Confucius once said that “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
Perhaps the same can be said of digital media buying. Too often it seems as though the onset and rapid growth of programmatic buying has created more problems than solutions. An expanded media supply chain with multiple layers of costs, increased levels of fraud, brand safety concerns, visibility challenges, a lack of transparency and perhaps most troubling, eroding levels of trust between advertisers and their agencies.
Growing pains? Perhaps. But something needs to change and this author would like to suggest one potential solution… abandon programmatic digital media buying altogether. Seriously? Why not?
Consider the following and the concept won’t seem so far-fetched:
- In 2015, advertisers spent $60 billion on digital media, with close to two-thirds of that going to Google and Facebook (source: Pivotal Research).
- According to the advertising trade group, Digital Content, today this duopoly is garnering 90% of every new dollar spent on digital media.
- What happened to the magical pursuit of the long-tail and the notion of smaller bets being safer? Economics. The fact is that the notion of the long-tail simply didn’t work as researchers and economists found that having less of more is a better, more statistically sound pursuit. To wit, Google’s and Facebook’s market share.
- Today, programmatic digital display advertising accounts for 80% of display ad spending, which will top $33 billion in 2017 (source: eMarketer).
- Between 2012 – 2016 programmatic advertising grew 71% per year, on average (source: Zenith).
- In 2018, programmatic will grow an additional 30%+ to $64 billion, with the U.S. representing 62% of global programmatic expenditures (source: Zenith).
Come again. Two publishers are getting $.90 of every incremental digital dollar spent and programmatic digital media buying accounts for 80%+ of digital media spend. What are we missing? Is there an algorithm that specializes in sending RFPs and insertion orders to Google and Facebook in such a manner that the outcome yields a 40% or better efficiency gain?
As we all know, there have been numerous industry studies, including those sponsored by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), which have suggested that at least 40% of every digital media dollar spent goes to cover programmatic digital media buying’s transactional costs (third-party expenses and agency fees), with only $.48 – $.60 of that expenditure going to publishers.
So, for an advertiser spending $40 million on programmatic digital media, if the law of averages holds true, $16 million will go to cover transactional costs and agency fees. That means that of the advertiser’s original spend, they will actually get $24 million worth of media. While we know that programmatic media can yield efficiencies, can it overcome that type of transactional deficit?
If that same advertiser eschewed programmatic digital and decided to rely on a digital direct media investment strategy, what would it cost them?
Assume that they hired ten seasoned digital media planning and investment professionals for $150,000 each (salary, bonus, benefits), they would spend $1.5 million on direct labor costs. Further, in order to afford their team maximum flexibility, let’s say that the advertiser allocated an additional $1 million annually for access to ad tech tools and research subscriptions to facilitate their Team’s planning and placement efforts. This would bring their total outlay to $2.5 million per annum.
If they were spending $40 million in total, this means that the team would be able to purchase $37.5 million worth of digital media. Don’t forget that placing digital buys direct will greatly reduce fraud levels that can eat up another 8% – 12% of every digital ad dollar, while also greatly improving brand safety guideline adherence. Compare that to the $24 million in inventory purchased programmatically.
So how efficient is programmatic?
Sadly, most advertisers can’t even address this question, because their buys are structured on a non-disclosed, rather than a cost-disclosed basis. Even if they had line of sight into what the third-party costs (i.e. media, data, tech) and agency fees being charged were, they wouldn’t have a clue as to the fees/ charges that sell-side suppliers were levying, further eroding working media levels.
A simplistic solution? Perhaps. But the fact that the industry continues to drink the programmatic “Kool-Aid” without any significant progress toward resolving the dilutive effect that programmatic transactional costs, agency fees and fraud have on an advertiser’s investment seems a tad irresponsible.
Ask yourself. What would you do if it were your money?