The Fall rendition of AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O was held in October 2017 in New York City. The event provided attendees with a plethora of insights surrounding the driving forces behind digital advertising. The conference aimed to combat prominent, industry-wide confusion regarding the programmatic process of buying and selling ad placements. According to one of the speakers, four out of five marketers couldn’t classify Double Click as Demand Side Platform (DSP).

Here are MediaRadar’s three key takeaways from Programmatic IO:

Whats Makes A Good DSP?

Scale. The inventory a DSP has access to is the most important factor in determining it’s success. Beyond this, efficient delivery, meaning whether or not the ads are being viewed, and data integration to optimize targeting as well as return, are most important.

What’s Holding Back Programmatic?

Lack of transparency and the resulting ad fraud concerns are the two biggest impediments to programmatic growth. The term ad fraud refers to illegitmate placements, click throughs and impressions. The lack of understanding of the programmatic market allows this to occur. Some of the speakers shared that publishers with in-house solutions have more transparency. However, only 10-20 percent have capabilities in house. Going forward, a hybrid model will be most popular where some of the process outsourced and some is done in-house.

Hidden Fees – The lack of transparency extends into the spend portion of programmatic, where brands don’t really know where their money is going. With percentages taken at each step of the process, investments could be worth pennies on the dollar. 

What’s happening with Amazon?

As with the other fields Amazon has entered, their are jumping into ad techmarket as a juggernaut.They are holding back many of their data stores as they build out their platform, but their growth is unprecented in the industry. According to one speaker, “Amazon is coming like a hurricane and already amongst the most impressive platforms.” According to MediaRadar’s data, the number of brand’s working with Amazon has increased by almost 30% since Q1. They are now a top 3 DSP in terms of number of brands partners. They also placed advertisements on the 6th most sites in Q3.