What Does It Take To Become A Programmatic-First Publisher?

Header bidding also created massive competition in the market. While in some ways the choices are overwhelming, having a market with multiple strong competitors, a host of secondary players and a large cohort of supporting players is far better than a market with just a handful of powerful companies that don’t need to compete.

All of these market and technical changes that were driven by header bidding have finally allowed publishers to cross the inflection point from break-even to business-building. But getting there isn’t trivial.

Getting To The Promised Land

A business plan to optimize revenue as a programmatic-first publisher has at least three main components.

First, publishers must choose a high-performing ad layout and format for their site.

Second, they must train their sales teams to sell PMPs and programmatic guaranteed deals, and train business development teams to build strong relationships with exchanges and other partners.

And finally, they must build technology to manage and optimize all points in their ad stack, from wrappers and analytics to flooring and code timing.

Vital Components

Every site is different, and understanding an audience’s opinion on advertising and its engagement patterns is key to determining the right type of ads and layout. There are certainly best practices that are useful to apply, but ultimately every site must be customized to match the audience’s needs.

A strong sales and business development team is another important part of the puzzle. Working with advertisers – either brand-direct or trading desks and agencies – can unlock significant budgets and allow publishers to sell the unique value of their audiences. Business development teams can build strong relationships with supply-side and demand-side platforms to ensure their properties are presented in the best possible light, and with the best possible terms.

And technology is the underpinning for all of this. A strong header bidding-enabled ad stack starts with a publisher’s choice of wrapper(s), its own customization and any logging and testing framework. Optimizing their partners’ platforms is equally important in terms of ad server setup, wrapper timing decisions and more.

All elements of a monetization plan must be backed up with analysis. Publishers must measure, monitor and maintain everything, while ensuring that the decisions they made six months ago are the right decisions today. Publishers must constantly test and refine what they’re doing because the industry changes quickly – if they’re not ahead of the market, they’ll be behind.

Buy Or Build?

As complex as this may seem, more and more publishers are making it work. It does require investment and focus, but it can pay off in a big way. One of the main challenges to get to this inflection point is the difficulty of running both the content and audience development side of the business, and the ad revenue side. Each company must decide how much of each they want to own for themselves and how much to outsource to partners.

In almost all scenarios, publishers need to find the right partners – building their own ad exchange is rarely the right approach. Each company must decide how comfortable they are giving up certain amounts of control versus how much they feel confident they can excel in each area.

Any number of possible combinations can work and, if they execute well, publishers will find themselves on the road to success.

Follow Paul Bannister (@pbannist), CafeMedia (@CafeMedia_) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

This post was syndicated from Ad Exchanger.