This interview was originally published by Beet.tv.



What started as a way for publishers to sell their video ad space more easily quickly became a series of disconnected islands.

“Header bidding” technology sought to solve  all that – eliminating the “waterfall” through which publishers would entertain ad bids from different demand platforms sequentially, thus allowing them to entertain maximum prices in a single hit.

Now ad buyers can expect even more simplification, according to one agency exec who has been seeing moves afoot from the publishers community.

“What I’m really excited about when I talk to our various supply partners is there seems to be kind of a consensus that, by end of 2020, beginning of 2021, the vast majority of video inventory that’s accessible programmatically will move into a unified auction format,” says Ben Hovaness, Omnicom Media Group MD marketplace innovation and intelligence, in this video interview with Beet.TV

“It’s not necessarily going to be called ‘header bidding’, but the point is that all demand is being aggregated instantaneously into one auction. That really improves the yield mechanics for publishers, which means that it benefits them commercially to expose all this inventory programmatically.

“I think that’s going to be a huge shift and it’s going to have major implications for how we negotiate these PMP (private marketplace) deals, for example, and what the overall shape of the industry looks like. I’m optimistic that will drive investment further away from your old school digital insertion orders and even more volume into programmatic.”

Speaking further about ad auctions Hovaness also says his OMG is working with PubMatic, a publisher-side ad-tech supplier, to introduce a brand-new buying control – the ability for platforms to grant a rate benefit to certain buyers.