Ari Rosenberg writes in MediaPost: My issue with programmatic buying is that there’s not much selling.
Publishers don’t really set the sale price for their product; they suggest one that invariably needs to be lowered after a buy begins. Publishers have no say on a minimum time or budget commitment either, to access their audience, as those factors are also dictated by the buyer on risk-free terms that guarantee the publisher nothing.
The campaign then starts, and value gets defined solely by how a consumer a publisher can’t control, reacts to an ad message a publisher did not create. Based on this performance, three things can happen. One, the campaign can continue to rummage through the publisher’s impressions with no guarantee of buying any. Two, the campaign “under-performs” and the publisher is given the opportunity to lower rates further in order to save it — or three, the campaign stops running. In any case, the seller has no idea how much was sold until the buyer generates a report reflecting how much was bought.
That’s not selling, that’s accounting.
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