New York, NY – A new report commissioned by real-time data company, Taykey, found that a majority of marketers (88 percent) feel forced to choose between quality or scale when it comes to targeting programmatic inventory. For many, there doesn’t seem to be a systematic approach to managing the two, but instead, prioritization comes on a case-by-case basis depending on a client’s objectives.
Amit Avner, Taykey co-founder & CEO, stated, “How do you successfully balance quality inventory with scale? That’s the big question advertisers face with their programmatic media spend. The success of one is often at the other’s expense.”
To get an answer, Taykey surveyed 228 advertisers in August and September, 2017 to discover their current approach. The report, in partnership with Digiday, a leading digital publication, examines the pain points, tactics and best practices of striking the right balance while maintaining brand safety in an era of automation.
Key Findings:
The primary approaches used by marketers today to find quality and relevant inventory – private marketplaces and whitelisting – often fail to deliver adequate scale. Further complicating the issue, the most common definitions of “quality” rely largely on subjective criteria.
To fill the gap, emphasis must be placed on getting the most accurate data and the right technology to connect the right content with the right audience at meaningful scale.
Avner continued, “Aligning around objective industry measures of quality, including page engagement and viewability can help point the way toward a more data-driven approach. This is the only plausible path for brands to identify the best possible environment for every impression in a scalable and efficient way.”
Additional Findings:
Most marketers are equally prioritizing inventory with scale, with a slight preference for quality. However, marketers have yet to find a clear strategy that achieves the right balance.
Of the marketers surveyed 34% consider a “quality environment” to be providing their audience with relevant content, working with reputable publishers 34%, and achieving high engagement rates 22%.
62% of marketers say inventory quality is the single biggest benefit of using whitelists
56% of marketers say inventory quality is the single biggest benefit of using PMPs
Lack of scale was named the biggest drawback of using whitelists and private marketplaces.
Marketers are often terrified that with any play for scale, their ads will end in brand-unsafe, if not outright caustic contexts. In order to ensure brand safety while achieving quality and scale, marketers should set a baseline of best practices, and understand the technology.
Marketers don’t have a clear answer when it comes to which tools best optimize the context in which their ads appear: They’re torn between data management platforms (39 percent), private marketplaces (34 percent), and keyword targeting (34 percent). With no front-runner, tradeoffs must be made.
This report comes at the heals of Taykey’s Smart Whitelist launch, a real-time data layer designed to proactively optimize for quality, relevance, and scale by identifying the content generating the most engagement across the general population. Smart Whitelist takes a unique ‘wisdom of the crowds’ approach to the problem by using the company’s patented AI to scan social platforms, websites, blogs and wikis to identify the topics generating the most engagement among the general population. Each topic is then translated into lists of hundreds of URLs, representing the most relevant article and video placements. These URLs are sent directly to participating DSPs for targeting and updated continuously as interests change throughout the day. Natural language processing is also applied in real-time to exclude all negative or controversial content and provide an additional layer of brand protection.
For a complementary copy of the report or to learn more about Smart Whitelist please visit www.taykey.com
About Taykey
Taykey is a real-time data company that analyzes hundreds of millions of digital activities per day to discover what consumers care about most right now and how those interests change over time.Taykey’s solutions provide companies with intelligence surrounding the brands, people, products, and events most relevant to their target audiences and the ability to automatically align their digital advertising with those topics in real time. Founded in 2009, the company is headquartered in New York with offices in Herzliya (Israel). Learn more at www.taykey.com.
