• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, October 27, 2016

American Express is digging into programmatic media buying and processes. While the financial services giant has been playing in the programmatic waters for the last few years, it did not get super serious about investment until the fall of 2015, according to two executives who spoke at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference on Thursday.

While AmEx is committed to programmatic, challenges remain -- and a major one is viewability, according to Amy Leung, director of digital acquisition, consumer marketing, American Express. “The industry standard [on viewability] is extremely low. That’s a problem for us. As marketers, we haven’t held publishers accountable for having viewable inventory,” she said.

It’s important to AmEx and other advertisers that ad content is correct and the context in which ads appear is appropriate. When there is an open exchange, context is a big problem for an advertiser like AmEx. “We want to know the sites our ads are appearing on,” said Jennifer Director, director of acquisition, loyalty, and brand marketing, personal savings, American Express.

Director noted that private marketplaces (PMPs), which are generally considered to have higher-quality ad inventory, aren’t working for AmEx. Why? Because fraud continues to be a huge issue in the programmatic ecosystem.

Looking back on the brand’s programmatic experience, Leung said: “We needed increased transparency in the space. We needed to know where our working media dollars were going. Some players weren’t willing to engage in transparent pricing, or offer us bidstream data.”

Fragmentation and complexity are prevalent in the ecosystem. “It affects us,” Director said, adding: “We have too many programmatic partners. They lack differentiation and create more inefficiency.” 

Leung said AmEx needs partners to help it amplify its own assets. “We need partners to help us that have the same standards as we do,” she said. Director said that AmEx developed a programmatic learning agenda to help it address challenges. It looked at the entire process, from selecting partners to testing.  

“We needed to know things like how many platforms we should be working with,” Director said. To that end, AmEx developed an 87-question RFI (request for information) and sent it to buying platforms. It had questions on it like "Do you have a custom algorithm on your platforms?" and "What is your approach to cross-device?" The RFI helped AmEx cultivate transparency, and the company then opened up the process to SSPs, exchanges, and publishers which it brought in for learning sessions.

AmEx made changes as a result of the questionnaire. The goal was to connect viewability to attribution — AmEx doesn’t want credit attributed to non-viewable impressions. AmEx prioritized obtaining access to quality inventory and it sought to increase transparency. Ultimately, “we decided to eliminate some partners that didn’t want to do transparent pricing. We wanted transparency on bid stream data and pricing,” Leung stressed. “We needed our performance-level data.”

The upshot is that AmEx is working with fewer partners, and took a more hands-on approach. It now has a better understanding of its budget for working media dollars. And it’s managing its programmatic buying strategy differently. Director urged marketers to work with partners that are transparent about data and pricing, and that use custom algorithms to drive incremental ROI.