High profile publishers are increasingly calling the shots. Having the budgetary clout and in-house expertise, they are well positioned to secure increasingly better ad-tech solutions.
The rest of the publisher market place including many powerful players, are not so fortunate. Many who lack the scale and in-house expertise, can spend endless hours chasing traffic, tracking technology and defusing disruptive ads.
The biggest piece missing in the puzzle is a technology stack robust enough to cover end-to-end intuitive building blocks, and flexible enough to grow at scale in their pace.
Many publishers over the past year have become more tech-savvy. They are increasingly less tolerant to poorly performing ad technologies and their vendors. If ad-tech vendors don’t meet their high thresholds, they may invite the next suitor in line, or if the budget permits, turn to their engineering team to develop an in-house tech-brew.
Take the case of the Washington Post: Frustrated with slow loading times, the bold publisher axed quite a few of its ad servers, ad builders and video vendors. It then set out to replace them with better performing vendors and home-bred solutions developed by their own engineering team.
Publishers with more challenging budgets that are keen to improve performance and earn video revenue quickly are not so spoiled for choice. Even with large traffic spikes, it’s harder for them to capture advertising revenue, in particular video revenue and their engineering teams, if they exist at all, are usually less equipped to develop solutions from scratch.
Bouncing from one ad network to the other, they are rightly frustrated by the data loss, the appearance of auto-play video ad popups with sound, and poor video delivery that wreaks havoc on the viewing experience.
Clearly, there is a need for a modern video tool set and technology partnerships dedicated to the requirements of many publishers that can help them scale over time.
With recent advances made in programmatic video there are a lot more opportunities to gain access to quality advertising sources. Now more than ever many publishers need a leg up to help them rapidly kick-start video monetization without hiring a large engineering team on one hand, or relying heavily on multiple tech-partners on the other.
This void could be filled with a publisher-specific tech stack designed in a modular structure that incorporates an easy to implement player, access to all video formats, a media agnostic ad server solution and an intuitive private market place.
To help leverage more effective video transactions there’s a need for simpler yield optimization tools and header bidding integrations requiring less engineering work.
In other words an entire system built top-to-bottom for the unique control, performance, security and monetization needs of the publisher. In the end, for any publisher, the challenge is to streamline monetization without compromising page load times and viewability.
But in some cases, where the publisher has a leaner in-house team, this solution requires more open dialog between the publisher and tech partners. Ideally technology partners need to have the willingness to adapt to the publishers’ pace while enabling them to remain in the driver seat.
Cedato’s video operating system is ideal for publishers who want to grow their video revenue, while benefiting from a simpler, more flexible and more user-friendly system that can optimize immediately on one hand, and continue to grow at scale on the other.