COLOGNE – As the number of ad tech providers ballooned from 350 in 2012 to 3,500 in 2016, so did advertiser concerns about digital media transparency. “It became so complex and messy that we needed to push the envelope,” says Dominique Delport, Global MD of Havas Group.
To provide more clarity and faith in the programmatic transaction process, Havas started with “a very simple statement” about demand-side platforms. “A DSP is not neutral,” Delport explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 DMEXCO advertising and trade show.
“If you put an amount of money with some KPI’s, whatever the DSP you will have very different results. You need to manage and optimize money to different DSP’s in parallel with your campaign if you want have the best result for your clients.”
Havas had 30 developers writing in excess of 100,000 lines of code to build a trading solution for its clients. The result is the global communications group’s Client Trading Solution (CTS), a fully transparent control tower displaying all programmatic trading that allows clients to track and monitor their programmatic buying in one place.
“We saw that there was only one way to restore trust, with an open platform. A platform that everyone can connect with,” Delport says.
Along with its ability to improve programmatic transaction transparency, CTS is touted as a better alternative to some brand marketers taking their programmatic efforts in-house.
“But you don’t have to manage people, you don’t have to manage the ever-changing tech, you don’t have to manage research and development,” says Delport. “You pay just a premium to see everything. And to have the total transparency and tranquility of knowing where the money goes.”
He still believes more needs to be done, because people who commit fraudulent digital media practices are usually one step ahead of the industry’s “detectives.”
Havas is applying CTS to brand safety as well, “to ensure that every inventory is absolutely clean. I think that we can say that we have under three percent of fraudulent inventory in our engine. It’s too much, but it’s much lower than the industry standard.” Another industry standard, this one impacting Europe, is looming over the advertising industry. Between now and May 28, 2018 there is be “a new frontier” in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation, the European Union’s biggest change in privacy regulation in 20 years.
“Every company needs to rethink the way they’re collecting first party data, to rethink the way they are collecting user ID’s on their social networks or their different online interfaces,” says Delport.
This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
