Expert plea for a walled garden exchange

Premium Australian video and audio ads should only be sold within a walled-garden exchange, according to an industry expert who has pointed to intermediary fees and subprime bundling as evils that must be fixed.

Former Dentsu investment executive and Schwartz Media CEO Ben Shepherd wrote on Linkedin that because ad platforms and aggregators were incentivised to maximise volume, their interests were not aligned with media networks.

Ben Shepherd

“[The aggregator and platform] goal is more inventory, selling more units, taking more clips. This is incongruent with networks looking to maximise yield. We have already seen this happen multiple times. Programmatic display is one area. Never does it realise more revenue or yield for the incumbent,” he wrote.