• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, November 7, 2014

What can the RTB (real-time bidding) ad industry learn from fast food restaurants? Well, not much if we’re being serious about it, but we can anecdotally ascertain.

I ate at PDQ for lunch the other day -- with “PDQ” pretending to stand for “People Dedicated to Quality” when everyone knows it secretly stands for “Pretty Damn Quick” -- and pretty damn quick they were. So quick, in fact, that my order was ready and my name called before I had even paid for the meal.

And it got me thinking: This is what the RTB ecosystem should be like. I could have gone and examined the chicken strips I ordered to make sure that I had indeed received five of them, that they were sufficiently plump, that the restaurant hadn’t slipped in a microscopic strip while trying to pass it off as a full strip, etc.

Of course, I didn’t do any of this, and by the time I had drawn the connection between what had just happened and the RTB ad world, two of my five strips were gone anyway. But that didn’t change the fact that I could have done all of those things, and so can you. (Substituting chicken for ads, of course.)

Why don’t more RTB ad exchanges only charge once the buyers know what they are buying? Some do -- like the exchanges cropping up that only charge advertisers if the ad has been deemed viewable -- but most don’t. Why don’t buyers demand this?

This is relatable to the industry’s transparency and quality versus quantity debates. Transparency concerns -- that is, marketers feeling like they aren’t receiving sufficient information about ad buys from partners -- routinely rank at or near the top of issues marketers most worry about.

The parallel is not perfect, I admit. When you buy food from a fast food restaurant, it isn’t going anywhere unless you eat it, throw it away or give it away. In short, you are in control of what you bought.

When you buy ad inventory from a digital publisher, that inventory could easily disappear if the consumer suffers from banner blindness or decides to scroll or tab away. The consumer is the one that ultimately swings the gavel. (Some companies, such as Clearstream, are attempting to keep the power in the hands of the advertiser by forcing ads to be fully viewed before the consumer can reach their desired content.)

With the ad industry projected to, and actively attempting to, push programmatic technologies into more premium ad environments, it’s becoming more evident that in order for this flight to quality to succeed, marketers must first be able to look at the chicken strips they are buying before writing the check.