Optimal monetization

How should a premium publisher deal with this issue? Should they open the door for their inventory and thus benefit from possible additional campaigns? What options do they have to "protect" their premium inventory without missing out on the general trend and profiting from future market developments? Omnimedia AG has asked itself these questions. It is the marketer of the Scout24 Group, Anibis and Ticketcorner as well as a technical partner of Energy and Cash. Kilian Kämpfen, Managing Director of Omnimedia, answered our questions.
 
WW: How long have you been working on this topic?
Kilian Kämpfen: More than two years ago, we decided to take a close look at the issue and search for possible alternative approaches.
 
How did you proceed?
We worked closely with agencies and customers - our most important advertising partners. This enabled us to find a solution that meets all the needs of the parties and, above all, those of the premium sites being marketed. In parallel to our tests, we conducted a market analysis to find out who in the European and other markets was aiming for something similar and what technologies were on offer. After a few months and many Skype meetings, we realized that most of the technology providers were not willing to implement exactly our solution, but were only interested in offering our inventory in their trading system and enabling it for as many of their demand-side platform (DSP) customers as possible. However, we wanted to build a "private marketplace" with our rules and not simply take over an existing system.

What does the solution look like?
The solution is a new marketing pyramid (see illustration) that allows both Premium and RTA and even RTB in certain areas. The idea behind this is that across the entire inventory, areas, channels or placements are released for RTA under our specifications.

What is "analog buying"?
This is classic sales, where we advise and support agencies and customers with our sales staff. For example, we offer branding products and special integrations on the sites. One of these products is Total Branding Week, for example, with the search background advertising material on Autoscout24, which is supplemented with a triple ad and mobile ads and offered as a fixed integration. This offer runs for one week and reaches almost four million contacts.

What do you mean by "programmatic buying"?
This is our new offer. We define two areas: Programmatic Direct and Programmatic Indirect.

What are the differences?
Programmatic Direct are campaigns that are automatically delivered via our technical solution (currently the Sell Side Cockpit of our technology partner) on all our premium placements as soon as the right user comes to the site for the campaign and the demand side (DSP) of the agencies or customers then wants to buy it at the predefined price. We deliver all IAB standard advertising media, i.e. Leaderboard, Skycrapper, HalfpageAD and Rectangle. Only agencies and clients who book a relevant proportion of branding products in analog buying with Omnimedia have access to this type of automated booking. 

Can you give an example?
An agency X books premium sales of CHF 500,000 for the whole year in 2013. This entitles them to automatically access our inventory in 2014 in addition to their analog bookings at fixed CPM. We define the price for this in a contract for the new year. This then applies to all of the agency's campaigns that they want to book in Programmatic Direct in 2014. At the end of each year, we will then redefine the contract with the agencies for the following year and again take their entire booked premium volume into account. The agency does not have to purchase fixed volumes in the programmatic direct area, but only if its campaigns reach the right target groups at Omnimedia. This is all automated and your DSP communicates with our Sell Side Platform (SSP) (or our SSC technology). So the agency gets access to around 500 million ad impressions and can run their campaigns automatically without Excel and email. One of the advantages we see is the optimization of processes between agencies and publishers. In future, we won't need more campaign managers, but rather well-trained yield managers and consultants who provide agencies with products and monitor and optimize automation. Billing will then be monthly and agency X will receive an invoice from us for the ad impressions received.

What is programmatic indirect?
Programmatic Indirect is implemented with classic RTB. But here, too, we determine who we want to work with and at what CPM the DSP and ad networks can purchase our ad impressions. We have defined parts of the inventory for this type of marketing. These are not in the 100 percent visible area or in channels that we do not otherwise only offer directly via analog sales. For example, this could be in subcategories of a site that has a lot of traffic but only allows advertising placement at the end of the site. Here, too, we have full control in our system and can block the URL except for individual customers to ensure that no unwanted advertising appears on our sites. This is because many publishers want to exclude advertising for erotic products, political campaigns and, of course, advertising from competitors. We have tested this over the last 12 months and can now ensure that 95.5 percent of these campaigns are excluded.

What are the advantages?
We are convinced that with these marketing variants we have found a new way to monetize the inventory on all placements and sites even more optimally. In addition, and this is even more important for the future, we have succeeded in finding an automated booking process with our premium customers that benefits all parties. These premium customers will also have an advantage over their competitors if they work with us in this way.

Interview: Pierre C. Meier

The interview was conducted in writing.