The Future of Native Media Buying
What goes on in the background when you’re buying media may interest some of you — here’s an insight into what I’ve learned and observed over the past few years being entrenched in the AdTech/programmatic world. Native is particularly interesting as more and more advertisers and performance marketers move their budgets to native. We see this trend as the number of events tracked on Voluum continues to decline, and ad spend tracked continues to increase. High value expensive traffic > High volume cheap traffic. Even so, adoption of native display is still low and this is just the beginning of growth:
Source: eMarketer
The Future of Native Media Buying
Background
I thought I would share what I’ve learned over the last 2.5 years since I made the decision to build Voluum DSP. To give you some background on the ‘market research’ that led to the decision to build a DSP: a few years ago I had one of our devs pull a report to see how much ad spend we were tracking in Voluum TRK and to my astonishment it was close to $1 billion. The decision in my mind was made instantaneously – we’re going to consolidate tracking optimization and media buying. Little did I know, this would become the most challenging undertaking of my life. One which burnt out my CTO early on, and one which made me want to give up so many times I cannot even count. The programmatic part of online advertising may be one of the most challenging, complex, least transparent and understood industries in existence. An industry riddled with so much fraud that estimates range from 10% to 50% (of all traffic sold being fraudulent), nobody knows with absolute certainty because it is simply impossible to measure. Based on my experience I feel it’s in the higher end of that range. This industry almost seems like an invitation for organized crime, insane returns, no legal repercussions — ad fraud is expected to become the second largest criminal activity second only to the drug trade. Technically, it’s not very difficult to generate fraud, implementing it is even easier. Fraudsters have an incredibly high incentive, face little to no risk, and as such they’re always a step ahead of those who futilely try to fight it – we know, we’ve tried.
On top of the fraud is the whole incestious nature of the programmatic advertising space. Both on Zeropark and on Voluum DSP we often observe the same visitor coming in 10+ times from multiple partners who re-b ...