LONDON – A couple of years after the media industry’s great ad transparency outcry sparked, a consensus emerged over why a change in pricing model would be necessary.

Cadi Jones is convinced that change – from ad-tech intermediaries taking a percentage of media spend to simply taking a flat, fixed fee – is right.

(We are republishing this video recorded in London in December 2019 with news this week of Beeswax acquisition by Comcast’s FreeWheel.)

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the EMEA commercial director at Beeswax, a real-time ad bidding software supplier, explains why.

“The original generation of programmatic technologies were built for the internet,” she says. “They were built for cheap media, not for premium quality and media that we’re seeing now starting to be traded programmatically.

“And so, rather than charge a percentage of the price, a percentage of the media spend that the other platforms are charging, we operate purely on an enterprise SaaS model, a fixed monthly fee based on the volume of transactions that we’re processing for you.

“For me it’s a much fairer model. It doesn’t cost us any more to buy a really expensive ad as it does to buy a cheap ad. And so why should our customers pay more and be sort of penalised for accessing better quality media?”

The company is four years in to offering its “Bidder-as-a-Service” (BaaS) technology, which allows ad buyers to bring their own algorithms in to trading for added customisability.

Jones is the Yahoo advertising veteran who has since held senior roles at Pangea Alliance and Clear Channel Outdoor.

Beeswax offers a demand-side ad platform that is deployed in a separate cloud instance for each customer.

This video was produced in London at the Future of TV Ads Global forum in December 2019.   This series is sponsored by Finecast, the global addressable TV company that is part of WPP.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.