We hear plenty around the need for more transparency, and more signals to be passed through the supply chain, when it comes to CTV advertising. Often, this is framed as primarily a buy-side frustration, where advertisers and agencies don’t have a clear window into what exactly it is they’re buying.
But Kieran Greene, founder and CEO of sell-side ad tech business Shinka, says it’s an issue that is hitting publishers’ bottom lines. And it’s not simply caused by streaming apps refusing to pass data back to buyers. Rather, the process which shepherds a bid request from the sell-side to the buy-side often operates inefficiently, preventing publishers from getting the most value from their inventory.
It’s a problem Greene says he first spotted while working at Google. The tying of AdX to Google’s Ad Manager, he says, prevented publishers from running truly fair and unbiased, or at least transparent, auctions. At the same time, technology wasn’t evolving fast enough to cater to new and emerging channels, where publishers themselves weren’t always tech-savvy enough to identify what was going wrong.
The result, according to Greene, is that significant revenue is being left on the table. “Publishers typically see a 20 to 40 percent uplift in revenue once these inefficiencies are addressed,” he said.
Filling in the blanks
The problems he saw cropping up for publishers served as the inspiration for Shinka, which Greene describes as an agnostic mediation layer for publishers, with the aim of making ad auctions for publishers more transparent and efficient.
Part of this comes through the auctions Shinka enables via its header bidding offering. But a lot of the work is done before the auction, in the preparation and distribution of the bid request itself. The bid request, after all, is a publisher’s chance to give prospective buyers as much information as possible about how valuable a given impression is. But often bid requests are incorrectly formatted, or are missing key signals which ultimately make the difference for whether an advertiser makes a bid or not.
Shinka integrates into its publisher clients’ video players, SSAI providers, and wherever bid requests are initiated. Its job then is to make sure the bid request is properly formulated, to enrich any signals provided with extra data, and to translate them appropriately for each demand source which the request gets sent to.
On the enrichment front, Shinka takes all of the signals which it has access to for the impression, and layers in additional data to help drive up its value. “An example would be that we might receive a ZIP code, but we won’t receive any of the other information around the city or the country,” said Greene. “But that information is what the advertiser is actually going to bid on. So we can place that information in.”
This also gives advertisers transparency that they don’t always get. For example, where publishers choose to share them, Shinka will send through data on the specific show, season, and episode, as well as the impression’s position within the ad break – with publishers staying in control of exactly which signals are passed to which partners.
These latter examples are the sorts of datapoints which publishers have historically been hesitant to share. But transparency is a two-way street, and Greene says sell-side companies benefit from buy-side transparency too. For example, publishers can see who bid and at what price, as well as getting visibility into creative IDs, and what exactly was served for each impression.
Lost in translation
Filling in the blanks for signals included in bid requests is just part of the story. Each demand-side platform or supply-side platform has different requirements around what exactly they need to see in a bid request in order to respond, so the bid has to be translated for every partner it’s sent out to. If that’s not done, then publishers will frequently see lower bid density than they might otherwise — and lower bid density means less competition, which ultimately pushes down CPMs.
Greene says that vertically integrated stacks naturally prioritise their own demand paths – not necessarily out of bad intent, it’s simply how they’re built. The translation and enrichment work gets done for the exchange the ad server is tied to, and not always for everyone else. The same applies to signal enrichment: an ad server might do that qualification and enrichment work itself, without that valuable information reaching third-party demand partners.
That, Greene says, is the benefit of having an independent player like Shinka in the middle. Shinka itself is ad server agnostic – it integrates with Google Ad Manager, but equally with any ad server compatible with OpenRTB or VAST. With no demand of its own to favour, it does the translation and enrichment work for every partner equally, so demand sources compete on even footing. This greater efficiency can be a win-win: advertisers understand more about what they’re buying and are able to bid more effectively, and publishers are able to maximise the value of every impression.
Efficiency doesn’t just come through the auction process. Greene says Shinka’s fee structure — where charges are only applied for delivered impressions, and are CPM fees rather than revenue share take rates – also works out more efficiently for publishers. This is particularly the case in CTV and DOOH, since fees aren’t inflated by impression multipliers. An ad delivery is an ad delivery, whether that ad is shown to one person or 50, and the fee is the same either way.
Shinka has also been formalising the trust element of its pitch, recently completing its SOC 2 Type II certification.
Publishers under pressure to deliver extra value to buyers
“Pieces of this have existed for years — header bidding, wrappers — but they haven’t been packaged for CTV and DOOH in a transparent, manageable way,” said Greene.
The obvious question arises of why publishers haven’t been more vocal on the subject, if so much money is being left on the table. Greene says it comes down to a combination of lack of resource and the competitive dynamics in the market.
“Publisher ad ops teams are lean and stretched – they’re being asked to do more with less every year,” said Greene. When it comes to pushing for widespread change in the programmatic ecosystem, they’re not particularly well equipped to do so.
Publishers also often feel beholden to the buy-side, since there’s so much competition for ad spend. And while there are certainly gains to be made on both sides of the market from greater efficiency, Greene says that in some cases, a lack of transparency actually plays into the hands of the advertisers.
The majority of CTV inventory, as is the case with DOOH, is still traded directly or via programmatic guaranteed. For those deals, these extra signals which could be passed through the supply chain aren’t really important to the advertiser. Sometimes they don’t want to know, according to Greene, because these signals might just end up demonstrating cases where the advertiser has gotten a bargain on a particularly valuable impression.
Greene gave an example from the DOOH world, where inventory on TV sets in public places often still ends up traded on a one-to-one basis, as if it were standard CTV inventory. In theory, a publisher should be able to charge significantly more for these impressions by applying an out-of-home audience multiplier. It’s an area Shinka has been leaning into, having announced a partnership with DOOH network GSTV earlier this summer.
“The market hasn’t yet developed a standard way to price the audience multiplier in these environments,” said Greene. “An ad seen by fifty people in a bar or a forecourt is often traded as if it were seen by one person on their sofa. With so much inventory out there, no individual publisher can push back on that alone – it’s a structural gap the sell side needs better tools to close.”
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