Index Exchange CEO: Time for a Performance Max for the open internet

Two different visions for programmatic media buying on the open internet appear to be taking shape.

On one side, demand-side platforms (DSPs) and the buy side are investing in empowering advertisers, for example, through measurement partnerships aimed at tying connected TV ads to sales, improving addressability with identity solutions like Unified ID 2.0 and ID5 and democratizing publisher metadata for better-informed media investments.

On the other side, many supply-side platforms (SSPs) are investing in curation, hailing it as an opportunity to use publisher data to improve ad buys. To accomplish that, they are building marketplaces of select publishers’ ad inventories for media buyers to access.

“I see the two choices as actually attempting to serve the same goal: honoring buyer intent,” says Morgan Jetto, senior vice president and general manager at Verve. “These two paradigms are more similar than dissimilar and represent progress in the broader attempt to make media buying in the open internet more effective.”

Still, these diverging visions risk further splitting an already fragmented open internet, even though the goal — a more efficient programmatic supply path — is ostensibly the same.

The latest evolution of supply-side curation is, unironically, inspired by Google’s playbook.

“The open internet needs its version of [Performance Max], and I think what’s happening in curation is going to ignite that,” said Andrew Casale, CEO at Index Exchange, during the Prebid Summit in London this week. Performance Max is a blackbox, AI-powered campaign type available on Google Ads.

Explaining his rationale, Casale said that one of the latest trends in curation was the emergence of startups developing custom bidding algorithms that “activate models and decisioning closest to the impression” — that is, the publisher — by analyzing on-page content with AI through large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s.

These analyses are then fed to the SSP’s curation tools. Some custom bidding algorithms also ingest advertisers’ conversion data. But unlike Big Tech’s tools, they also attempt to give buyers some degree of control and transparency, even though the curated publisher data these models rely on has ultimately been prefiltered by the supply side.

“If you sell a lot of cars and you pipe your conversions into these APIs … those algorithms might help that marketer sell their cars, but those algorithms are now also going to be really good at selling every other marketer’s cars,” Casale said.

“What’s happening in this arena is the opportunity to potentially build models that are proprietary, whereby marketers’ data never leaves them or they’re not training some other platforms’ algorithm,” Casale continued.

A black box, then, but only for a marketer’s competitors.

Casale may have a point in that marketers are likely always on the hunt for more precise, end-to-end targeting, measurement and attribution capabilities from their media partners, something that premium publishers like Disney and DSPs like The Trade Desk are already addressing through initiatives like the former’s Compass tool and the latter’s Kokai upgrade.

They can contrast Casale’s thinking with a different philosophy, outlined by Mike O’Sullivan, GM of product at The Trade Desk, during the company’s annual Forward 25 event in New York last week. The event brought together some of the world’s foremost premium publishers and media owners like Disney, The New York Times and Spotify.

From O’Sullivan’s perspective, the future of advertising is shifting toward advertiser empowerment, as demonstrated by tools such as Sincera. Co-founded by O’Sullivan and acquired by The Trade Desk this year, Sincera focuses on giving media buyers greater control, potentially helping lead to improved ad performance and higher revenue for publishers.

For example, metadata powered by Sincera’s technology provides marketers with granular ad inventory insights like ads-to-content ratio to help them zero in on the truly premium ad experiences worth investing in, instead of relying on SSPs to curate decisions for media buyers. Publishers, meanwhile, can have their inventory valued at the premium rates it deserves.

“Premium publishers have all these characteristics, but they’re not being transmitted to buyers,” O’Sullivan said.

Initiatives like The Trade Desk’s Sellers and Publishers 500+ can also help marketers make sense of the sprawling open internet by highlighting what The Trade Desk considers to be top properties while being transparent about the criteria behind such selections, such as ad refresh rate and ad load.

“Having this awareness of the supply chain, understanding and valuing a publisher’s environment and the context in which ad opportunities exist” is only possible on the open internet, said O’Sullivan. “There are still ads on the walled gardens. You just know nothing about this.”

The Current is owned and operated by The Trade Desk. This information is provided solely for background and is not a representation or guarantee of any future performance.