Greater Transparency in Programmatic Advertising

Ad serv­ing, tar­get­ing, data, sup­ply-side plat­forms, ad ver­i­fi­ca­tion, brand safe­ty: Today, a wide vari­ety of tech­ni­cal plat­forms are need­ed to ensure pro­gram­mat­ic adver­tis­ing reach­es the right user in the right envi­ron­ment, in an auto­mat­ed fash­ion. In addi­tion, every new plat­form gen­er­ates new costs. For mar­ket­ing man­agers, this means it is not always easy to retain an overview of where their adver­tis­ing bud­get goes and how their cam­paigns on the indi­vid­ual plat­forms and exchanges are actu­al­ly performing.

Partnering with supply-side platforms

The debate over poor media qual­i­ty, hid­den ad tech fees, and wrong­ly tar­get­ed incen­tives con­tin­ues unabat­ed. To erad­i­cate this lack of trans­paren­cy once and for all, Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud is now the first-ever media buy­ing plat­form to work with 15 of the largest sup­ply-side plat­forms (SSPs) and exchange providers on a joint ini­tia­tive. The aim? To make all costs in the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chain, includ­ing hid­den fees, com­plete­ly transparent.

Among the com­pa­nies and plat­forms along for the ride are Google AdEx, MoP­ub, Oath, OpenX, Pub­mat­ic, SpotX­change, The Rubi­con Project and Teads. In gen­er­al, these and oth­er sup­ply-side plat­forms gen­er­ate the bulk of their turnover from ad tech fees, which they receive from online pub­lish­ers in return for mon­etis­ing their adver­tis­ing envi­ron­ments. Many SSPs, how­ev­er, are in the habit of inte­grat­ing fur­ther fees into the media costs with­out dis­clos­ing this explic­it­ly to the advertiser.

The part­ners in this ini­tia­tive have com­mit­ted to either elim­i­nate or dis­close any fees incurred on top of the actu­al media costs. In future, all iden­ti­fied fees will be dis­closed on the Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud plat­form. We are con­vinced that this trans­paren­cy will ben­e­fit all par­ties involved in the dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing sector—and that it’s long overdue.

Access campaigns on your mobile app

In tech­no­log­i­cal respects, too, the Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud is con­tin­u­ing to evolve. Although the bulk of all dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing has long since been imple­ment­ed via auto­mat­ed soft­ware, adver­tis­ing tech­nol­o­gy itself remains stuck in the era of the desk­top PC. For mar­ket­ing man­agers this means one thing above all else: as soon as they leave their office or their com­put­er, they have large­ly lost con­trol of their cur­rent campaigns.

We are now offer­ing a rem­e­dy in the form of the new Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud mobile app for iOS and Android: the industry’s first mobile appli­ca­tion for cross-chan­nel cam­paign man­age­ment. This means that for the first time, mar­ket­ing deci­sion-mak­ers pos­sess all the tools nec­es­sary to guar­an­tee the per­for­mance and deliv­ery of their cam­paigns wher­ev­er they are in the world. Con­ve­nience and trans­paren­cy: Two inno­va­tions to help achieve the goal of a sin­gle soft­ware solu­tion offer­ing full cross-screen plan­ning, buy­ing, mea­sur­ing and opti­mis­ing capabilities.