• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 28, 2018

Mobile-only ad company Kargo has announced the launch of its Programmatic Guaranteed platform that allows advertisers to buy media programmatically and reserve “guaranteed impressions” prior to running campaigns. 

Advertisers want an alternative to buying media. Some of the more than 80 publishers that Kargo works with want guaranteed revenue, so Kargo built a programmatic guaranteed model that works directly with the company’s demand-side platform (DSP) partners to provide media buyers with a guaranteed return based on specific terms.

One beta customer has been testing the platform, with several in the pipeline, according to Ryan Polley, chief product officer. The platform is available in the U.S. today, with plans to take it to Asia-Pacific in the near future.

The “guarantee” means that a media buyer will negotiate a set price against a predetermined number of impressions during a specific time period. The advertiser agrees to bid on 90% of the impressions against that yield, for example, and Kargo must deliver against the impressions sent to the DSP.  

“I don’t think we have insight yet into all the ways this will change the industry,” Polley said.

There are other attributes that companies can apply to campaigns like this. Many campaigns that run in IO have attempted to do this, but they don’t have the infrastructure support that comes from programmatic systems. For instance, if a buyer wants to reach a specific audience during a certain time of the year across a set of publishers for a fixed price and the placement is 100% viewable, systems are not available to support it, he said.

Kargo’s Programmatic Guaranteed is powered by Kargo’s editorial graph, an index of audiences based on the publishers Kargo works with. Some demographics index higher on some publishers than others. The platform can enable targeting against the index based on the audience of an editorial graph.

It also allows CRM onboarding and 100% transparent supply through The Trade Desk. It allows advertisers to build their audiences based on their own client lists or data, Kargo’s proprietary targeting options, or a custom combination of the two.