch in additional markets over the course of 2022 and beyond.
“Today’s programmatic ecosystem has become incredibly complex and inefficient, and clients are rightly concerned about transparency and accountability across the digital and programmatic supply chain,” Andrew Meaden, GroupM’s global head of investment, said.
“GroupM Premium Marketplace solves these problems for our clients by making the media-buying process simpler and more transparent and by using technology to ensure our clients always receive the maximum benefit of GroupM’s unique size and scale.”
