by Rebecca Muir on 24th Jun 2016 in TRADERTALK

In this special vox pop edition of TraderTalk TV, filmed in sunny Cannes, Nate Woodman, GM of demand solutions, IPONWEB, gives us his thoughts about the evolving relationship between agencies and brands.

In the agency world, what we're seeing is that agencies feel that they become somewhat distant from publishers, explains Woodman. The relationship power has gone to DSPs and SSPs; agencies are reacting by minimising the ad tech tags used. They're doing this by getting closer to publisher tags that get into the publisher waterfall, so they get first look at bid requests and premium inventory. Essentially, they are creating demand networks that are exclusive to their agencies, a strategy employed by ad networks for quite some time.

Woodman explains that it is the collision between buying entities that will create the biggest mass of buying power, which can then be flexed to get the best inventory from publishers. Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not the balance of power is transferred.

Header bidding, which has been discussed a lot at Cannes, makes this issue very poignant, says Woodman. Brands have laid down a challenge to their agencies; they are more interested in ROI, not the metrics made available by publishers that have traditionally been used to measure performance.

Today, brands want to know whether their digital advertising is driving incremental revenue. Woodman argues that optimising to post-view metrics, more often than not, harms brands because it does not prove whether new campaigns are creating incremental value and revenue above and beyond other channels.

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