How FatTail’s Deals Marketplace Will Help Media Buyers and Sellers

FatTail announced this week the release of its Deals Marketplace, which will transform access to programmatic direct deals. 

The marketplace will allow publishers to display their products, inventory, and pricing for programmatic deals directly to buyers. It will also allow media buyers to see the same at scale, accessing premium inventory with programmatic efficiency and taking advantage of benefits like price guarantees and inventory commitments that are unavailable via the spot market.

You can check out the release if you want to know more about the basics of Deals Marketplace. 

To get FatTail CEO Doug Huntington’s thoughts on how Deals Marketplace will maximize the value of programmatic advertising, why an equivalent of Deals Marketplace has not previously come to market, and what Deals Marketplace portends for the future of programmatic, read on.

Doug, you think programmatic direct should play a much bigger role in how premium publishers monetize their inventory and how advertisers purchase that inventory. Why, and how does Deals Marketplace accomplish that?

Our clients are putting a lot of thought into how to execute direct deals more efficiently. Most would agree that the open market is an important part of their revenue strategy, but would also tell you that, all else being equal, they’d far prefer doing deals with advertisers rather than with pipes.

They have invested considerable time and money in both. Unfortunately, the tech and workflow required to support each revenue stream has been developed and managed in silos and up until now has been completely disconnected.

Our thought was that if we could somehow bring the two together, publishers and their advertisers would have the best of both worlds: the quality and control of direct with the efficiency and scale of programmatic.

This is what Deals Marketplace aims to do.

If Deals Marketplace will be so helpful to media buyers and sellers, why hasn’t a product like it previously come to market? What are the roadblocks?

Market conditions and tech haven’t really lined up very well until now. With the pendulum swinging back to first-party data, direct deals, and premium inventory, now seemed like the ideal time to launch Deals Marketplace and work with the industry to define the next generation of direct advertising.

To make this work, both sides of the market need to embrace the notion of truly collaborating to build a fair, efficient, and open market that is independently controlled and seeks to preserve the vitally important trust relationship shared by publishers, advertiser, and consumers.

The reaction to the recent TradeDesk announcement indicates an increased appetite for this level of collaboration. What OpenPath seeks to solve for the open market is highly complementary and analogous to what Deals Marketplace seeks to solve for direct deals but with the added controls that direct advertising inherently provides.

How are DSPs, advertisers, and publishers responding to Deals Marketplace?

The technology is in place, and we’re making very good progress in assembling the market, having the advantage of built-in supply and seamless integration through our OMS offering. We are also seeing significant interest from publishers not currently using our OMS, which is great because Deals Marketplace was designed to be OMS agnostic so any supply source could take advantage of it.  

Our initial DSP partners view integration to Deals Marketplace as a way of providing differentiated services to their users in the form of new direct sources of premium inventory and upfront access to it, integrated media planning and deal origination, and direct deal execution across publishers at scale. These benefits can also equally apply to any electronic media planning and buying system.

Our self-serve tech partners that engage in automated guaranteed transactions see it as a “low-cost” way to become “un-siloed” and a fully integrated component of the publisher’s existing direct deal workflow processes, sales capabilities, and productization strategies.

What does Deals Marketplace suggest about the future of programmatic?

That programmatic and direct advertising no longer need to be thought of as two different things. That programmatic doesn’t need to imply disintermediation. That the benefits of it can apply equally to all forms of media. 

Publishers will be able to much more readily benefit from it in direct proportion to the perceived value of the content they produce, to the detriment of MFA sites. The total addressable market for programmatic will be much more equal in size to the total addressable market for advertising. The level of fraud will decrease. It will become much more transparent. And premium publishers and brands will have much more control.