Marketers should radically reduce the number of ad exchanges they transact with in order to achieve a double transparency win.

So says the founder of a programmatic ad consultancy that claims to have the “little black book” on ad-tech.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media, talks about the new practice of supply path optimization (SPO), through which ad buyers reduce or smoothe out kinks in their programmatic ad-buying to take greater control.

He says Jounce serves brands that have begun to take in-house many of the functions of programmatic ad-buying. But that’s where the problems come to light.

“Behind the DSP are dozens of different exchanges that are serving as marketplaces for executing these programmatic trades” Kane says.

“If the marketer really wants to have a clear line of sight into how their dollars are working, it’s too big and messy of a problem to transact through 50 exchanges. Consolidate down to a set of (eight) trusted partners who give scale, transparency and efficiency.”

New York-based Jounce serves clients including Pinterest, WebMD and RetailMeNot.

Its series of Little Black Books covers many of the key concepts and technologies at play in ad-tech.

For Kane, reducing the number of suppliers can serve supply path optimization.

“There are two types of transparency that come out of this consolidation effort,” he says:

  • “Fee transparency is the one that gets all the headlines.
  • “Supply path transparency is the one that doesn’t, and it’s the one that I think is much more impactful.”

“Supply path transparency helps me understand the technical chain of connections that deliver my bid to the final decisioning point in the publisher’s ad server.

“We have learned that supply path transparency output is much more impactful to helping marketers transact efficiently with publishers than the fee transparency component.”

This video is from a Beet.TV series titled Consolidation & The Case for Supply Chain Innovation, presented by PubMatic.   For more videos, please visit this page.