← Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Marketecture: Get Smart. Fast.
Sovrn's Signal product gives publishers tools for ad performance
00:17:39
Loading summary
Transcript52 lines
- [00:01]
McAfee Advertisement
Your data is like gold to hackers. They'll sell it to the highest bidder. Are you protected? McAfee helps shield you blocking suspicious texts, malicious emails and fraudulent websites. McAfee Secure VPN lets you browse safely and its AI powered tech scam detector spots threats instantly. You'll also get up to $2 million of award winning antivirus and identity theft protection, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com/Cancel anytime terms apply.
- [00:40]
Ari Paparo
Welcome to Marketecture where you can get smart fast with interviews of leading technology executives. I'm Ari Paparo. I'm joined today by Peter Cunna who is the managing director of the Signal product at Sovereign. Peter, thanks for being here.
- [00:54]
Peter Cunna
Yeah, thanks for having me, Ari.
- [00:57]
Ari Paparo
So probably a lot of people know Sovereign. We had Walter, the CEO on architecture early on, maybe it's probably been a couple years at this point. So we want to focus in on Signal and want to hear about what it is and how it's working. So why don't you give us the update?
- [01:10]
Peter Cunna
Yeah. So Signal is our on page measurement and curation tool. It's a data enrichment product for publishers that augments the value of publisher supply by keying off of attention, broadcasting smarter price floors and layering on behavioral enrichment onto the bid request so that the publisher can experience a positive yield outcome on that bid.
- [01:36]
Ari Paparo
That's interesting. How long has it been out?
- [01:38]
Peter Cunna
Well, we've had different iterations of the product out. This actually came out of an acquisition that Sovereign made a few years ago of a company called OnScroll out in the UK and they were one of the first folks to kind of really pioneer the viewable Engage time metric, which is kind of like the first proxy attention index on the web. And so we've kind of really saw the opportunity, I think recently around curation and ultimately some of what we were trying to do on our SSP business and we decided to take a different approach. We decided to build this into a software offering for publishers that kind of really provided them with the sort of the analytics and data of effectively how demand views their inventory and their audiences. And we decided to eliminate our take rate on the SSP so as to align our incentives a little bit better with publishers, you know, for those, for those specific use cases. You know, we didn't want a situation where we were charging for the software on one end and then double dipping, you know, further, further downstream. And, and you know, I think a lot of what we've, what we've done over the last few years has really been, you know, we've been trying to really understand and, and uncover optimization opportunities as it's, as it's, as it relates to the overall value chain. And so this ends up being but both a net win for buyers, a net win for publishers and a net win for us because we transition our revenue from more of a media share media model to a SaaS model.
- [03:20]
Ari Paparo
Right. So you announced the revenue share elimination a while back. Now just to make sure we're clear on things, is the brand name Signal corresponding to the rev share elimination or the data overlay or is it all hard bundled together?
- [03:36]
Peter Cunna
So Signal is referring to the product which provides sort of the on page data enrichment elements. What we've done is we've packaged it in a way so that if you do work with the sovereign exchange, we will eliminate our take rate on the sovereign exchange so as to just align those incentives a little bit better. So it's the packaging of our commercials and our commercial model.
- [04:00]
Ari Paparo
And for those of you who aren't as familiar with sovereign, the reason you can eliminate your rev share and still offer an SSP is because you tend to sell to more torso tail type publishers who you deliver a complete package to, is that correct?
- [04:15]
Peter Cunna
I'd say that that was probably the case about four or five years ago. Less of a case now. I mean we work with a lot of the sort of the bellwether publisher list, the trade desk premium list as it were, Yahoo, Meredith and a bunch of others. So I'd say that that was probably the case about four or five, but we've evolved to serving more direct premium publishers.
- [04:42]
Ari Paparo
Well then I'll turn around the question which is how are you able to not have a take rate and make it a business proposition? What are you charging for?
- [04:50]
Peter Cunna
It's very simple. We are charging a volumetric CPM tied to any impression that was enriched by our data and that resulted in a positive yield outcome for the publisher. So a yield bump that they otherwise wouldn't have received. And we monitor that through AB testing, we monitor that through a control set and the value that we're bringing to the table here I think is a lot more comprehensive and a lot more interesting for the publisher in that use case.
- [05:20]
Ari Paparo
Right, so you get paid on the lift, uptake, uplift, that is.
- [05:24]
Peter Cunna
Yes.
- [05:24]
Ari Paparo
Okay, so let's get back to Signal. So when you first introduced Signal, you mentioned a whole bunch of different benefits. Could we peel them back one at a time? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I guess. Publisher second party data or it's called second party data. It's really publisher first party data translated into second party data for bidders. How does that work?
