Programmatic can be a mixed bag for Black-owned media companies.
Although it’s an efficient way to sell more ad inventory, irrational keyword blocking and the much-despised ad tech tax are big challenges.
Some minority-owned publishers also consider programmatic to be less effective than direct buys for striking a chord with diverse audiences because campaign execution is more hands-off.
Black-owned TV and media network Revolt, for example, eschews programmatic completely. But others are compromising by turning to programmatic guaranteed (PG), which is like a digitized version of an insertion order.
PG combines campaign automation with closer publisher oversight, which helps advertisers ensure they’re reaching the audiences they want to reach while sticking to a specific budget commitment. And publishers can ensure ads are a good fit for their audiences and more easily keep tabs on how much ad revenue is coming in.
Bidding blocks
Black Enterprise and Blavity Media Group, both Black-owned publishers, are leaning into PG.
Unlike in private marketplace deals (PMPs), PG allows publishers to control budget pacing, and there is no bidding involved.
Blavity uses PG to complement direct buys so buyers can meet their spend commitments with more standard video or display ads, said CRO Mike Hadgis.
Black Enterprise’s strategy, meanwhile, is to set a high floor price for its biddable ad units. While that helps ensure quality, it also means buyers that bid lower in search of better deals often don’t win those bids. Losing bids in PMPs means client spend tracks behind budget allocation plans, making those deals more complicated and less scalable.
“That’s why we shy away from PMPs and try to push clients into PG,” said Justin Barton, SVP of digital strategy and partnerships at Black Enterprise.
Black Enterprise sells 20% of its inventory either through PMPs or open exchanges, compared with 80% direct deals, which includes PG.
Despite the benefits of PG deals, however, including the ability to negotiate directly with buyers, publishers that sell through PG still have to pay their supply-side platforms.
But that’s just “the cost of doing business,” Barton said, adding that selling via PG is much less expensive than paying for a managed service.
The cost of diversity
Still, paying for a programmatic team and developing relationships with SSPs takes time and resources that many Black-owned businesses didn’t have before the spigot of diverse-owned media spend commitments opened in 2020, following the police killing of George Floyd.
And those commitments are only increasing as agencies and advertisers continue to allocate more spend to Black-owned media companies.
In response to an increase in demand from major agency holding companies, Black Enterprise expanded and began in-housing its programmatic tech stack.
Rather than paying for a managed service, it licensed a Prebid.js header bidding wrapper from ad ops tech provider Aditude to support integrations with major SSPs, including PubMatic and Index Exchange.
Under block and key
But even with the right programmatic tech in place, keyword blocking is a big problem, Barton said, because it filters out culturally relevant language.
If buyers don’t review and update their brand safety tags with sellers, advertisers might end up engaging in unconscious bias.
Many agencies and DSPs use old blocklists full of words and phrases that resonate with Black audiences, including those related to social justice issues or even the word “Black” itself.
Keyword blocking also often rejects colloquialisms, said Hadgis.
Using the word “dope,” for example, might disqualify a legitimate article from being monetized, even though the word was used to refer to something cool rather than as a drug reference.
Keyword blocking and audience targeting in PMPs are done on the buy side through a DSP, whereas PG deals are initiated within a seller’s ad server, where a publisher can manually adjust its own keyword blockers, Barton said.
It’s one reason why Black Enterprise encourages its advertisers to move more of their budgets from PMPs to PG.
A programmatic push
PMPs do still have their place, though.
A private marketplace setup, for example, may be preferable for advertisers that want to scale their buys and target different audiences across an array of minority-owned sites, Barton said.
Advertising leaders like P&G’s Marc Pritchard are calling on Black-owned publishers to make more of their inventory biddable.
One of Blavity’s business goals is helping other minority-owned publishers build ad revenue through programmatic, which isn’t always easy for smaller companies that don’t have the bandwidth to negotiate with giant agency holding companies such as WPP or IPG, Hadgis said.
Blavity has its own ad network, including first-party data from its tech trade events and media brands, as well as integrations with DSPs and SSPs, such as The Trade Desk and Magnite.
And for targeting, PMPs are also more effective than open exchanges, where the inventory selection is more random.
For that reason, Black Enterprise suggests that clients move budgets earmarked for diverse publishers from open exchanges to PMPs. But for its own monetization, it continues to advise clients to move more spend into PG, where CPMs are higher.
Although biddable is growing, Barton said, PG is still the preferred method both for controlling targeting and maximizing ad spend.
