PubMatic has created an API that allows media buyers to find and buy private marketplace deals through their DSPs. The second phase will bring automated guaranteed deals into their platforms through the same API.
Early DSP partners include DataXu, MediaMath, SiteScout, The Trade Desk and TURN.
“We’re confident this will put us in a leadership position, because no one is approaching this with holistic management of automated guaranteed and private marketplaces,” President Kirk McDonald said.
“Automated inventory management is not going to scale and brand dollars are never going to come if we manage it in two different buckets or platforms,” McDonald continued. “We don’t believe you should segregate those strategies.”
For publishers, “holistic pricing and packaging” will enable more strategic management of inventory, McDonald said, and reduce the cost of sale.
Publishers would likely see more diverse buyers flow in via the platform.
“A 20-person sales team can only take so many meetings,” he said. But he still sees adoption of the platform as being people-led: Sales teams that would have gone out and sold direct deals should be encouraged to sell deals that flow through the automated guaranteed platform.
Publishers will package the inventory themselves, adding in capabilities like audience buying or contextual targeting. McDonald said that’s an important distinction that allows for more flexibility and ultimately takes the work out of creating a deal: After that’s in place, the platform will allocate the impressions based on data and audience segments, not the publisher.
Buyers would be given a “system that manages rules as well as host an auction in one environment,” McDonald said, “and to be able to allow inventory to observe the rules it’s been given.”
Publishers using PubMatic’s open marketplaces will be able to have inventory compete against each other through the company’s “decision manager” capability, which enables publishers to see how the rules they set up for different deals or marketplaces affect yield and revenue.
While private marketplaces have sprung up that go across many publishers, PubMatic will focus on one-to-one deals between a buyer and a seller, consistent with its focus on “head and torso-sized” publishers.
