Data management platform Krux is joining the header-bidding fray.
Krux built a header bidder because it wants marketers to buy both data and media in one place. Header bidding is the best mechanism to facilitate that transaction.
By rolling out the tech, Krux adds a media-buying capability to Krux Link, the data exchange bazaar it’s run for the past couple of years. Via Link, advertisers and publishers bought and sold data but went elsewhere for media.
Now marketers can add Krux’s header-bidding tag to buy data and media through Link across publishers that installed Krux’s header tag. That streamlined process reduces cookie loss and bypasses tech fees from the SSP and exchange. SSPs often charge publishers 10% or 15% of all the media, and exchanges take another cut, while Krux Link said it takes a single 25-cent CPM fee on transactions.
“When you attach media to data, and you cut out all the people in the middle that are taking a fee, you get strong performance,” explained Michael Moreau, COO of Link’s data cloud.
A group of DSPs and 28 marketer buyers are transacting through the solution. Marketers account for about 45% of the spend flowing through Link, with 55% coming from DSP integrations.
Marketers also get access to quality publishers at scale, and publishers (32 have deployed Krux’s header-bidding tech) gain access to marketers that want to set up private marketplaces.
Krux’s transparent, flat fee appeals to the sell side too.
“If they are able to cut down the ad tax, and take less than nontransparent competitors, you are going to see publishers making more money,” said Daniel Bornstein, SVP of media monetization and operations at Demand Media, one of the publishers implementing Krux’s header-bidding solution.
Demand Media believes Krux’s header bidder will eliminate the friction between marketers that want to use their data and publishers that want to hawk theirs to advertisers.
For example, when publishers try to combine their hair-care segment with a marketer’s shampoo-buying segment, those audiences often don’t overlap, leading to a failed campaign with little scale.
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But when Krux serves as both the data exchange and the media-buying marketplace, “There is no cookie loss, no loss of scale, no sending carbon copies of audiences to DSPs without any security oversight, and there is no double filtering of data,” said Scott Messer, Demand Media’s VP of content channels.
According to Messer, this solution will allow publishers to see where advertisers are buying without violating the standard 4A’s contract, where publishers and advertisers agree not to cookie and repurpose each other’s audiences.
“Krux can collect all the bid-stream data, and give enough back to publishers in a transparent and aggregated way,” Messer said. That data helps Demand Media understand and determine the value of its audience.
Although Krux’s header-bidding tech replaces the SSP and exchange as it’s set up, Moreau doesn’t think SSPs will go away. But he does say it will change their relationship with publishers.
“It changes the business models, but it’s not the death of the SSP,” he predicted. “If you are giving many companies equal access to inventory, and there are no preferential relationships, it’s great for publishers and it will be a lot harder to take hidden fees and do things that are not transparent to publishers and marketers.”
