Mobile Monetization: innovations and challenges facing publishers

Ogury recently participated in episode 128 of The Programmatic Society. The panel was attended by Bérangère Vuillemin, Ogury Senior Director Publisher Development, along with Sebastien Noel, Managing Director Programmatic, Adtech and Monetization at M Publicité, and Loïc Sfiligoi, Co-founder of Pubstack. 

Together they discussed mobile monetization innovations and the current challenges publishers are facing in a changing advertising landscape.

With Chrome set to remove all third-party cookies in 2023, many big players within the advertising ecosystem are starting to feel the pressure.

While Safari and Firefox have been blocking third-party cookies for some time, Chrome continues to dominate the browser market with a 69% market share.

“We can already see that some SSPs are handling it much better than others because of a lot of contextual work,” said Sebastien.

Following up, Bérangère explained how Ogury leveraged years of consented user data to quickly become cookieless and ID-less.

“With the GDPR, we were proven right, so we were already a little ahead due to our anticipation of this. We had collated enough intelligence to quickly become cookieless/ID-less.”

Today, Ogury continues to enrich its historical data by conducting studies on large user panels and employing a technical team of 120 people who work continuously to improve this data.

“Contextual and semantic data is very good, but our vision is that we need to go a bit further to deliver the high performance that brands are asking for, delivering interesting CPM and RPM while respecting the user in their mobile consumption.”

Partner rationalization in mobile advertising

The AdTech industry is in a transitional phase, with many technology partners adapting their strategies to survive in the emerging cookieless/ID-less market.

Consequently, there has been a cleanup among publishers as they have started rationalizing their advertising partners.

“When you have so many advertising partners, it’s in your interest to rationalize your operational costs,” said Loïc. “For a partner who represents 1 or 2% of our annual income, we don’t necessarily want to keep them as they certainly cost more than they bring in.”

In addition to mitigating costs, rationalizing technology partners is also a way for publishers to cut down on complexity within the supply path and regain control of their data. 

“On the other hand, having partners like Ogury, who have a direct sales force, who will really bring a rather unique incremental value, are still interesting. So the rationalization, for me, is more at the locational level.” 

“As Loïc said, it’s good to make a lot of little streams, but that doesn’t make a big river in the end,” added Sebastien.

Competition and publisher obstacles in the bidder market

Bérangère explained how Ogury has circumvented publisher obstacles by creating long-term partnerships built on trust.

“Since we have a very good loyalty rate from our publishers, this is already a guarantee of quality, which allows us to be known by other publishers with whom we want to work.” 

“We have more than 200 salespeople who go to see advertisers and agencies directly on a daily basis which allows us to have exclusive agreements with a lot of premium brands.”

“There has to be a strong element of trust, especially within mobile environments, as you have one visible ad most of the time, on the screen,” remarked Sebastien. “A real filter we’re going to have with our partners, especially on mobile is, do they understand our constraints.”

Innovations in diversifying publisher revenue sources

Ogury’s fully on-screen ad formats have been paramount in generating the highest level of consumer attention while maintaining a positive user experience.

“At Ogury, we have created formats that are impactful, but they were also designed with a non-intrusive logic in mind,” said Bérangère.“Our advertising formats will either create incremental revenue or, thanks to our salesforce, they will increase the publisher’s RPM. So in the end, everyone wins a little. At Ogury, we have a very large reach because we are able to monetize publishers’ inventories both in-app and on the mobile web.”

Discussion outcomes

As we continue to head towards a cookieless and ID-less advertising future, advertisers who have not taken steps to adapt to the changing times are in for a rude awakening. 

We are experiencing the calm before the storm, as It is not a matter of if, but when Chrome will get rid of third-party cookies. Once that happens, those who have not adapted will soon be playing catch-up. 

Conversely, the winners of the new market will be those that foresaw the coming of the cookieless era.

But is this enough? Certainly not, when publishers are rationalizing their partners left, right, and center.

The future of AdTech now relies on innovative and future-proof solutions, utilizing fully on-screen and interactive formats that respect data privacy and facilitate a positive user experience.