How Premium Marketplace is Bringing Transparency to Programmatic Media

Marketers today face the challenging task of planning, buying and measuring video campaigns against a unified audience within an evolving, fragmented and sometimes opaque media ecosystem.

One of the ways we are helping to solve these challenges is through our Premium Marketplace. First introduced in February 2022, Premium Marketplace is a programmatically enabled global marketplace for premium video that has proven to advance transparency and effectiveness across the digital and programmatic supply chain while reducing the “digital exhaust” of extraneous ad tech and netting more to premium publishers.

Premium Marketplace, which hosts roughly 30 active advertisers, including leaders in the retail, travel and CPG spaces, is establishing itself as a destination for direct and advantaged access to high-quality inventory within a broader ecosystem where media buyers still face obstacles that lessen the value of every dollar they spend. This has profound implications across the publishing ecosystem, especially on minority-owned media and independent, responsible journalism.

GPM has scaled quickly since inception. January 2023 saw the most spend through the marketplace to date, and first quarter activity is already set to outpace that of Q4 2022. The results are there, too.

The total average win rate within GPM is roughly 35%, with rates upwards of 50% in some cases, compared to an average rate of 15% seen outside of the Premium Marketplace. GroupM is also able to use its scale to provide clients better pricing models. One client, a top retail advertiser, saw CPMs were nearly one-third lower inside GPM than outside it. These efficiencies are possible because of our publishers’ direct connection into the marketplace.

In North America, this curated marketplace has integrations with 80% of top 20 connected TV publishers. Clients have preferred access to high quality premium video inventory from companies such as Fox, AMC, Univision, LG, Philo and Xumo, as well as other major entertainment companies, original equipment manufacturers and ad-supported streaming services. More sell-side integrations across different markets are set to rollout throughout the year.

We have long been focused on developing workstreams that create more transparency, prevent fraud and reduce unnecessary fees within the programmatic supply chain. Our Premium Marketplace further reinforces our longstanding industry leadership and collaboration with publishers and technology partners to ensure safe, high-quality advertising experiences for consumers in both new and established media environments. The industry at large has been taking steps to address these concerns, too — initiatives that we support.

The Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), for example, produced a revelatory Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study in 2020 that detailed the financial and brand safety shortcomings that can exist within the programmatic ecosystem, namely the “unknown delta” that represented 15% of advertising spend that could not be accounted for on an impression level, meaning it essentially disappeared from the supply chain.

ISBA and PwC, along with the Association of Online Publishers (AOP), have since formed a taskforce and released a toolkit to help media traders and tech intermediaries to help establish standards and recoup value in programmatic media. As a result, the latest updates to the transparency report from ISBA and PwC, released in late January 2023, show a significant drop of the unknown delta to 3%.

The updates from the latest transparency report, which we supported, also found there is a discrepancy in lost spend between open marketplaces (3%) and private marketplaces (<1%), numbers that lend support to GroupM’s vision behind creating GPM that directly connects clients with publishers and establishes transparent partnerships with trusted tech partners Magnite and PubMatic.

On a client-by-client basis, GPM allows us to demonstrate the exact working dollar of their campaign spend. It provides an auditable system where clients can execute scaled buys for bespoke inventory, ultimately helping premium media owners understand future revenue.

As media consumption habits change, GPM provides marketers an innovative, accountable ecosystem to seamlessly reach consumers where they are. It is another step toward GroupM’s vision of creating a new era of media where advertising work better for people everywhere, and it further strengthens our Responsible Investment Framework, which puts purpose at the center of growth.

Premium Marketplace is currently available in EMEA and North America and will launch in additional markets over the course of 2023 and beyond.