Are you Paying the AdTech Tax? The Other Side of AdTech

We take a reality check on where supply side programmatic adtech can do better to serve the needs of publishers. In the AdTech ecosystem, Publishers – the ones that offer the sites for the ads to display – are often overlooked for the needs of the demand side (the ones who pay!). But the supply side has as much angst as advertisers when it comes to the complex ecosystem and the many players that work to keep them as far from advertisers as possible.

There are so many players in the complex AdTech ecosystem today. Publishers and advertisers are kept far apart by all the players in between – media agencies, DSPs, SSPs, ad networks, trading desks, ad exchanges, affiliates and other sundry players in the middle.

As much as an advertiser struggles to make sense of this ecosystem, the publisher too – especially the small publisher – finds it challenging to cut through the clutter and get the best value for their offerings and effectively monetize their website.

How much of your advertising dollar goes towards actual media?

This screen grab from the TrustX website claims that less than half of an advertising dollar actually goes behind working media. That is worrying for both – the publisher and the advertiser (although the many players along the way gladly collect a share of the pie!)

Clearly, the time is right to simplify programmatic adtech while empowering advertisers to get the best value for their money and publishers to intelligently take charge of their content monetization. With all the current complexity built into the process of placing a simple display ad, my search begins at asking what partners do advertisers and publishers actually need to get things done effectively? Diego Sanchez, CEO of supply-side adtech company Adtelligent Inc., doesn’t mince his words. “There are very few key players needed in the game. Publishers need an ad server, header wrapper, and good analytics.  Buyers need an ad server, a bidder, a CDP, and a good attribution platform. In my opinion, everything else is the ad tech tax”.

Really? So why do publishers feel compelled to pay the ‘adtech tax’ today? What is lacking in the core ecosystem that these (additional) players on both sides are exploiting? “I think many vendors are able to convince the buy side that their technology is indispensable, even if there is no clear impact on ROAS. Take viewability as an example. This is a made-up standard that only digital advertisers are held to. With television advertising, you don’t know if someone walks out of the room while a commercial is playing. With print, you don’t know if the reader is skipping past the ad pages. But advertisers still buy TV and print because they know it performs for them.  I wish digital advertising was held to the same standard, but unfortunately, there’s a trust deficit between digital buyers and sellers that ad tech vendors are able to exploit”.

So, the current system truly is set up to put as much distance as possible between advertiser and publisher? “As you state, a true disruptor would be trying to minimize the distance between advertisers and publishers. TrustX is an interesting example of publishers working collaboratively to establish their own SSP, but they are still plugging into traditional DSPs. I can’t think of many other examples that aren’t self-serving”.

Read More https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/ads/are-you-paying-the-adtech-tax-the-other-side-of-adtech/