Private Marketplace (PMP) and Private Marketplace Guaranteed (PMP-Guaranteed) spend has grown markedly over the last few years. In fact, monetized PMP impression volume rose 22 percent year-over-year (YOY) in 2017 (according to PubMatic platform data). Additionally, PMP and PMP-Guaranteed is expanding outside of display, mobile and video into new formats such as radio, digital out-of-home and TV.
What Is a Private Markplace?
As a refresher, a PMP is a customized, invitation-only marketplace that provides publishers with the ability (through an SSP) to designate certain inventory and sell it to a select buyer or group of buyers with an emphasis on margin improvement for the seller. Unlike a direct buy, which can be quite labor-intensive, buyers in a private marketplace use programmatic methods to purchase from publishers. PMP-Guaranteed deals (typically) involve programmatic direct transactions with fixed pricing and inventory guarantees.
Private Marketplace deals are unique because they link the best aspects of traditional direct sales and programmatic. Traditional direct sales benefits include direct relationships between buyers and a publisher’s premium inventory, custom deals not available in open market, transparency and inventory quality. The benefits of using programmatic technology include an automated workflow which adds tremendous efficiencies to a sales process, as well as the ability to optimize and target specific audiences in real-time.
Buyer and Publisher Benefits
PMP and PMP-Guaranteed provide benefits for both publishers and buyers. I’ll briefly summarize the main benefits for buyers here and will dive deep on benefits for publishers.
For buyers, the main benefits are access to premium inventory at scale, brand safety and transparency. These benefits ultimately alleviate many buyer pain-points around inventory quality and scale since buyers know exactly what they are getting in regard to inventory, rate and scale.
For publishers, the main benefits of PMP and PMP-Guaranteed are elevated advertiser and ad quality, guaranteed spend with higher eCPMs, and stronger partnerships with buyers. PMP and PMP-Guaranteed deals bridge the gap between traditional direct sales and programmatic.
Why Choose Direct Sales?
For a publisher, one of the key benefits of direct sales is the ability to maintain strong relationships with the buyer and have more insight to campaign success metrics. With PMP and PMP-Guaranteed, publishers have the ability to maintain stronger partnerships with end buyers than they would in the open market.
In the open market, publishers have very little insight as to why an advertiser is or is not buying their inventory. For example, publishers often see huge spend spikes from various advertisers with no insight as to why the spending changed. Spend could have changed (or stopped) because of performance issues or perhaps a campaign or promotion ended. By having a relationship with the buyer, the publisher can provide recommendations and improve their internal forecast.
Stronger relationships also enable publishers to elevate advertiser and ad quality since they are working directly with the buyer. This give publishers full control of who they are working with and peace of mind that they are not working with fraudulent advertisers or intrusive ad units that disrupt the user experience.
Finally, PMP and PMP-Guaranteed deals help publishers better forecast revenue expectations because these budgets are typically guaranteed or have soft guarantees. Additionally, since PMP inventory is not offered in the open market or has a higher priority, eCPMs in PMP deals are often higher.
Sahil Shah from Purch, one of our PMP partners, recently stated “We offer our clients brand safe, audience data, and highly targeted inventory to help meet their KPIs. Anytime we see success in PMP, we have a solid base to build upon our relationships with clients and potentially move them up the funnel to direct, more custom integrated opportunities that you can’t buy programmatically.”
What’s Next?
If you would like to learn more about how you can also benefit from PMP and PMP-Guaranteed deals, let us know. It is PubMatic’s goal to make sure that our partners are using the most efficient infrastructure and innovative tools, and we welcome the chance to help you grow.
