By Seb Joseph • September 12, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
The open web tends to get a bad rap in advertising circles. Fair or not, it’s often viewed as a breeding ground for low-quality inventory, rife with fraud and malvertising. Yet, in a surprising twist, one of its biggest advocates is none other than Coca-Cola.
The company not only spends ad dollars on the open web, but it also plans to keep investing in these spaces that exist outside the walled gardens of platforms like Amazon, YouTube and Google. However, Coca-Cola does so with strict safeguards in place to ensure its ads avoid the open web’s shadier corners.
Speaking at Exchangewire’s ATS event in London yesterday (Sept. 11), Coca-Cola’s programmatic lead James Trott offered a brief overview of how these guardrails work.
“The open web is critical to us now and moving forward,” said Trott, who is the senior director of global addressable media at the Coca-Cola Company.
Initially, this began several years ago as supply-path optimization — consolidating ad dollars into fewer, higher-quality programmatic marketplaces to make buys more efficient. Fewer marketplaces mean fewer chances of duplicating bids on the same impression, which can inadvertently drive up the price of ads.
But advertisers can only do this so much. It gets to a point where consolidation at this level becomes a game of diminishing returns.
That’s when Coca-Cola turned its focus to curation — using ad tech to build a custom version of the open web that doesn’t rely on unreliable third-party signals.
Or as Trott put it: “It’s about working out how you curate all the media you need while mitigating the risk of quality loss by ensuring that your minimum standards for programmatic media are respected.”
Granted, it’s still early days for this type of approach. Curation, and the value Coca-Cola hopes to derive from it, remain more of a hypothesis than a proven strategy. With that said, Trott and his team are actively testing the approach.
Through such testing, Trott emphasized, marketers can restore confidence in programmatic buying, which has taken quite a few hits in recent years.
What he’s referring to isn’t groundbreaking — curation, supply path optimization and transparency have been hot topics in the industry for years. But when it comes to curation, it remains especially relevant today. The spread of made-for-advertising sites made sure of that. It forced advertisers to think about why they were buying ads on these sites, which are ultimately in the business of ad arbitrage.
For some of them, curation was seen as a panacea to this risk.
At Coca-Cola, however, it’s seen as much more.
“If you think about what the optimal media supply would look like for [programmatic marketers] in Spain versus Mexico versus Australia, there’s going to be differences,” said Trott. “It’s almost like the personalization of media for any market.”
He’s referring to using curation to build bespoke marketplaces — mini-marketplaces shaped by Coca-Cola’s own localized view of what quality inventory is. These are underpinned by the data available to their marketers and the specific outcomes they’re trying to achieve for their brands. The smaller scale of these curated marketplaces, compared to large private marketplaces, means less exposure to bad inventory like MFAs.
But this level of precision can’t be achieved without supply-side platforms (SSPs). As Trott explained, SSPs are the ad tech vendors with the deepest knowledge of the programmatic ecosystem. “You’d probably be far more effective working with SSPs to help curate inventory in your markets based on what they know will be effective,” he said.
None of this implies that SSPs will replace demand-side platforms (DSPs) — at least not under Trott’s watch at Coca-Cola. There’s still a vital need for technology that enables smarter ad buying, particularly in emerging channels like gaming, streaming services and audio. But Trott also said he believes SSPs are no longer the “dumb pipes” they’ve sometimes been called. Instead, they’re evolving into “smart pipes,” and playing a more active role in optimizing the supply chain.
Advertisers like Diageo, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mars and Heineken would agree. All have pursued strategies similar to Coca-Cola’s in recent years. And all of them have had to deal with their fair share of setbacks. Many of those challenges can be traced back to the dominance of walled gardens, whose success often came at the open web’s expense. Need proof? Just look at what’s happening with Google.
“In the shadow of the DOJ monopoly case against Google, it’s great to hear repeated references to the value of the open web (the most important channel for society where people spend 75% of their time online),” said Jamie Barnard, CEO of Compliant. “If the outcome of the litigation is, as predicted, the break-up of Google’s dominance over the ad tech stack, the open web has a chance to fight back — after all, when you combine the biggest and best of journalism, CTV and audio, the open web has the scale to compete with Google, Meta and Apple combined.”
Even so, the open web’s renaissance hinges on streamlining the supply chain, Barnard continued, focusing on curating quality inventory over sheer volume, and providing access to addressable, high-quality audiences — those that are on-target, receptive and consented.
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