James Akhbari, VP and digital media director at Havas, told the audience at OMMA Video at Internet Week New York that he is “old school” and wants to buy premium ad inventory that he
knows isn't fraudulent, and that the best way to do so involves avoiding automation.
David Hahn, SVP of product management at Integral Ad Science, responded to Akhbari by pointed out
that that approach requires one to assume that there’s no premium video ad inventory available in programmatic, a notion Hahn disagrees with.
“There’s a lot of premium in
programmatic,” he said, before acknowledging that it’s mixed up with the “crap.”
But Hahn believes technology is capable of sorting quality inventory from the mess and
bringing fraud down to “manageable levels” in programmatic. If it does, he believes that “the publishers who are being pushed down from a value perspective [by using programmatic]
will” begin putting higher-quality inventory into the marketplace.
“That’s how the industry will scale,” he asserted. “We can’t scale with insertion orders
anymore.”