The Open Marketplace (OMP) No Longer Serves Its Purpose.
Consumer choice coupled with cookie deprecation has reduced addressability to 30%. By Q4 of next year, Google will start phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome. With legacy ad tech and ID solutions, publishers and brands can no longer use audience data, control frequency, and measure reach. As a result, publisher OMP revenue is in free fall, and brands are losing market share.
Publishers are Experiencing This Trend With a 25% YOY Drop in OMP Revenue in Q4 2022.
According to eMarketer data on the US market, projections indicate that direct-sold ads will account for 75% of total programmatic digital display ad spend by 2024, while OMP will only make up 8.5%. And with supply-path optimization, spending is moving out of the open marketplace to more direct channels.
As the OMP collapses, publishers aren’t just off-setting losses with direct-sold programmatic; they’re building bigger businesses by unlocking the 70% of consumers brands can’t reach in the OMP.
Publishers Taking Control With Direct-Sold Programmatic
The OMP favors third parties vested in maintaining a system where publishers face an ad tech take rate of more than 50 cents on the dollar, not to mention complicated supply paths. Given the revenue loss and data leakage, publisher CROs must realize that they have to take control and keep 100% of their revenue. As data owners, publishers are the next generation of digital advertising, not third-party ad tech.
Publishers must differentiate their direct-sold product from the OMP. In the OMP, brands that spend most of their budget only reach 30% of their audience. Meanwhile, direct-sold allows brands to reach 100% of their audience – and the publisher captures all of the spending. It’s up to publishers to show brands they are losing their share of voice by buying in the open.
By using insights to tell that story and an activation platform to deliver on the promise of reach, publisher CROs can significantly drive revenue increases for their publications without brands having to increase their spending.