GroupM’s John Miskelly & PubMatic’s Jason Barnes on the future of transparency and SPO

In this episode, GroupM APAC investment director John Miskelly, explains the challenges agencies are facing in terms of transparency, including the huge amount of data that agencies are having to process now.

During each episode, PubMatic chief revenue officer, APAC, Jason Barnes will give a need-to-know account of the topic. For SPO, Barnes says, “fundamentally supply path optimization or SPO is about media buyers and DSPs reclaiming control of the digital supply chain. I'd say that's the simplest way to put it in a sentence. Programmatic advertising is pretty complex. Automation is supposed to make transactions more streamlined and efficient. But what's happened with many players coming into the supply chain, sometimes digital spending, ROI has actually decreased.”

The job of agencies and businesses in the digital ecosystem, according to Miskelly, therefore, is to instill greater confidence in digital advertising. Both Barnes and Miskelly agree that digital is a powerful channel, but they agree that the complexity and scale can be challenging.

Miskelly says consolidation in any part of the ecosystem can be seen as valuable to agencies because of the sheer scale of data they now process.

“Data processing is probably one of the things that people don't quite understand. From our example, we’re processing 10 million demands, it takes a huge amount of processing time, and also manual work to try and categorize that and simplify it. There's a lot of data out there and it does require a lot of space and a lot of work. That's probably one of the biggest things I see and one of the reasons why consolidation and being a bit more selective about who we use is important,” he explains.

To hear the full episode and to subscribe to the entire series, find PubCast: the future of programmatic on Apple, Spotify or Google Podcasts.