• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, September 17, 2015

According to Technorati’s “State Of The Industry: The State Of Programmatic Partnerships” survey, in conjunction with Digiday, 45.5% of publishers are frustrated by programmatic demand partners not able to compete with each other on each impression.

In the survey of over 600 buy-and sell-side professionals, 49% of publishers say they use passbacks and floor prices to maximize yield of programmatic demand solutions, giving each partner in a series a chance at an impression before moving it along to the next partner if it is not purchased.

Shani Higgins, Technorati’s CEO, says “… when sequential auctions or manually estimating bids… are the only options for a publisher… buy and sell sides suffer from lack of true competition and access… “

While 64.71% of publishers and buyers use just 1 to 5 programmatic partners, 29% of buyers and 27% of sellers use more than 6 programmatic partners. “… the fragmentation of demand puts publishers in the untenable position of baring the costs in workhours and tech stacks for each separate relationship… ” says Higgins.

Biggest Challenges Facing Publishers Working With Programmatic Demand Solutions

• Not being able to have demand partners compete with each other on each impression   45.5%
• Daisy Chaining or Waterfalling partners is inefficient and not as effective as it could be   43.4%
• Not having my own internal developers with time/resources/ expertise to support my needs   44.4%
• Not having the technology and tools that address my needs   43.4%

The survey is part of a “report card” about how buyers and sellers regard one another in the programmatic space. Programmatic (mainly open marketplace) buying is now claiming the bulk of digital budgets, averaging about 46% of spending. Additional highlights from the survey include:

Publishers say the difficulty of dealing with multiple programmatic demand platforms is felt more by:

• Publishers    57.80%
• Both equally    34.86%
• Buyers    7.34%

Publishers say the biggest role in keeping us from integrating more programmatic demand solutions is:

• Time or effort to technically integrate another system    63.13%
• Time or effort to manage each relationship    56.57%
• Time or effort to manage ad quality    46.97%
• Loss of impressions from chaining more partners    39.90%

Buyers say this is what has prevented us from integrating more programmatic buying tools:

• Time or effort to integrate    55.09%
• Time or effort to manage each relationship    49.10%
• All of the inventory is overlapping    41.32%
• Time or effort to manage inventory quality    38.92%

According to publishers, these aspects of our programmatic demand solutions in most need of improvement are:

• CPM    46.78%
• Fill rate    42.49%
• Total revenue    35.62%
• Ad quality    34.76%
• Partner support    12.88%

Additional information from Technorati may be found here.