With another year of dmexco over, James Prudhomme (pictured below), managing director EMEA, Index Exchange, provides ExchangeWire with his view on the common theme present throughout the conference and, indeed, in the industry for a long time – transparency.

As the industry reflects on last week’s dmexco conference, an issue that was discussed at length – on the stage, at casual gatherings, and in closed-door conversations – is the persistent lack of transparency in the programmatic ecosystem. According to a recent eMarketer report, UK programmatic spend will be up 44% from last year. And, across Europe, programmatic spending – specifically within mobile and video platforms – is on the rise. While these numbers prove promising for the EMEA region, the increase in the number of players and confusion about solutions that will deliver sustained ROI is hindering continued growth in the market.

In a piece I wrote almost a year ago, I admitted that the programmatic value chain is complex – and that this complexity can create structural barriers to adoption. As you head east of the UK, the European market gets even more complicated. Buyers and sellers in Eastern Europe, DACH, Benelux, the Nordic countries, and Southern Europe have to manage their way across multiple currencies, unique languages, disparate regulatory regimes, and other factors that can cause the value chain to become more opaque. 

This opaqueness can often create opportunity for bad actors to flourish. Bad actors are taking advantage of both buyers and sellers with hidden fees, misclassification of inventory, and various forms of invalid traffic. This ambiguity, along with empty promises and a general environment of distrust, is hindering adoption in both mature and emerging markets alike.   

James Prudhomme, MD EMEA, Index Exchange,

I recently had the pleasure of participating in a panel moderated by Jeremy Noya, Manager of Digital Trading at Voetbal International and a core member of the IAB Netherlands Programmatic Task Force. We discussed how publishers in markets like The Netherlands can leverage header bidding to create a transparent environment where all buyers can compete fairly, reduce latency and, ultimately, put money back in the publisher’s pocket. 

The definition is simple and it's worth restating: a buyer should know exactly where their ad is going to run and shouldn’t be subjected to soft floor pricing. Sellers and buyers alike should have 100% transparency into the fees being charged by the intermediaries during the transaction. 

Just a short time ago, Jeremy and his colleagues did not have a clear understanding of who their buyer was and couldn’t see the winning bid price for every impression. As mentioned in my piece back in March, it’s imperative that the industry develop a common understanding and vocabulary around transparency and that a set of standard practices emerges. This effort will bind us together in a form of industry self-regulation that will deliver a permanent and progressive solution to the bad actors who permeate our industry.