Programmatic in 2022 from the perspective of Publishers

The first month of 2022 is behind us. Especially for you, we asked four publishers who operate in different geographic markets and create qualitative content from various thematic categories about how they assess the current moment in the Digital Publishing industry, with particular emphasis on the aspects of content monetization.

Now we present current and future Programmatic trends together with objective feedback. We believe that these insights will propel and inspire in your own various dealings and activities.

In-house vs Outsource, Cookies, Business Developing. What trends in Digital Publishing and Yield Monetization will gain momentum in the coming months?

I see that the in-house trend is becoming more and more popular. I can see this happening with several large Advertisers on the Polish market and I predict that we shall observe the same situation on foreign markets. This move would represent a threat to both agencies and media houses. The question is how quickly and how much Programmatic support will be transferred in-house before media houses feel the effects of these actions; and the related losses. It is not an easy matter, because real specialists, not those who have read three articles on Facebook, are few and far between.

This dearth of specialists is particularly visible on recruiting websites, where we can see that the same companies have been looking for specialists for half a year or more. These people are simply not to be found. I think this phenomenon will be the main challenge for the Programmatic market. You need to prepare the team and train people who will be able to handle the campaigns. In my opinion, one of the downsides of the Publishing market is that half-measures are being sought from all sides; and training priorities are falling by the wayside. Such neglect is bound to adversely affect everyone.

We all know well that it is impossible to handle a large number of campaigns without the participation of software solutions. But because Programmatic is moving forwards at such a rapid pace new solutions are being overlooked. To make matters worse, large companies such as Google do not always inform their users about new solutions in as comprehensive a manner as they should. It is often the case that when browsing our user panel, we find new functions that were not available a week ago. Indeed, it is proceeding so fast that Programmatic doesn’t even communicate all the changes. There may be Google partners who receive this information, but most users will not be afforded the same courtesy.

Trends are not the same around the world; what is true for the U.S. is not true for Europe or; if we take countries like China, Russia, India, they are all characterised by different ball games and approaches. With such complexity, you need to adapt to each market; and I think that’s what we are endeavouring to do.

If we look at recent times, more and more e-commerce is taking up an ever-increasing part of the internet and this is affecting the Publishing industry as well. It certainly impacts the Publishers who combine organic traffic and paid traffic as the prices go up. But also you find more and more articles that capture users’ attention, which is from the e-commerce sector.

In my opinion, in 2022 we will see highly influential and branding Advertising campaigns. We will also see a decline in the popularity of so-called “performance marketing” as it will be more difficult to measure the results of launched campaigns due to the change in regulations governing the collection of third-party data. Also, their optimization, which so far has been easier thanks to cookies, will have a completely different dimension; and it is not yet known which direction our industry will head in.

So I think buyers will move to use more of their own data provided by the Publisher – we at JP Politiken started this process 2 years ago. And although Google has yet to introduce real changes that would translate into an advertising reality, the entire industry is preparing itself for a seismic change.

A lot of people are talking about data and also the demise of cookies. But ideally what we want is a new system which is less intrusive than the last one. And of course, we as a company are quite dependent on the steps that Google and Apple are taking, and in the absence of solutions we are hedging our bets and holding off for now.

We are shifting to a lot of contextual strategies and trying to add more information. This is very important for us. When you have a news portal it is very easy; you have a lot of text with a lot of information in an article; but on our site we just have an airplane. Therefore it is challenging to contribute more contextual information. We want to make it easier for ad crawlers to understand what is on our website and how it will benefit the buyers.

The challenges of a maturing market. What global phenomena and entities shape the Digital Publishing market the most?

The publishing market will certainly struggle with Google. We will increasingly experience not only their favouring of their own systems but also problems with data security. For a Publisher like us, a Publisher who does not use the full Google stack, we have seen a lot of problems with brand security algorithms that block the buying on our site due to very strict rules that categorize our site as an unsafe environment. And even if the Advertiser does not categorise our site as dangerous, they will want to make sure that they find sites that are actually safe for their brand. Unfortunately, this Google activity blocked in some cases all buying on our site…

We will also face a completely different challenge. We have noticed that in 5% of the cases, the data the buyer uses to buy impressions on our sites through DV360 does not match with data from SSPs other than GAM. So in our case, we are seeing a lot of Advertisers who trust 100% of Google’s data and therefore they can’t get any spend on our site. This is in some way also why DV360 buyers tend to put all spend through different GAM accounts, because here they can bid on more inventory. In 2021 we spent a lot of time finding solutions to cater for DV360 buyers.

It will be all about keeping up with the game. There will be many changes in the way Google works, particularly in terms of its privacy policy and cookies. The cookie conundrum is the best example of how the user base will look in the future, particularly when we think about targeting. Most Publishers are dependent on the industry giants, and are making large changes regardless of the cookies. This means they are moving their partners and moving their policy program; and they are not sharing a lot of information. We don’t know the what & when of it all. There is Facebook obviously, and there are others.