- [05:44]
Peter Cunna
Yeah, so when we look at the, you know, what kind of really results in the kind of a yield outcome and the different elements of a bid request that are really responsible for driving that delta, you know, addressability is one big piece there. So if you're able to enrich a bid request with any addressability information, you know, that's, that's super interesting for, for the buy side and that, that typically transacts at a higher clip.
- [06:15]
Ari Paparo
What does addressability mean?
- [06:17]
Peter Cunna
Well, addressability means, you know, any kind of addressability information. So that could be an audience segment or it could be something like hashed email. Yeah, that's provided.
- [06:28]
Ari Paparo
So identity, like bridged identity of various kinds.
- [06:31]
Peter Cunna
Bridged identity. Yeah, good way, yeah, good way to put it. So that's one, that's one component. Price discovery is another component as well. So smarter, more dynamic flooring, you know, is another area that we've seen a lot of really positive results in. And we use a pretty, it's taken us a long time to build, but we use a pretty sophisticated, you know, flooring algorithm that we also use on our ssp, which basically looks at the entire sovereign universe by way of, you know, the 300 billion ad requests that we see on the SSP side. And all of that context and all of that bid data is leveraged into making the publisher's floor smarter. So we're leveraging basically what we see across the entire exchange and using that for the publisher's benefit when understanding kind of how buyers value certain users and certain environments, et cetera. And so price discovery has been a big one for us. And then there's attention as well. So we have a lot of buyers that are, more and more buyers now are keying off of attention metrics and the attention score of an ad unit outside of just, you know, kind of standard viewability, you know, proxies and, and that's another way that we, that we augment the value of the impression. So our idea is to take this a little bit further and start layering on some of the other compelling data assets that we preside over on other sides of the sovereign platform, namely our commerce line of products as well. So if we can enrich on the advertising side an impression with commerce intent data and segments, then, you know, then that could be, you know, a compelling story for, you know, a publisher that doesn't, that might not have a commerce business.
- [08:20]
Ari Paparo
Right. Do you, do you have your own identity across, across your sites.
- [08:25]
Peter Cunna
We do have our own internal ID that we use and used to stitch, you know, a lot of what we see across, across the platform. But no, we're not in market with, with an id. We don't feel like expanding that list of, you know, hundreds of IDs.
- [08:43]
Ari Paparo
All right, so I get it. So you have this tag on the page and you're calculating predicted detention, you're calculating data, you're calculating floor prices. Now, walking through the supply chain, do those things only hit your SSP or are you able to apply the data to other pipes?
- [09:00]
Peter Cunna
So some, some of those signals are, you know, are, are able to only really be activated in rssp. You know, some of our audience segments, for example, really only have kind of an impact on, on, on our marketplace. The attention score is an example of one that's ubiquitous across the board. So publisher kind of, you know, leveraging signal, you know, would benefit from. You know, I think probably the primary beneficiary there is Google. Google is probably the one buyer that, you know, where we've seen that sort of more pronounced correlation between attention and monetization. And price discovery is ubiquitous as well across the board. So price discovery, I would say that the, probably the largest value proposition of a publisher updating their pricing strategy to a dynamic pricing strategy would be the opportunity around, you know, unifying the pricing signal across their entire demand stack. I think Chris Kane at JO did some really interesting research around this about a year ago where he found that, you know, sort of every SSP had a different floor price. And as a buyer trying to navigate that, it's, it's impossible. So we've actually seen a lot of positive results on sort of buyer bid rate as a, as a byproduct of unifying that pricing signal across the board. And so we're, we're trying to get publishers to take off of a lot of this data, which is why we're, we're also launching a new refreshed UI around our signal product that really taps into a lot of those, a lot of those opportunities. It's kind of like a sincere for publishers, very similar in a lot of the data that they capture. You know, ads to content ratio, attention scores, etc.
- [10:50]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, yeah, the floor pricing dynamic, floor pricing product sounds a lot like what cybids used to offer to publishers to optimize results. I'm also interested in your attention product. My understanding is that attention is very fragmented and there really isn't a lot of attention going over the wires over rtb, it's really up to the buyers to figure out what they want to bid on. How, how are you as a publisher facing product? Working with attention?
- [11:20]
Peter Cunna
Yeah, so I'd say that there's really two, two main focuses. One is, you know, buyers that are actively seeking out attention as a, as a, as a KPI to optimize around. I think that's, there are a few buyers out there and I think publishers can engage those buyers directly or via pmps. We, you know, we do a lot of curation around attention on the sovereign side of things. So our attention PMPs are a big focus for us and we see a lot of value being created there. And then there's using attention as a metric to optimize around. So in our analytics, we show publishers the correlation between attention score across all of their ad units and then more globally across their inventory and the correlation between attention score and bid rate or CPM or other health metrics. And so using that as an optimization lever is something that we're trying to equip publishers with the data to be able to do so.
