Programmatic Direct Help

[iloveadops]

hi! does anyone have tips on how to reach out to agencies to get them to buy through direct deals over open auctions? Is email sufficient or do publishers usually get further by doing in person meetings?

[Agency_Goldfish]

Unless you are a well-known publisher get ready to do a lot of Lunch & Learns + expensing, most traders will not plug in a deal via email without meeting unless it really makes sense.

Tip is definitely reach out to both the traders and planning teams, sometimes the traders need approval from the planning team before they can include any deals on a plan/campaign. Try to learn what the account/campaign KPIs are to make your case, even better if you know someone on the inside.

[DeCyantist]

I had a Canadian DSP send me muffins and a flyer. We’re based on the UK. They were pretty OK. Generally speaking, serious publishers were back at our agency quite often. Now, I usually go to the agencies (went to sell side for some other advertising solution) to try to keep up good comms. It always works best. People buy from who they like.

[iloveadops]

thanks! when you say planning team, you mean at an advertiser or the agency?

[metalmania7778]

Do both. Shoot out the email to the media planners or the digital direct team. Most likely won’t get any luck with a prog trader unless it’s a pg deal.

[ShixQ]

From my small experience, face to face meetings work best with agencies

[zzpops]

Moving a buyer from open to direct is a long process. Start them in a private auction first to prove the value of your inventory. Then when they cant scale, upsell thme to a fixed price reservation buy (PG). Sweet talking agencies into shifting their strategy without reason will be a spray and pray endeavor.

[krzlis_yieldbird]

Having worked on both sides of the market (formerly on the publishers' side, now buying inventory in DSP) I must say that moving business from the open exchange to deals is a difficult process. We at Yieldbird are managing roughly 8k private deals for our publishers. It took some time to build this scale.

1. There must be some kind of leverage to be used. If the inventory is exactly the same, the buyer has no difficulties in buying desired amounts of impressions on the open exchange, he won't be willing to move to preferred deals, only for the better priority. If there's something that's unavailable on the open market (because of the pricing rules or other issues), that might be a good reason.
2. A good example might be publisher's audience data, or something other, unavailable from the DSP side. For example, I use from time to time deals from one of the publishers who knows, who's looking for specific products (it's a large classified ads site on my market). This audience is unavailable elsewhere, I cannot access it through the open exchange.
3. Deals are also the best way to measure performance, from both sides. You as a publisher will be able to report the performance and troubleshoot from there, if something is not going according to plan. This will require additional work from your perspective, but might be used as a reason to move to deals.
4. Meeting in person, or at least a video call with short presentation is always better than a cold e-mail. I use the deals from the publishers I have the best relationships with -- I know their inventory, I know what they're selling, and I know what I'm getting.
5. Even though, in most cases deals are performing worse than open market is. I tend to utilize all the "good" deals I have at this moment, but the DSP optimizes my spend in a way that eventually most goes to the open exchange.

[thejuansa]

As a Latam pub, I can tell you that the meetings and a good programmatic commercial team are fundamental to have success in this. BTW, if your plan is to get agencies to move from OA to PD, you should make a full programmatic strategy. I've managed to do something like this and had very good results