Empowering Publisher Sales Teams: How to Regain Control with the Right Tools

It seems that today's digital advertising ecosystem is like a never-ending roller coaster; the privacy landscape is changing, the way we sell and buy is changing, and so are the standards that we must adhere to. Change is good—it forces us to rethink old practices and build something new. Analytics and data are one such practice, where the ecosystem giants incentivise us to update our strategies for the future. 

The recent news about Google’s antitrust lawsuits, made public in the unredacted documents, has raised several concerning issues. The dominant player in the digital advertising industry has abused its market position in multiple ways, harming publishers and Google’s competitors considerably. Google didn’t want this to become public.

Google's actions have led to the serious allegations

Google’s DSP, DV360, is the largest player in the market. This success can be attributed to many things; however, one key decision from 2015 stands out. Google decided that the YouTube inventory would remain exclusive to Google, locking out the other platforms. Buyers naturally gravitated towards Google because YouTube is essential to running video campaigns. Similarly, the lawsuit claims that Google’s buy-side platform received advantages in terms of speed and available data on Google’s AdX compared to the competition, leading to them winning the majority of auctions and further reinforcing their position. 

The same year, Google launched AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), promising improved page load times. At the centre of AMPs sought performance gains was the removal of javascript from the page; the immediate consequence was that header bidding was not possible at first. Similarly, Google gave publishers who implemented AMP preference in their search results a key incentive for publishers to implement it. This preference was removed earlier this year. The lawsuit also alleges that Google purposefully slowed down ad delivery on non-AMP pages, intending to blame the latency on header bidding.

In 2017, Facebook was a proponent of header bidding. However, based on the lawsuit documents, it seems that Google and Facebook struck a deal where Facebook would stop supporting header bidding. Google, in exchange, would give them preferential treatment in Open Bidding by guaranteeing FB win rates in the auctions and helping them identify users in cookieless environments.

These are all serious allegations. If they are proven true, then action must be taken against Google’s grave anti-competitive behaviour, which has harmed almost every other actor in the market. 

How can publishers succeed without a firm reliance on a single source of revenue?

The conversation around the industry giants has taken off, though, as we know, they are only a component of the complex ecosystem of digital advertising sales. How do publishers ensure they can succeed without heavily relying on one revenue source? We collected a few recommendations for consideration:

• By utilizing prebid, publishers can bring in more competing demand from other sources than just Google. Given this recent news, relying entirely on Google and utilizing Open Bidding within their platform is not a safe and future-proof choice.
• Focus on developing server-side capabilities. Prebid server performance and ID-matching via the server are improving all the time, and for publishers who want to ensure quick load times, this is a great option to work with.
• Streamline your sales operation. For publishers, this means adopting a curious mindset and being willing to optimise your sales stack, for example, continually renegotiating the SSPs used. New technologies, which may be able to help increase your ad sales, are frequently released onto the market, and old ones may see gains in performance or, indeed, regress. This presents a challenge for the tech setup. Ensuring that you work with solutions that enable agile testing, rapid set-up changes, and optimisation is essential. 
• Avoiding a situation where a sell-side vendor has power over others is crucial. We don’t believe that competition can be fair if one of the active sales channels orchestrates it. In practice, this means running and optimising a prebid set-up should be in the hands of an independent party, someone who can truly focus on the publisher's total revenue.
• We all should also fight for transparency on all fronts. This applies to solutions used in digital sales and general revenue transparency inside organisations. We have seen that comprehensive, easy-to-understand (and shareable) revenue data help both tech- and sales teams to perform better. To give a couple of concrete examples, real-time monitoring of your sales will allow you to notice possible errors immediately and save a lot of money. Similarly, if your sales team can easily spot an advertiser increasing investments in Open RTB, they can promote better PMP opportunities and increase sales. 

In conclusion - Empower sales and yield teams.

Today's challenge is that digital ad sales are too technical, and developers have struggled to keep up with fulfilling business needs. We must empower sales and yield optimization teams with solutions that enable revenue optimization agilely, without developers updating code whenever we want to test new tricks.

So, instead of saying “power back to the publishers,” we could be more specific and say it’s time to return power to publishers’ sales and optimisation teams. To enable revenue growth, they need access to the most relevant data and the right tools to optimise their sales. That’s the goal we work toward daily with the Relevant Digital team. We aim to simplify the complex, offer independence and control, and bring clarity and transparency to the daily work of publisher media sales teams.