Programmatrix: Why lower CPM are destroying the Open Web?! 💸💸

The other day, a media trader told me:

"My advertiser refuses to buy video above a €6 CPM."
For several years now, more and more advertisers have been laser-focused on price to optimize their branding campaigns 💲💲

Yet, fundamentally, the metric driving them should be ROI = real-world effectiveness. So how do we explain this obsession with price?

It might be a symptom of a deeper, underlying issue: What if advertisers think they are ALREADY buying quality? 🏅

Think about it: if you are absolutely certain you're buying quality (e.g., a controlled environment, very high viewability/VTR), the main KPI left to improve efficiency naturally becomes... the price! 💵

On the other side of the programmatic supply chain, premium publishers—whose revenues depend on CPM levels—are much less inclined to slash their prices 🙅‍♂️

😈 This leaves a massive loophole for much less scrupulous programmatic players (e.g., MFA publishers & some Resellers) to create ad offerings that give advertisers the illusion that it is perfectly possible to buy top-tier quality at unbeatable prices!

Want to see what that looks like? 💊
📟 ENTER THE PROGRAMMATRIX 📟

# Giving the illusion of a brand-safe environment:

Suspicious activity hosted on subdomains or historically clean sites.

# Giving the illusion of high performance:

+80% MRC viewability rates achieved through tiny creatives/players and sticky placements.
CTRs > 5% driven by "click error" (fat-finger) formats.

# Compensating for low prices by driving up volume:

Pages crammed with ad placements.
Extremely high ad rotation / ad refresh rates.
Flooding the auction with multiple bidders to minimize the impact of throttling algorithms.

📟 EXIT THE PROGRAMMATRIX 📟

This illusion is incredibly hard to spot because DSPs don't always share key data points with their buyers (e.g., subdomains, Seller_names, placement IDs), making quality audits a real headache... 😤

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At GreyFox Ads, we believe the quality OpenWeb brings real efficiency to advertisers.

We are a human-sized Adnetwork that helps Media Traders outside of France to address the French market with all our deep market knowledge focused in one "Master Curated Deal".
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