When private marketplaces (PMPs) first appeared on the digital scene a few years ago, sellers were cautious to release inventory and invite buyers, fearing eroding CPMs and low-quality creative. It seemed only premium publishers and brands would be willing to transact in these exclusive environments.

But, as technology and the industry progressed, PMPs became commonplace for publishers and brands beyond comScore’s top 100 sites and Fortune 500 brands. SpotX recently announced that private marketplace deals accounted for about 45% of ad spend on its platform. And most industry sources estimate that a third of all programmatic media buying will happen through PMPs this year, making it a vital tactic to incorporate in any digital media campaign.

In order to understand the reasons behind this trend, it’s important to take a step back, examine the benefits, and learn where the industry’s interest in private marketplaces came from.

PMPs, though still part of the open ecosystem, are customized marketplaces, where publishers make their inventory available to select buyers. With private marketplaces, usually a negotiation takes place between the buyer and seller to create and agree on a deal, which hinges on approval of the advertiser, inventory type, and floor price. Deals are facilitated through a deal ID, which acts as a key to marketplace.

Transactions are still subject to an auction and not guaranteed, but the competition is limited to advertisers with the deal ID. With only a select few buyers having access to the inventory, your chance of winning impressions increases. Compare this to running a campaign across open exchanges, where all programmatic buyers have access to the same inventory and your opportunity to win impressions decreases because there’s more competition.

Those are the basics of PMPs, but let’s explore a few additional benefits to utilizing PMPs:

• Unique inventory: A lot of publishers reserve specific inventory -- or sometimes all of their inventory -- exclusively for private marketplaces. More desirable ad placements such as high-impact, video, and connected TV will be excluded from the open exchanges. Also, publishers can offer first-party audience packages that would normally not be available.
• Increase Campaign Performance: Using a private marketplace allows you to gain more access to a specific publisher’s inventory, which can be a tool to strategically optimize your campaigns. If you’re running a campaign across the open market, you may notice a certain site performing above average. With PMPs, you can add another tactic to your campaign: run your ad on that specific high-performing site. This will allow you to see and win even more impressions in hopes of achieving your KPI.
• More control in buyer’s hands: You will know exactly where your ad is being placed, have the ability to choose which publisher sites you want to run across, what ad units you are running, where you ad is located on the page, what type of content category you want to surround you ad with, and much more.
• Viewability: Most publishers reserve above-the-fold inventory for private marketplaces. Also, publishers are using viewability vendors to ensure they are measuring their inventory correctly and will offer the ability to sell specific viewability deals. If viewability is your goal, using a private marketplace is one of the best ways to get you there.

Now that you are a private marketplace expert, consider adding one or more to your campaigns. Centro DSP and your Customer Success Manager can help you get started.

Learn more about Programmatic Advertising with Centro.

"Centro announced on Thursday that 80% of its political clients in the 2016 U.S. election cycle had winning outcomes. The company’s Candidates and Causes unit, focused on digital media-buying for political groups and campaigns, managed over 150 races across the nation at all levels of the ballot as well as local ballot initiatives."

Read more in MediaPost.

Centro’s Candidates and Causes Business Unit Managed Digital Advertising for 150 Political Campaigns; Mix of Flexible Technology and Service in Digital Media Helped Swing Votes

Washington, DC – Jan. 26, 2017 – Centro (centro.net), a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising, today announced that nearly 80% of its political clients involved in the 2016 U.S. election cycle had winning outcomes. Centro’s Candidates and Causes services unit, specializing in digital media-buying for political groups, managed campaigns in 150+ races throughout the nation, encompassing candidates at all levels and local ballot measures. This non-partisan offering of technology and services is available for agencies and consultants with political clients. With additional hiring plans for 2017 to support new clients, this group within Centro is now focused on servicing causes in legislation and advocacy.

Centro’s activity during the 2016 election season gives it a wide breadth of knowledge and a diversified view on the use of digital media for campaigns and successful advertising tactics. Its experience showed how digital media was utilized in the past year:

• Although one-third of Centro’s political advertisers were individual candidates or their committees, PACs (Political Action Committees) were the largest segment of advertisers, active in the most races and also spending the most because of the large number of ballot measures in various states.
• The sophisticated use of data targeting grew beyond presidential campaigns, where down-ballot campaigns and measures used it heavily.
• Voter file data was widely used, and campaigns utilized it to model and target specific audiences.
• Hyperlocal data and targeting was used by smaller campaigns to maximize ad spend.
• Digital video continued to play a key role, expanding beyond traditional in-stream placements to in-feed, mobile and OTT devices.

“In politics, although digital media partners are judged on whether or not they help a campaign win, the client trust Centro has built over the years is what makes us stand out,” said Grace Briscoe, VP of Candidates and Causes, Centro. “Our decade of experience and proficiency in this field can be a differentiated and valuable asset for driving perception in government, in the public sphere, or among specific audiences.”

