Woe, Woe and Thrice Woe For Publishers

I was at Admonsters’ OPS:London event yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours, drowning in a barrage of acronyms led by SSPs and DSPs. It seemed very clear that the publishers’ ad operations teams must be similarly drowning in data. Loads and loads of data.

The SSP guys at the event showed how publishers can set up numerous deals and bid prices and the rest in their systems; and how they could now analyse it live and to the nth degree; we heard how one newspaper has just set up a team of four to do just that. I wonder if that is taking budget from the sales team. Be that as it may, the commercial focus from the supplier presentations was all about increasing publishers’ yields.

We also heard from Ben Wood, director at Aegis’ iProspect, and from Quantcast’s impressive CEO, Konrad Feldman, that customer data is a “significant opportunity for publishers”. They didn’t really spell out how when pushed; at least to no greater extent than an aside about data exchanges. However Ben (who was delivering a colleague’s speech in her absence) did state that, because all this available data makes targeting easier now, it is harder and harder for a publisher to sell something that is premium content. As much as an agency always valued quality content of course.

So, just around these few areas the summary take-away seems to be this:

Real time trading could offer publishers higher yields – if they have enough resource to manage the trading mechanisms and systems. Publishers’ customer data is valuable and should be owned and sold by them, but we are not clear quite how this will work yet. There is some doubt that producing high quality content will be really worth a publisher’s investment going forward. And the algorithms in the clever trading platforms will determine everything.

Glad I am not a publisher!