Has programmatic ad spend hit its peak in Australia?
Programmatic ad spend share has been slipping in the US for a while, and it looks like the same thing might be starting to happen in Australia, writes SMI managing director Jane Ractliffe.
Australia’s media industry has seen plenty of trends come and go, but arguably few have had such an impact on the media landscape as the programmatic trading of digital advertising.
I well remember an office discussion in 2011 when a payment code came in for a new company called Brandscreen. To create the SMI data we need to manually assign every media agency payment record a place in our data taxonomy. From the moment we began researching Brandscreen we could see it did not fit the usual digital mould.
Brandscreen became the first of many demand side platforms for which we received payment codes, and given the early growth in this market within a year a new `Exchanges’ section was added to the data taxonomy as the home for all programmatic payment codes/spend data.
How does SMI track programmatic investment?
My understanding is that SMI takes the feed from BCC invoicing systems withing agencies.
However what is loaded into an invoicing system is usually the identity of the trading desk, not the actual publishers/media etc. for example, DSPs clear billing with an SSP and the SSP passes revenue back to publisher. and the holding group pays the DSP’s invoices.
How does SMI track this kind of spend?
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Hi Anonymous
Yes we get all the Agencies’ ad spend and therefore also their bookings onto their trading desks (which we combine) and their spend onto other DSPs. Very best, Jane
Thanks for the insights, Jane. Curious what media channels are being tracked by SMI on this from agencies, as we’ve seen in the US & globally nothing but continued growth in TV, DOOH, Audio, Video & In-App. Display might be slipping a bit as a share & certainly on growth rate since it’s tough to keep up when 80% is now programmatic in the US & hi 60s in Western EU. Law of large numbers. For what it’s worth, our teams across various regions have also seen part of the shift, in a healthy way, from buyers and sellers moving from Open Auction transaction types to Private Exchanges, reducing fraud and increasing viewability and contextual relevance.
revenue into agency controlled exchanges has flattened – that is what the data says. Programmatically transacted revenue is not the same thing as SMI ‘Exchanges’ calculation.
So the headline is – “agencies allocation of investment into their own TD’s has stopped growing.”