Digital Advertising’s Dirty, Little P-Word Is Getting a Makeover

Programmatic is getting an overhaul. Technologies like Sonobi are upending the legacy of low CPMs and the passive nature of how buyers and sellers have traditionally engaged in trade. They are facilitating a new way for buyers to manage for reach and frequency.

Companies like iSocket, Shiny Ads and Legolas made marginal gains in this area: their buying model, dubbed “automated guarantees,” attempted to bring to market an impression-level buy with upfront reservations and CPMs north of $2. However, much like its precursor in Real Time Bidding (RTB), automated guarantees created a passive framework for media trading and deprived buyers of the ability to discover their audience or manage frequency caps across their various strategies.

This meant that buyers could not precisely define who they wanted to reach at scale, nor could they control over-communication to their target consumers. A publisher pushed impressions for a buyer to accept, in part or in full, based on the terms of their agreement. This created an area of opportunity for other technologies like Sonobi to lead with innovation.

Google, too, released an update to DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) with its version of a programmatic guaranteed product in 2016. However, this, likewise, did not offer direct negotiations between buyers and publishers. Instead of a “push” buying orientation, Google’s programmatic guaranteed offering has remained a more passive, “pull” form of media trade, just like RTB. The publishers’ only option was to accept or reject a proposal with no discussion on the buyer’s intention. Google also introduced an audience feature in DFP last year, since their original product was oriented around serving impressions and not people, and only had the ability to frequency cap at the line item level.

While I cannot speak in detail about all the innovative work that is currently happening in the ad-tech market, I can more adeptly discuss what Sonobi has been developing over the last few years to redress some of the shortcomings of prior programmatic offerings. As announced in November 2017, Sonobi developed a people-based identifier (PBID), which is a cross-device, persistent ID to recognize a user regardless of whether they are browsing content in-app or via the browser across mobile or desktop. For forward-leaning buyers, Sonobi stitches together the leading destinations on the internet in one uniform buying experience (similar in nature to Facebook and Google’s walled gardens) and allows buyers to isolate their valued customers with a high match-rate by targeting cookies, device IDs, or logged-in user data in a privacy compliant infrastructure. Sonobi understands that a publisher’s greatest asset is not solely its impression volume but the people that make those impressions valuable.

Our identity graph product, which was released in beta across various brand-safe publishers in the comScore 250, is allowing buyers to communicate in an addressable fashion to over 225 million-plus validated individuals with almost none of the privacy-breach concerns for which Facebook has recently come under scrutiny. A data partnership between a buyer, a seller and a partner data safe-haven enables Sonobi to obtain high-fidelity user-targeting information without  ever receiving a user’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Instead, the data safe haven passes an anonymized ID that cannot be converted back to its original dataset, thus eliminating information leakage. The benefit for buyers is that they can now precisely target the consumers they want to reach and calibrate how they message them across different media channels and throughout the full marketing funnel. Sonobi’s PBID solution allows buyers to maximize their spend with greater audience-targeting accuracy, transparency, and confidence.     

At Sonobi, we believe that the optimal conditions for both buyer and seller are created when the buyer defines both the addressable audience it wants to reach and the quality environments that yield the best outcome for its clients. This digital Shangri-La is also enhanced when a marketer can understand a publisher’s site visitors and their behavior by way of a JavaScript tag in the header on a publisher’s page. Sonobi pioneered facilitating transactions via the header tag to amplify visibility into the universe of a publisher’s user-base. In comparison, both iSocket and Shiny Ads products lacked this insight since they only had a line item to call in the ad server.

The combination of these paradigms means that Sonobi completes a census of all page visitors and the most viewable ad unit placements on a site, and then matches and isolates those users against a buyer-defined target audience. This dynamically expands the addressable users a buyer can reach and eliminates having to verify that a buyer bought what it wanted to buy post-campaign when it is already too late to apply changes to enhance campaign KPIs.

With API access to the publisher’s ad server, Sonobi’s thin layer of technology also allows the buyer to gain priority, to forecast, and to directly book inventory without creating channel conflicts. The buyer and the publisher can negotiate directly in a seamless interface, which keeps a record of their communications and business together, thereby eliminating the headache of extraneous record keeping. This is a great improvement from the iSocket product which had limited priority and technical ingenuity in the ad server to not conflict with the business interests of the publishers; and did not provide a means for the buyer and the seller to actively engage with each other. Sonobi’s JetStream product is rooted in advanced programmatic technology, which makes it smarter than its competitors by focusing on audience and brings it at true parity with direct media buys. Our innovative solution facilitates better buyer-seller alignment, affords greater transparency on scale, and eliminates fraud completely, since by quantifying the audience pre-execution a buyer qualifies the media they will be buying. Sonobi’s strategy leverages the virtues of programmatic while providing an antidote to its demerits.

The direct campaigns flowing through Sonobi blur the lines between what is traditionally considered “programmatic” and “direct.” As a result, investment heads and CROs at major agencies and media companies are reassessing the division between the two buy types and how to best strategize around optimizing spend and driving revenue. Our innovation, we hope, eliminates the pain points that have kept buyers at bay from adopting an approach that allows the buyers to use technology to transact with their publishing partners more precisely, intelligently, and with ease.

Programmatic has come a long way. Through the efforts of many, we are reshaping how media transactions can be more efficient, insightful and impactful. Sonobi has created a marketplace where premium web properties allow the industry’s leading buyers to discover their audience, plan, forecast, reserve and buy directly into the publisher ad server while frequency capping. This, in turn has evolved the programmatic business to be a more deliberate, mutually beneficial exchange than its predecessors -- RTB or automated guarantee. Buyers can have greater confidence that the media dollars they invest are working towards the buyers’ maximum benefit with the greatest achievable efficiency, and without eroding the success in its various campaign tactics.

Following Sonobi’s lead, the ad technology solutions that will be most successful in programmatic are those that can adapt and learn from the lessons of the past, and unpack new ideas that enhance the strengths of the original business concepts. They may even change the face of programmatic altogether. For us at Sonobi, this means putting people first, fostering direct market engagement, and offering value that aligns with the goals of the principals that we serve.