The world of ad tech gets accused of being overly complicated and it’s refreshing to be able to simplify what is going on at the current moment. Everybody agrees about the shift toward CTV; with it there brings a whole slew of potential new advertising customers to expand from the major 500 players to over 5,000. Data remains King, as knowing your audience means being able to charge fair market value for curated audience segments. While The Trade Desk (TTD) has enjoyed unequaled dominance on the buy side to participate in the data economics, the shift is on from third party data (DSP controlled) to first party data (publisher/SSP controlled).
Publishers will finally get to take full advantage of their proprietary first party data and use their preferred SSP partner Magnite (MGNI) to create the best yield for their ad inventory. The most exciting aspect of the partnership is Magnite’s ability to federate their publisher partners to create audience packages at scale to match the demand side from media buying agencies and a DSP like The Trade Desk… or again, any DSP in the world. Jeff Green can’t force all traffic to flow through his pipes and recent actions like his latest software du jour, creating a glass OS which is doomed to be siloed and calling out SSPs two weeks ago on the ER with misleading statements are all signals that he knows the deal. Seems a little desperate.
Magnite continues to be at the right place at the right time, offering dynamic products that help their publisher and commerce media partners get the best price for their ad slots. Full stop.
“I think it’s pretty clear that [The Trade Desk’s] OpenPath is a very valuable source of demand. It begins and ends there. The demand is the lifeblood for publishers. However, it’s just one DSP.
And as Jeff pointed out, if you’re going to do this, you better build your own yield management as a publisher. And we kind of vociferously disagree with the publisher has the capability to build yield management, let alone have the data that we have to feed yield management. So, I would say, largely speaking, we — our biggest value above OpenPath is we bring the world’s demand. We bring every DSP under the sun.
We bring global demand. The Trade Desk isn’t even operating in Latin America, we are. So, we absolutely can bring all this demand, and we add yield management to it. And so, we’re making sure that we’re keeping the buyers honest, and the publishers are getting the best possible rate.
And so, that is not what OpenPath is. OpenPath is just a pipe of demand, valuable demand. But I think we could argue for the same fee, you get Trade Desk and the world’s demand with yield optimization.” –Michael Barrett