Political marketers want expertise in navigating the complexity in digital from channels, sites, content, ad units, devices and data. Since 2006, Centro has been on the forefront political advertising in digital media, now having worked with 200 political campaigns and independent expenditure committees and 500 issue advocacy advertisers. The group’s central hub in Washington, DC, fields a team of 20 political media experts. The team is now turning its attention to influencing legislation and promoting advocacy agendas for its clients for the next two years before the next set of government elections.

For political marketers, Centro customizes digital advertising solutions on all channels to drive action from key voter constituents. Centro helps target audiences through multi-layered technology-driven solutions that include fully-transparent and controllable programmatic advertising, voter file data integrations, predictive modeling around key issues, location-targeted mobile audiences and high-impact premium creative placement on local and national sites.

About Centro

Centro (centro.net) is creating a platform to make digital advertising easier. Its enterprise-class software centralizes, organizes and automates all digital media campaigns across all channels, accessing both guaranteed and biddable inventory, to achieve any objective. Our holistic approach gives marketers a single system of record to fulfill their research, planning, buying, optimization, reporting and reconciliation needs. Since 2001, Centro has successfully planned and executed more than 250,000 campaigns across all digital display platforms and ad format types. Headquartered in Chicago with 32 offices in North America, Centro has received numerous accolades for its commitment to employees and workplace culture.

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Contact:

Anthony Loredo

[email protected]

646-462-4888

Do you dream of pivot tables because you’re spending too much time in spreadsheets? The wealth of data and metrics available for programmatic buyers to assess the health of their campaigns can be overwhelming and difficult to quickly analyze.

Centro DSP has always offered real-time reporting to keep buyers up-to-date. But, in order to help them make even smarter and quicker optimization decisions, we introduced a new pacing view feature on January 17.

Pacing view helps buyers visualize delivery and performance of groups over time. The view combines grid stats and a graphic representation based on flight dates, budget, spend, and KPI goals. Pacing view is integrated directly into the user interface – eliminating the need to export data for visualization in other tools.

Pacing view is also compatible with the Advertiser Spend feature and allows you to track a contracted CPC, CPM, margin, or mark up.

To access this feature: Click Pacing on the left-hand menu to see all of your groups. You will notice the default setting is Active groups, but you can switch to All, All But Archived, and Online. The search bar allows you to easily find a group by name, ID or brand.

In order to take advantage of pacing view make sure all of your campaigns and groups are under brands, and that all groups have flight dates.

For more information on how to make the most of this new feature, please join us for a webinar on January 31^st at 1 PM (CST). You can register here.

AdExchanger’s 2017 Industry Preview has come to an end, leaving plenty for marketers to think about as they approach their digital strategies and plans this year. If you thought 2017 was going to be a simple year in digital, think again.

One major theme of the today’s presentations was the increasing desire to better track and manage the cross-channel client experience.

Frightening --> "46% of millennials would rather lose a finger than their phone." Research shared via Patrick Keane @sharethrough #IP2017

— R. J. Talyor (@rjtalyor) January 19, 2017

At the end of the day and effective audience data strategy is a combination of art, science and... common sense #IP2017

— Alessandro De Zanche (@fastbreakdgtl) January 19, 2017

@adexchanger Managing the data: Delivering good customer experience means knowing what they want and need. @Acxiom @annekagupta #IP2017

— Network of Giving (@NetworkofGiving) January 19, 2017

With more time spent using multiple devices, consumers are growing tired of the increasingly disruptive nature of ads. During the Measuring Data panel, Anneka Gupta, Director of Marketing at LiveRamp, cited this intrusion as the main reason why consumers are turning to ad blockers.

This is leading to the emergence of better and more effective native units. Unfortunately, consistent adoption of standard attribution KPIs is lagging behind in adoption.

"A single native ad can deliver as much meaning as 300 banner ad impressions" @phkeane @sharethrough #IP2017

— Inneractive (@Inneractive) January 19, 2017

"If the room was filled w/ attribution experts, none of them would agree on the best method for attribution" @ericeichmann @criteo #IP2017

— LiveRamp (@LiveRamp) January 19, 2017

So, what should you take away from this year’s Industry Preview? Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of VaynerMedia, said it best in his opening remarks on Day 1:

Best quote from #IP2017 thus far "If marketing was math, we would have figured it out a long time ago..." @garyvee at @adexchanger

— Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley) January 18, 2017

"In 2017 managing data #crossdevice will be the only way to keep up with and meet expectations of consumers." #IP2017 @eMarketer pic.twitter.com/xRYzg8xBhu

— Adbrain (@AdbrainTech) January 19, 2017

Reaching your customers at relevant times with content they can relate to – and, not to mention, in the most ideal format -- is not an easy task. We should not pretend like it is.

