Ben Barokas, President & Co-Founder, Admeld, On Price Transparency, Bridging Buy & Sell Sides & The Swift Adoption Of SSP Technology In the Australian and APAC Markets

by Ciaran O'Kane on 3rd Nov 2011 in News

Ben Barokas, CEO and Co-Founder of Admeld on being a sell-side platform (SSP) for premium publishers and why Australian publishers are moving so rapidly to solve the same fundamental challenges other markets have faced.

He also discusses the dynamics of the Australian market, yield optimisation, private exchanges, how technology is delivering efficiencies the market has been asking for and how both buyers and sellers are pushing each other to evolve.

Why did Admeld choose to move into the Australian market? When it comes to programmatic buying how does the Australian market differ to the UK and US markets?

What’s happening in the Australian market is very exciting because publishers here are moving very quickly to solve the same fundamental challenges that we’ve seen elsewhere. In the end, the goal is to capture new spends while maintaining a high level of control and transparency.

Of course, the market here differs quite a bit from the US and UK. To start, supply in Australia is much more concentrated, and as a result ad networks never proliferated to the same extent. In a way, Australian publishers have skipped intermediate steps (such as ad network optimization) that many publishers in the US/EMEA markets took on their way to adapting to more automated technologies. We’re seeing Australian publishers moving directly to programmatic exchange trading, including RTB, and adoption of the private exchange model is a natural extension of that.

Another difference is that demand is more concentrated here as well. Until recently, publishers here had been working directly with the agencies, many of which have invested heavily in trading desk technology. Broadly, publishers have been stretched to keep up with these buy-side advancements while running their core business. What we do is help publishers solve this problem by providing technology that fully manages all their programmatic demand sources, provides access to inventory for buyers who commit upfront, and gives publishers deeper control and insight into the whole process.