Programmatic has become a word that covers multiple facets of ad buying but how should publishers setup their mobile programmatic trading effectively? And what is the best approach to take?

The Telegraph is fairly new to the world of mobile programmatic, and even admits as much, but believes it has an effective approach to programmatic in the mobile world.

“Our ambition is to be a world class mobile-first media owner that delivers real business metrics for us and commercial partners,” said Paul De La Nougerede, commercial product director at The Telegraph, speaking at the Mobile Marketing Programmatic for Publishers Summit. “Going back just 18 months, we only had the website to worry about. But, in the last 18 months, a whole proliferation of platforms have come out of the woodwork that we’ve had to support.”

A whole new world
The newspaper publication decided to use its experience and success in trading programmatically on desktop and try to harness the power of the same products in a mobile environment.

Despite this, The Telegraph soon realised that it wasn’t that straightforward, and that the mobile programmatic world is a very different place.

“On the desktop side of business, we have a very mature, well thought out, approach to the products that we think about in the programmatic world. We have this selection of products going from the open auction, where we’ll monetise everything that’s not monetised directly by an agency; and then we go into this programmatic direct world, which is very much agency focused products that we can sell directly to sales team,” said De La Nougerede.

“Our approach is to make sure this works in a mobile world as well but, because of the way that different platforms work, it’s difficult to squeeze that way of thinking into all these different platforms. They all work very differently. On the web, it’s fairly straightforward. In the app world though, the way that we work with SDKs and the way that those impressions work make it a much more challenging task to replicate that way of thinking.”

The challenge is only made more difficult by the need to work with the tech big boys on mobile to get the maximum benefits.  

“With Facebook Instant Articles, we have to work with Facebook, in terms of monetisation, and we can’t put any other third-parties in there,” De La Nougerede continued. “With Apple, it’s a very similar environment, it’s all about direct selling – you can’t put any programmatic partners into the Apple News environment. And then you’ve got Google AMP, which is restrictive just by the way that came about. Of course, these platforms came about for the need of speeding up the experience. Speed is of the essence when it comes to the mobile user experience. So, they create really great experiences but what we’ve lost is that flexibility around how we monetise and how we integrate with various different partners that we’d normally work in the desktop world.”

Heads up
The Telegraph jumped onboard with header bidding over the last 12 months, and is reaping the rewards as a result. The publication also views header bidding as a cross device product rather than solely for desktop.

“We’ve really embraced the header bidding revolution that’s hit us over the last 12 months. We went live with header bidding last September, working with Index [Exchange]. It’s been a really positive partnership, we’ve seen shifts in revenue by embracing that header bidding way of working,” said De La Nougerede

“We’re taking an agnostic approach in terms of platform for this. We want this to work across all platforms – it shouldn’t just be a desktop product, it should be a mobile product as well. The challenges of that are, going back to that latency and speed thing, is making sure those partners who we integrate into header bidding can respond in a quick enough time to make sure that we’re not making any impact on the user experience.”

Though wanting to take an agnostic approach, due to The Telegraph’s desire to be a ‘world class mobile-first media owner, it knows that not all platforms cater to both mobile and desktop.

“There are partners out there who are mobile specific partners,” added De La Nougerede. “People like Facebook, who we’re working with, will only respond to mobile efforts as well. So, that’s a really interesting angle when it comes to building out that mobile stack.”

Now you see me
According to De La Nougerede, The Telegraph knows how important viewability is across both desktop and mobile, and has decided to approach this accordingly. And, despite all the challenges in the mobile ecosystem, must make sure ads are viewable.

The need to have viewable ads is even more evident when, according to Meetrics, around £750m is wasted on non-viewable ads each year.

“One of the big issues that we come across in the mobile environment is viewability,” He said. “Viewability is a really key metric on the desktop side of business, it’s how you replicate that in a mobile environment. And the way we’re approaching that is making sure that all our ads are lazy loaded, so that they only appear just as the user is about to get to that position because, programmatically, we can see through the data that viewable ads have a much better monetisation rate than they do if they’re not viewable. So, we can see that coming through.”

Ads being seen isn’t the only problem faced by advertisers but also where their ads pop up.

The Telegraph highlights brand safety as a highly important issue, especially with the recent issues surrounding ad placement on questionable websites or next to offensive content.  

“Brand safety is a key differentiator for us, in terms of how we choose partners. Being able to ensure that we’re not getting bad ads appearing across our sites is very important,” said De La Nougerede. “One of the key questions we ask partners when we onboard them is ‘what tools do you have that will allow us to figure out what’s going on?’. It’s not just with partners but also working with third-party tools to make sure we have the right technology on our side to monitor all these programmatic partners that we want to bring onboard. It’s a generic way of working when we think about programmatic.

“We have come up with a list of criteria of about seven or eight different things that we score our partners on. Things like the speed of response, access to reporting, unique demand, brand safety tools – they’re the types of things we’re now scoring partners on to see where they come in, and then we’re prioritising partners based on how well they score against those different kinds of criteria.”

De La Nougerede also pointed out how the brand safety issues in the industry have helped improve relations between publishers and advertisers. Advertisers now want to know where their ads are appearing because “there’s been a lot of money spent programmatically on where brands didn’t know they were appearing”.