In our opinion, the subscription model will become more and more popular, but you have to be cautious when you want to have income from Ads and subscriptions. Sometimes achieving a good balance can be a challenge, but I think for us it has been a perfect model, especially now during COVID. But it is quite hard to get the balance right, and not cannibalise either side of the business. So ad formats are like rewarded ads, which unlock certain levels of subscription-based functionality when you watch an ad, and in that sense, we don’t want to give the user too much, because maybe they will take an extra step and become a subscriber. A subscriber will always give us more than any basic user generating ad revenue. So it is something of a tightrope act. But having said that, I think a hybrid model would represent a step forward for many companies.

Programmatic Audio, Video and CTV – which of the popular advertising formats are the most promising in the opinion of publishers? Which emerging formats will work only for some?

In our case, the process of considering the introduction of new formats is a consequence of the market demands. For example, we were quite hesitant as far as video is concerned, but it quickly turned out that with the growing demand, the growth of other Publishers and the importance of the video format itself, we had to swim with the tide. In my opinion, this video pressure will only increase and it will be one of the biggest things to look at in 2022. In the case of audio, I’m not sure how the situation will turn out yet, but looking at the growing podcast market, I imagine that come the end of 2022 it will be necessary to say: oh, audio, it’s interesting.

We think there is still a lot of organisational work to be done. In audio & CTV there is huge potential for IVT and wrongdoing. However the potential is there, and year on year we have been seeing a huge increase in smart TVs; particularly given that the younger generations are more accustomed to consuming their content in this format. I don’t remember when was the last time that I just turned on my TV and started to watch something… maybe 2 years ago. Regarding audio, for sure work needs to be done; but now when people are consuming their content in the car, we have to regard audio as having potential.

We’ve definitely noticed an increase in the use of high-end formats such as Topscroll, Wallpaper, and Midscroll / Interscroll; both with video or actually banners you can engage with. We also see an uplift in video spend other than TV/Broadcast.

Responsible and safe industry. How do publishers keep their brands safe?

Legitimate Publishers like us spend a lot of money on external tools like GeoEdge, Clean.io, etc., and if you allow for any fraud, the other side will catch on. If you are building a sustainable business, you want to build a brand and a reputable name. You want Advertisers and partners to work with you, and you want to reach out to brands also.

I’ve read an article that 50% of internet traffic is bots. We are doing as much as we can to prevent this because we care about what the other side gets. We want both sides to do well.

For SSPs, we verify obviously RPMs, CTRs (very high CTRs raise suspicion). So we have built our own system to alert us about red flags. We get alerts when something is not in line.

One of our biggest concerns is the huge amount of URLs and creatives that we have to throw into the “exclusion” category, and it is very bothersome. Among the most burdensome are those about investing, supplements, weight loss, and fake news about celebrities and politicians that send users to dangerous places on the Internet. You could say that for a Publisher like us, this is a total nightmare.

I would like to see Programmatic deal with this issue better, but the same Programmatic is pushing bogus ads that people are willing to believe.

Today, all Publishers are struggling with the issues of personal data protection, cookies, GDPR … But if a user has clicked on everything and everywhere over the past few years, they should not expect that in 2022 their digital footprint will have been cleaned up. Because if they wanted their data to stop floating around the Internet, they would have to go to every single place where they have been and unclick every single consent they had previously clicked. Unfortunately, to the consternation of Publishers, internet users then accuse Publishers of delivering unwanted ads. It is impossible to go back in time, and all we can hope for is the phasing out of this trend.

If we took 1000 internet users and sat them down for a week in front of their computer and started showing them ads in a Programmatic model, how many of them would click to exclude those unwanted ads? How many clicks on this Google triangle would we see? This is due to a very pragmatic approach taken to allowing Programmatic on our websites. If you flag industries that are undesirable in the basic settings, you need to realise that this is a waiver of a larger or smaller part of Programmatic revenues. Because what generates the most revenue? Fake news, casinos, and all kinds of undesirable (from our point of view) content and creations. If, when implementing Programmatic, the Publisher establishes pragmatic rules of the game, then the whole process becomes much easier.

In addition to the blocking settings, the second issue is also the floor prices. Most spam and the crap from fake news Publishers occurs when you build from 0.01 gr.

On the other hand, an industry like casinos have cash to burn and they are trying to get in through a back door like this. They come and say, ok if you don’t let us on the display surface, then we’ll buy content from you and put links in … That’s why we need a consistent policy for not allowing such content at all.

There are Publishers who forgo a filter, and that means they are taking a risk.

Do you have any thoughts on the position of publishers in the programmatic industry?

Let us know in the comment or write to us directly!