“For years the relationship between a DSP and a publisher has been a black box in both directions.”
Last week, Viant launched its enhanced Publisher Solutions. It is free to publishers, which is the headline most people will reach for, and the least interesting thing about it.
I keep coming back to the same argument – that a segment is not a signal; that the gap between what CTV promises and delivers is mostly a gap in the data; that handing a model a conclusion is not the same as giving it the evidence that produced one.
This week, the argument stopped being a thing I wrote about and became a thing we built.
For three years the industry has argued about supply paths, and mostly it has argued about the wrong variable: length. How many hops, how direct a route, how much middle got cut? Length became the proxy for quality in the same way that a deal ID became the proxy for premium: a label that’s easy to market and difficult to validate.
A direct path to bad signal is still a bad path.
The ANA stat often gets quoted as a fee story. Roughly $20 billion in open internet waste a year, with about 36 cents of every dollar reaching the publisher. I read it as a signal problem with a fee problem attached. When a request moves through a hop and loses its real IP, its supply-chain validation, its content metadata, its identity match, the bidder is no longer pricing the impression that the publisher actually sold. The fee is what you pay. The degraded signal is what you are left holding.
The part I am most willing to plant my flag on is the part we left out. We did not build a publisher fee. Not as a promotion, not as a land grab. A take rate would have given us a reason to route spend toward our own margin instead of toward the best outcome. We removed the object from the design.
If the model holds, and the 85% of our CTV spend already running through it suggests that it does, the burden of proof moves. The question stops being ‘why you would give this away for free?’ and becomes ‘what is everyone else’s fee actually buying?’.
I do not think the path was ever the point. The path is the plumbing. The signal is the intelligence that makes the plumbing worth building.
the conversation
I got into all of this with Richie Hyden on Signal & Noise, hosted by Brett House and Rio Longacre. They titled the episode “Can DSPs Save Publishers?” and I spent the first ten minutes arguing the premise was backwards. Nobody is saving anybody. The job is to reconnect the advertiser – who is the client – with the publisher – who owns the inventory – and to stop degrading what passes between them.
It is a loose, unscripted hour. At one point I compared curation to a mortgage-backed securities, which my father, who actually worked in mortgage-backed securities, did not love.
Signal & Noise episode:
“You negotiate an end cap, eye level, at a set price. Then you walk into the retail store and there’s garbage on the floor, your product is on the bottom shelf halfway down the aisle. That is what happened to publisher inventory.”
the long version
I wrote the full argument for the Viant blog. It goes deeper on the four pieces, on the decision to leave the fee out, and on what the numbers look like at launch.
A Direct Path to Bad Signal Is Still a Bad Path
the coverage
The launch was covered across the industry. A few I am glad to point to.
Ad Age ran an exclusive, placing the work alongside OpenAI, Geico, and Coca-Cola in its rundown of the emerging trends brands and agencies need to track.
- AdExchanger, Publisher Problems, DSP Solutions; Who’s Tagging Out?
- AdExchanger / TV Tech, Viant Launches Enhanced Publisher Solutions for CTV, Programmatic
- TV News Check, Viant Expands Publisher Tools To Improve CTV Supply Quality & Monetization
- MarTech Series, Viant Expands Publisher Solutions to Unlock Greater Performance and Transparency
- Ad Tech Radar, Viant Debuts Free Transparency Solution for Publishers
- PPC Land, Viant opens its bidder to publishers with free SupplyIQ dashboard
- Let’s Data Science, Viant launches publisher tool, Google and TTD drop TAG
- Tipsheet.ai, Newsletter
- Stock Titan, Viant Expands Publisher Solutions to Unlock Greater Performance and Transparency
- Yahoo Finance, Viant Expands Publisher Solutions to Unlock Greater Performance and Transparency