It’s looking like 2017 will be a year focused on delivering what consumers need and are asking for, not what we think they want.

“A lot of [the targeting] is based on contextual targeting in lieu of audience data,” said Dan Raffe, director of programmatic at ad software developer Centro.

Read more in Digiday about pharmaceutical advertising with programmatic tactics.

"Regardless of how advertisers want to collect, store, and analyze first-party data, any programmatic advertising efforts require some form of a data strategy."

Read more from Centro's Dan Raffe in MediaPost.

Mobile technology is changing the way people communicate and consume media. Marketers are well-advised to be open to experimenting with ways to connect to consumers meaningfully in this fast-paced, ever-evolving era.

Read more from Centro's Ryan Manchee in CMO.com.

Have you ever witnessed a bad improv comedy performance? You would know immediately if you did. The jokes fall flat, the story doesn’t follow any kind of thread, and the audience is uncomfortably lifeless.

A good improv performance, though? It’s an exercise in a collective and powerful group mind.

The performers get a single word suggestion – sometimes maybe a location, too – and the scene unfolds. Sometimes the performance is short, sometimes long. What makes it work though, no matter the length, is the group on stage incorporating their individual POVs, creativity, and intelligence, and building a cohesive scene.

In improv, each individual brings something to the table and has a unique interpretation of what’s unfolding on stage – maybe one actor heard something another didn’t, or saw a facial expression that went unnoticed by others, or maybe the group picks up the slack when a fellow performer runs out of ideas, or can’t think of an idea or quip fast enough. The greatest performances happen when each person is working together and in sync. Because in most cases, two heads are better than one. There are other ideas out there that might be better than yours. And, yes, there are solutions you never even thought of.

But you have to set the proper stage for a mind-blowing collaborative performance. It usually doesn’t just happen on its own. Give people a place, a stage, a platform to collaborate, and the freedom to share ideas -- and watch the magic happen.

Modern-day technology and tools give us that place, and offers the ability to leverage many minds to address one issue or problem. Which begs the question: Are we successfully using these tools in the digital advertising space? Are we collaborating at all – let alone efficiently? It seems today that too many teams are isolated and left to their own devices to hunt down correct information and data. And, even worse, the data is spread out in a vast wasteland of disconnected systems – spreadsheets, Excel, Outlook, Google docs, Word docs, AdWords, DSPs, DMPs, and more.

Imagine the performance if we had the power of many to plan, negotiate, analyze and run digital media campaigns. In improv terms, the best show comes from the power of a collective group.

Which is why digital media businesses built around collaboration and shared learning opportunities needs to be the new norm.

By instituting a highly centralized and collaborative approach to campaign management, digital media teams can share internal and external communications, and campaign activity and context in one unified place – which bolsters performance and eliminates the blind spot of making assumptions.

Adopting collaborative thinking and software provides an opportunity to crowdsource everyone in the digital media ecosystem – buyers, sellers and everyone in between – to get up-to-date and accurate information about your accounts. Things like what worked, what didn’t, best optimizations, best rates and publisher information, historical campaign plans and media pricing, what ad units or creative proved most effective in the past, and post-launch pacing and performance.

Not to mention, crowdsourcing cuts down on mistakes, because there are more eyes looking at the same data in the same system. We’ve seen a 50% reduction in manual errors at Centro as a result of getting everyone on the platform.

Centro Platform is what collaboration looks like for your digital media teams.

Connect processes, teams, and systems with Centro Platform. Now everyone who touches the digital process operates with persistent and contextual communication.

Platform Features

Communications Center

The message center offers a transparent record of all the communication with sellers and team members, and it’s organized by campaign. And document sharing now comes with context, as you upload and share files in relation to communication streams and campaign changes.

Vendors share context and visibility through Centro Platform’s message center, activity feed, and views of shared proposals. Benefits of collaboration extend to working with publishers, and as a result, media plan development, negotiation, and completion is 29% faster using Centro Platform.

Dashboard Homepage

Centro Platform starts users with a dashboard based on their role. The dashboard provides a view of current workload status (new campaigns, campaigns going live, outstanding IO/RFP, campaigns ending, etc.) and an index of campaigns sorted by status, client, date, action required. An Activity Feed provides information about new activities since a user last logged in. If a user wants to search for a specific client or campaign, Centro Platform provides a universal search.

Alerts & Notifications
Teams start with an advantage, as notifications inform them of key actions on relevant projects – allowing them to immediately direct their attention as needed. Automated notifications keep users informed of new activities and pacing issues, allowing for faster campaign launch, issue resolution, and an ability to course-correct quickly.

To learn more about Centro Platform or request a demo, visit centro.net or email [email protected].