PubMatic and Goodway Group have signed an agreement to place the management of the supply ad tech fee in the buyer’s control. The companies said the partnership is the first to introduce a 100 per cent transparent, agency-controlled fee model that empowers buyers to improve the efficiency of their programmatic supply path and drive sustainable increases in digital advertising revenue to publishers.

As brand spend continues to drive growth of the programmatic industry, marketers have pushed for greater fee transparency. According to a World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) survey, more than 85 per cent of advertisers worldwide prioritized ensuring a fully transparent relationship with their programmatic partners. To that end, Goodway Group has negotiated a single fee to be paid for all media buys transacted on the PubMatic platform.

The fee will replace the standard publisher fee to become the only fee charged for these transactions. This goes beyond other industry approaches to share the fee in the bid request, which requires complete coverage by publishers and introduces operational challenges for buyers, limiting their ability to leverage spending power to improve the economics of their preferred SSP relationships.

“The current SSP fee model is broken,” said Goodway Group president, Jay Friedman. Despite the massive push for transparency in our industry over the last few years, SSP and exchange fees have continued to be hard to pin down and out of most buyers’ negotiation reach. Goodway is proud to partner with PubMatic to gain full cost control through the entire programmatic value chain.”

PubMatic has been a vocal proponent of transparency and efficiency, driven by the understanding that a more transparent supply chain will increase the value of programmatic at large and result in greater overall spend for the ecosystem. For its part, The Goodway Group has aggressively consolidated spend across limited SSPs and exchanges over the past 18 months to drive fairer, more transparent pricing. PubMatic’s partnership with Goodway Group offers advertisers a new and elevated iteration of its current offering by putting transparency and control in the hands of the buyers.

“We are excited to work with Goodway Group to continue pushing the programmatic supply chain toward a more transparent future,” said Rajeev Goel, co-founder and CEO of PubMatic. “With more efficient and transparent economics, we are helping Goodway Group deliver better ROI to their clients and ultimately increasing yield and driving sustainable business growth for our premium publishers.”