We’ve summarized common vendors’ feedbacks on their work with publishers.

Poor choice of partners

One common publishers’ concern is the transparency on fees. What part of the budget will reach the publisher? In some cases, it may be less than a half. Ad tech vendors from the other side are in no hurry to answer this question, suggesting publishers to raise their awareness and selectivity. Publishers shouldn’t jump into any relations, attracted by a nice service pack, i.e. according to vendors, the problem of transparency is on publishers.

“Everyone is facing this issue,” Head of Programmatic operations Yaroslav Holod says. “No one wants publishers to have the information about min/max bids and who established these. Partially, that is the reason why header bidding appeared. It helps publishers to control bids from any DSP.”

Shiftlessness

Tech opportunities occur every day. Sometimes, the opportunity is considered as such only if you’ve got it first. At that, both sides agree on publishers’ lack of speed, who are neither adjusted to fast decision-making nor adapted to digital innovations yet. But if publishers are willing to admit the problem and work on it, vendors are just very annoyed. The reason for that are scarce resources or no understanding of the product, either way, new stuff is missed out, which is frustrating.

“Any technology exists within adopted standards. Any deviation from the standards, e.g. additional module or “new opportunity”, requires a “duct tape” solutions to glue together the existing architecture with a new one. As a rule, we have no resources’ issues, but the problems with architecture intervention do occur,” Yaroslav Holod comments.

Due diligence

Another problem, which, according to vendors, arises due to publishers’ naivety, is cooperation with doubtful platforms and disintermediation.

The two sides of the same issue are clear. Publishers aren’t sure about the value added by every intermediate business, if there is any. And vendors are scolding publishers for giving up inventory to the shared platforms too fast, thus compromising their sales channels.

Background check and investigation, no trust in advance – these are vendors’ advices for publishers.

Awareness

Publishers should be aware of the fact that ad tech vendors are not the same thing as SSPs, often being media sales networks. Confusing them leads to misunderstanding. Publishers are complaining against vendors when the fault is on platforms. The platforms in their turn can’t get the inventory without “being” tech companies. So, we’re back to due diligence.