Improving the value of the Programmatic Supply Chain

The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) in collaboration with PwC and the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) have published a study calling for far-reaching reform of the programmatic advertising supply chain. The study reveals the “depth of the supply chain’s lack of organisation and complexity…. a lack of understanding and consistency among the ad tech suppliers as to how they could legally share data and what permissions were needed; a lack of uniformity on data storage and formatting; and [inability to achieve] impression matching”. Most damningly, the study points out that “these challenges and complexities do not serve the principal interests of advertisers or publishers”. 

Advertisers, agencies and other industry participants have been aware of these issues surrounding the lack of trust, transparency, standardisation and verification plaguing programmatic advertising for some time now. Moreover, COVID-19 has infused even greater urgency for Marketers to optimise ROI on their campaign budgets by solving for these issues outlined above. As digital spends grow, this programmatic supply chain should eventually replace the existing supply chain built for linear media. If so, are we ready for the future? 

The opposite of programmatic is manual. So we are not going to go back. We are not going to throw the baby with the bathwater, either. Walled gardens already deploy their campaigns programmatically. OTT will be delivered programmatically, soon. Out of Home is into programmatic as well. We cannot afford to have yet another point solution. So, at Aqilliz, we believe marketers must employ a holistic approach–from campaign initiation, monitoring, reconciliation to finally settlement to derive full value from the programmatic supply chain. Point solutions will only provide “yet another band-aid" in an already crowded MarTech landscape. This holistic approach to optimising the programmatic advertising supply chain is based on the following key elements: 

• An independent, federated architecture where each programmatic actor (‘participant’) in the supply chain contributes data in a secure, legally compliant manner whilst maintaining complete ownership of their own data including access control 
• Standardised, rules-based, automated reconciliation of campaign data, including at log level that forms the basis of eventual settlement between participants. This will help in scaling up the programmatic investments to include other channels as the digital spends grow. 
• Real-time visibility of reconciled campaign performance to enable in-flight campaign optimisation. This will help in improving the ROI for the marketers as well as the yield for the publishers, one and all. 
• Immutable, distributed record of reconciled campaign data for visibility and audit purposes based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) i.e. ‘Authentication’. This will help the industry to jointly address the unattributable costs and improve value for all. 
• Automated settlement between participants based on reconciled campaign data using smart contracts on DLT i.e. ‘Authorisation’. If this loop is not closed, we will perennially consider these investments as an add-on. Eventually this supply chain should replace the current. 

The above approach to programmatic campaign optimisation has helped Aqilliz deliver productivity uplifts in the range of 15-30% for our clients across multiple geographies, campaign types (Private vs. Open Marketplace), formats (display, video), and channels (Desktop, Mobile, Digital Out of Home, Connected TV). 

The ISBA report reinforces the need for Marketers to address the multitude of issues arising from the programmatic supply chain today. Aqilliz provides a proven, holistic solution based on cutting edge technology that allows brands, publishers and eventually consumers to cut through this complexity and deliver better value for all in the ecosystem.