In today's guest post, Time Inc. UK's Dom Perkins, digital commercial development director, speaks exclusively to ExchangeWire about how the digital advertising market has served technology entrepreneurs well in the past 10 years.

The emergence of networks, offerings of reach and scale, along with the ability to provide audience platforms that enable greater targeting, efficiencies and attribution has given these entrepreneurs the opportunity to change the fabric of the digital landscape.

Advertisers and publishers have watched as new advertising and marketing technology fragmented the digital market place, almost to a point where they had lost control of who was selling and buying their brands, data and digital media. As a consequence, additional revenues have been lost from the advertisers’ budgets and, in some cases; there has been less transparency about where the advertising revenues are being delivered, leaving publishers with little control of the inventory.

It’s only in the last few years that publishers have realised it isn’t only the domain for the heavily VC-funded platforms and that they too can actively participate in the automated media world. While growth in ad tech has fragmented the flow of digital revenues from traditional content owners and publishers, it has also acted as a wakeup call for publishers, like us, to invest in our own technology platforms as well as staff and understand how to work more effectively with clients and agencies directly.

At Time Inc. UK, we’ve not only engaged strategically with ad tech partners to help us control our inventory in market but also regain control of the currency, which is so often traded without any knowledge of the publisher, e.g. data. This hasn’t always gone smoothly, but we have been able to trial new platforms and learn from both problems and successes along the way.

In order to work directly with all buying points, we’ve removed all third-party networks from trading Time Inc. UK inventory and invested in publisher platforms such as a DMP, tag management as well our global exchange platform (SSP). Additionally, we’ve invested in our own buying platform (DSP) allowing us to activate our own data on and off site – for both advertiser campaigns and Time Inc. UK marketing campaigns; we’re an advertiser, too.

We actively police our buyers’ creatives and tags for unapproved data collection and push back where we can, again trying to regain control of our key assets that are being collected, traded and used without agreement from content owners.

All of these platforms have been deployed to enable us to become as accessible as possible to advertisers and agencies, adding value and insight via data while regaining control of our tradable assets.

Globally, Time Inc. is investing heavily in its engineering capabilities across the entire business focussing on big data, editorial applications and product development for audience engagement and ad systems. All of these allow us to understand our audiences, deliver content and monetise this across multiple platforms, without relying on third-party companies to perform this on our behalf.

We have an envious breadth of audience data from brands’ interaction and touch points with individuals, not just through content but also from subscriptions, competitions, forums, events, and ecommerce; and with recent investments in event companies like UK Cycling Events and platforms like Snap Fashion where we’re able to collect rich data points.

Our focus has been on assembling a tech stack that is flexible enough to meet the ever changing demand platforms needs, while simplified enough to make sure we’re able to maximise our assets to market.

For the past two years, we’ve been trialling partners and understanding which ones genuinely add value and which are simply focussing on making margin or using the Time Inc. logo for their own benefits, eliminating those who don’t help deliver value to our strategy. We have stripped out unnecessary technology solutions that have their own modus operandi and aren’t there to support our business and help connect our tech stack seamlessly. We look to work for companies that offer great advice and consultancy and are willing to work with other tech providers, who in some cases may be competitors, but agree to work and integrate with each other for the benefit of our business.

Our technology strategy is relatively simple; we store all our personal data in our single customer view database and link this both ways with our behavioural data through our DMP. This helps us to understand and track a customer journey and activate it both on and off site.

In addition, we’re experimenting with holistic yield management to facilitate our multiple demand sources to compete in a unified auction. This lets us flow our inventory more efficiently and connect it to multiple buyers in one place as well as enabling our fixed price PMPs to compete against other sources. We only use one SSP to do this, again trying to keep our tech stack as simple as possible and only allowing full transparency of site level URLs to invited buyers.

We want to get to a position where we are open and transparent with agencies and advertisers, delivering as much insight and data as possible, helping buyers to create a strategy that truly delivers value for both the buy and sell side; a point where Time Inc. UK gets paid a fair value for its inventory and/or data and the advertiser gets exactly what they pay for transparently in an efficient transaction.

While we certainly don’t have all the answers, we do believe we are focussing on delivering the best tech stack possible to ease access to our inventory and data, while remaining flexible enough to accommodate the ever increasing demand side technology request. However, the key for us is to enable Time Inc. UK to remain in control of all its assets.