Will Ad Inventory Become Verticalized from DSP - SSP - Pubs

Constant change has been the state of the digital media landscape since the inception, but will constant change come to an abrupt halt?  Would the verticalization of ad tech and publishing stabilize the industry and make for a more perfect ads world?

I think so.  

Today, supply path routing of an ad impression is complex and messy.  Single publishers often have 4-6 SSP partners and or Native Ad Network partners.  Often the Native Ad Networks re-list the inventory on other SSP's, and there is still an old practice of shared inventory among SSP's leading to a single domain being spread across most all SSP's.  This is not efficient for the publisher or the buyer.

In addition buyers will utilize 3+ DSP's, plus proprietary inventory like Facebook.  This has consolidated, but it still complicates the sprawl of ad tech.

This has lead to massive inefficiencies and impression fraud that is still running out of control today.  "what is the true origin of an ad impression?".  Ads.txt is a lightweight and easy to spoof technique which is not well suited to tackle the problems stemming from above.  Worse yet the added tax of IVT vendors like MOAT, IAS, DV, WhiteOps, Fraudlogiq triple charge the industry and have a high degree of errors leading to more inefficiency.

I believe that Google and Apple's "privacy" (aka land-grab) efforts will force change as it relates to how data flows across the ecosystem going forward. This is discussed in my last blog post covering Data Privacy. Here is how I see further consolidation of ad tech and publishing going forward.

DSP's and SSP's should merge into one product, eliminating any ambiguity of impression origin for the buyer.  Direct line of impression custody.  This will also enable, in some cases, SSP's to combine and build audience and contextual segments in conjunction with publishers 1st Party data.  Very efficient for buyers at the aggregated vs individual publisher level.

Further, there could be a world where either ad tech or publishers buy their own vertical.  To an extent, facebook has done this with liverail, and Comcast has done this with Freewheel.  If you have a large enough O&O footprint of high quality ad supply coupled with high quality 1st party data, why would you allow others to arbitrage your publisher earnings as they do today?  Wouldn't it be more valuable for the publisher to sell their own inventory directly through a UI where a buyer could come and select audience, context, and other buying rules directly with you in an automated fashion.  Since FLoC and Apple will eliminate the notion of frequency caps across 3rd party, why do you need an unified buying system to extract value?

Publishers should really begin conversations, corp dev, and design plans to aggregate all of their O&O in one unified stack.  This will eliminate the 50%-70% ad tech tax currently charged to the industry.  Yes this will take more human hands on the keyboards at the agencies, or agencies will need to be good at unifying publisher API's to automatically aggregate data for their purposes.

I believe that publishers, agencies, and brands would greatly benefit from this type of vertical consolidation going forward.  Less ad tech tax, better quality supply, access to high value 1P data.

#chrisverzello