Facebook paves path to premium programmatic as it knocks down walled garden theories

Nine months on from its acquisition by Facebook, LiveRail was expanded last month for publishers to sell their native and display ads rather than just video. At an event in London yesterday (15 April), the business brought together publishers, broadcasters and developers to tout the benefits of the revamped offering.

The pitch was that publishers can start to change the way they sell inventory, remarketing remnant mobile video and display media on their sites and mobile apps using Facebook’s anonymised user data. Interestingly, the social network is offering media owners all the plug-ins, levers and controls needed to sell their inventory in a way that makes sense for them; So if a publisher wants to set certain price floors, expose inventory to certain buyers or adopt a specific partner to measure metrics like viewbaility then they can.

It means media owners already using LiveRail such as Dailymotion and BBC Worldwide can start to sell blocks of media around specific audiences, making it a more attractive proposition to buyers. Instead of advertisers thinking about getting six impressions for example, Facebook's tech views the impressions as people, which in this instance could see them they pay to reach three people using two devices rather than one for each click on a device.

It is a shift fuelled by the fact that a device is no longer a proxy for a person because they use multiple devices.

Clicks are not a strong measure of performance and advertisers’ struggles to move beyond the cookie has left publishers with an audience that has migrated online but not the advertising budgets to fully monetise them.

Yoav Arnstein, head of international for LiveRail, said “bringing premium inventory to the game” is “key” to its programmatic efforts with LiveRail. “That’s the game changer for us,” he continued, “because marketers and agencies will gain more confidence the more premium the inventory is in programmatic”.

Confidence is already growing with media experts predicting a “step change” in terms of applying native thinking to digital video and clearer strategies that aren’t just simply trying to repurpose TV ads.

Speaking at the forum, Dan Chapman, head of digital at MediaCom, said “it’s great to have automated trading” but advertisers need to prioritise knowing “what the KPIs are”.

He added: “we’ve got to a point in digital where things have to grow up. We’re at that next stage in digital where we’re a lot more focused on the native [metrics] that I get out of video based on the data feeds that I have on the data based on the objective of video content.”

Chapman’s fellow panellist Will Smyth, chief digital strategy officer at Omnicom Media Group, echoed the calls for more mature campaign planning around video because “clients aren’t shouting at us saying we’d like to pay you money”.

“[Advertiers] need to work out what is the single metric they need to gauge success by [for video],” he said. “The more things that you try to optimise then the fewer things you will succeed at. If you optimise one bit of your campaign then the chances are another bit is going to suffer from it.”

Despite programmatic’s growing influence over how media is traded, it has yet to shirk its reputation for shifting lower value media such as banners and interstital ads. Native ads could hold the key to premiumisation, according to Facebook.

Native ads now account for more than half the inventory on the Facebook Audience Network – its network of third party apps – with publishers seeing formats such as video perform seven times better than traditional banners. It is where the technology company is diverting the bulk of its mobile efforts, particularly through in-app ads as it looks to extend its advertising real estate beyond its own sites.

Mark Trefgarne, LiveRail co-founder and product director at Facebook, said it was in a “unique position” to help customers “think through channels” because “we get such a holistic view of the ecosystem”.

“Facebook is actually developing some really unique tools in the shape of LiveRail and Audience Network that allow advertisers to say 'we want to reach these type of people' but aggregated at scale across a very large network of apps and publishers that enables those advertisers to be able to buy those audiences no matter where they are.”

Facebook’s investment in LiveRail will likely charge ongoing concerns that the publisher is walling off its offering in an attempt to pressure brands into buying directly from it. Rumours it is assembling a rival to Google’s Doubleclick, which were first revealed by The Drum, were further stoked earlier this month when Business Insider reported it filed a patent for a social-driven ad exchange.

However, Facebook dismissed the notion it was doing so though did admit marketers, publishers and agencies have already voiced their concerns on the matter.

Arnstein said: "It’s not just a marketer or agency concern [we’ve received]. We’ve heard from publishers directly. Our response has been 'let us prove that that’s not the case.' One of the things we announced was making anonynimised Facebook audience data available to publishers. It can only be accessed when a marketer interacts directly with a publisher. It is not via LiveRail or via Facebook at all. This is an example of how we’re providing publishers with a solution and not creating a walled garden through which both them and the marketer need to actually engage."