Hasta La Creative!

Digital advertising is Google and Facebook’s market to lose, where the safety (and scale, and data and automation) of a walled garden have allowed them to grab 77% of gross spending online and nearly every new dollar spent. Unless a media buy goes through Facebook or Google, buyers rightly worry that a lot of the money spent is going to a bot, a spoofed site, or worse. Good quality publishers that exist in the open web, and supply content to Google and Facebook, are at risk because of these issues.

Brands spend the money, and therefore are in the best position to make changes for the better. There are several practical ways brands can treat good publishers more like allies in the quest to reduce problems and retain high-quality content.

1. Treat good publishers well. Treating all publishers the same threatens the top end of the content market. Real publishers like NBCU and The Washington Post should not be treated the same as gotbabes.net, even if they sit side by side in a trading platform dashboard. Agency media buyers have no incentive to treat good publishers well in the short term — low prices and scale are everything. Anytime a new issue such as viewability or nonhuman traffic is surfaced, a new blanket process is created that all publishers must follow. Buyers have metrics and controls that are time consuming and expensive for good publishers, who rarely fall afoul of the rules when compared to the long tail.

Continue reading at AdAge.com