- [12:27]
Ari Paparo
Right. Okay, so if I'm a publisher and I'm interested in what you're saying, what's the deployment like? Assuming I'm not currently working with Sovereign.
- [12:37]
Peter Cunna
So the deployment is very simple. It's like a lot in our business. Single line of JavaScript.
- [12:44]
Ari Paparo
Yeah, I've heard that one before.
- [12:46]
Peter Cunna
Yeah. No, we have a JavaScript deployment and this can be deployed either direct on page or it can be deployed via tag manager. And essentially the tag does all of the heavy lifting. And so we set up, and this is just best practices, we tend to set up a lot of, you know, key values in the publisher's ad server. Also, our florist product resolves around GAM so that there's no sort of delta between what we see and what the publisher sees. So ultimately we require the publisher to set up corresponding unified pricing rules, UPRs to map to the floor values that we're going to be broadcasting across their stack.
- [13:28]
Ari Paparo
Right. And then the business model you mentioned earlier is an uplift model. So how would that work kind of mechanically? Are you, have you a holdback of some kind per exchange?
- [13:40]
Peter Cunna
Well, we have a holdback on the publisher's inventory where we're just, we're not doing anything and so we track that holdback, you know, compared to, so, you know, we use that as the control compared to where we're able to successfully pass these different attributes and, you know, these different data provision elements to the Publisher's pre bid and you know, the publisher's demand stack. And so we'll be able to monitor that specifically whether or not the publisher is using attention segments, whether or not they're using a hashed email, whether or not they're using the price floor. We're able to kind of track where we were successfully able to pass that value.
- [14:23]
Ari Paparo
So if the average CPM and the holdout is a dollar and the average CPM on your stuff is $1.50, you're going to assume you produce that 50 cents in value, multiply by the number of impressions and then that's the gross increase that you provided.
- [14:39]
Peter Cunna
Yeah, it's a very broad way of explaining it. But ultimately we get super, super granular and around sort of which event was tied to which impression. But yes, in layman terms that would be the analysis.
- [14:54]
Ari Paparo
And then you would piece of that. You would, would you do you send them a bill for the difference or do you take a bid reduction for the difference?
- [15:01]
Peter Cunna
So we price that on a flat, on a flat price cpm. We do not use a rev share to, to tap into that. And you know, and then you know that CPM is, is mapped directly to, you know, sort of the, the number of impressions that, that we were able to enrich.
- [15:19]
Ari Paparo
Right. Okay, so it's like a SaaS model that backs into an ROI. Right. So I might have agreed in advance to pay you, let's say $0.10 CPM. But you show a nice report that says you made me 50 cents cpm. So I don't complain.
- [15:32]
Peter Cunna
Yeah, it'll be much less than the 10 cents based off of our pricing tables.
- [15:36]
Ari Paparo
I was just kind of giving round number examples. All right, let's do a quick lightning round. So what's your number one competitive advantage of signal in particular?
- [15:46]
Peter Cunna
Our number one competitive advantage is the data portability. So we will transparently show you exactly what data led to what event and how to tie that to a yield outcome.
- [16:02]
Ari Paparo
Right. Why won't Google, Amazon, et cetera, do this and just crush you?
- [16:08]
Peter Cunna
Well, they tend to like to lock their data in their silos and we have way more explicit ways of sharing the data with publishers. They can basically request to ingest that data, however which way they want. I don't think Amazon or Google do that currently.
- [16:23]
Ari Paparo
What's your biggest challenge with this product?
- [16:25]
Peter Cunna
Oh, the biggest challenge I think is education and just covering and covering ground. So you know, we have a finite number of sellers that can have these conversations in market and every time we engage a publisher on a lot of these conversations. It's a great. It's a great conversation. And publishers, you know, give us great feedback. It's just that we're limited in terms of, like, you know, how many people and how many publishers we can engage with this message. And so I'd say that's probably the number one limitation right now.
- [16:53]
Ari Paparo
Got it. Okay, last question. If Signal was an animal, what animal would it be?
- [16:58]
Peter Cunna
Honey badger.
- [16:59]
Ari Paparo
Why is that?
- [17:01]
Peter Cunna
Scrappy but ferocious.
- [17:03]
Ari Paparo
All right, there, you heard it here first. So, Peter Kunow, the managing director for Signal at Sovereign, thank you so much for being here.
- [17:11]
Peter Cunna
Thanks. AR Foreign.
- [17:24]
Ari Paparo
Thank you for listening to the marketecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Marketing. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to join at AdTech God. Com.