Why Publishers Are Eliminating Programmatic Silos

We have a sales team who is the market for both programmatic and direct sales.

Everyone is kind of interested in both [programmatic and direct sales] and has this stake in the game and can speak to both programmatic and direct deals. We’re ramping up [programmatic] training, and everyone is super cool with trying to be educated on it.

We sell all of our units programmatically. Homepage, high-impact, native, all that stuff is sold programmatically.

It really hasn’t affected us as much as I think it affects buyers. For us, we’re seeing more advertisers. There’s a wider variety of advertisers scaling on our site across the different verticals just because we’re seeing advertisers that might not have won [programmatic auctions] in the past being able to win now.

We’ve integrated private marketplace [PMP] deals with Amazon’s Transparent Ad Marketplace.

I think all of them are either thinking about doing it or are in the stages of talking about doing it. But not everyone does it today.

I think everyone’s setup is different, but you still need an SSP and a DSP. I guess there are a lot of marketers that are starting to do more programmatic things in-house, so the DSP might become something that isn’t always necessary. But I think that’s still being figured out. It’s part of the whole evolution.

It’s too early to tell. I agree those discussions are happening now and that people are starting to figure out what vendors they need. And data is playing more and more into every single conversation that we have. There are a lot of conversations that are happening about it, but [ad industry insiders] are just trying to figure out what would make sense.