ADOMIK Q4 Report Q&A

ADOMIK Q4 Report Q&A

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Author

Rob Beeler

Published Date
February 10, 2025

More than ever, publishers need benchmarks to help them understand what is happening to their company and the industry as a whole. ADOMIK (https://adomik.com/) released their 2024 Wrap-Up Report broken down into four major sections – Curation, High CPM Values in Deals, Growth of Instream Video and Top Brands (still) Dominated by Retail. I decided to ask Jeff Bernard, co-founder of ADOMIK, some questions about the data in the report.

Here’s a link to download the report.

Curation

Rob Beeler: You noted that PubMatic, Magnite, and Index Exchange were the most active SSPs in the Curation market. Which DSPS are most active? Is there any pattern?

Jeff Bernard:  If you look at the names, the top DSPs active on curation are almost similar to the “overall” top DSPs. But there are a few differences:

  • The Trade Desk is the #1 DSP in the overall and Curation markets. Still, its SoV in the curation market is above 40% and, at the same time, below 30% in the overall market.
  • DV360 is #1 in the overall market and #2 behind TTD in the curation market (SoV 21%).
  • Google Ads (Adwords) is 3rd in the overall market, but is not present in the Curation market. That makes sense: Google Ads buys Open Auctions only and no Curated MP.
  • Then you have the list of Yahoo!, Amazon, and Xandr, with slightly different ranks in the overall and curation markets. Yahoo! Is only #6 overall but #3 in the Curation market.

How do we explain the difference? We do not see this directly related to Curation. To understand which DSPs are the most active on Curation, you have to think of the DSPs that are the most active on the SSPs with strong Curation businesses and that Buyers use a lot for Deal IDs. If you compare the top DSPs with those two filters on our market data, this is very close to the top DSPs on Curation. (i.e., DSPs are not designed to be “strong” on curation but to buy efficiently from some SSPs and offer a good solution for managing deal IDs)

Another Interesting note: if you look for the “bidders” with the highest share of Curation in terms of media spend -> Pubmatic Connect and Magnite Clearline are among the top ones, which is expected.

Beeler: Do you feel that curation is adding new demand to the marketplace, or is this some of the same demand but shifting toward curation-based solutions?

Jeff Bernard: When we look at the leading brands active in the Curation market, we see that Curation for them is just a new channel next to others (open auction, Private auction…). From that standpoint, curation does not add new demand. The brands active in the Curation market are a subset of the brands that have historically been active in programmatic.

We have not spotted any major brands that started to buy with Curation as the first thing they do. Still, for some brands, Curation has become the channel that attracts the most media spend. The media spend going through curation is generally shifted from other channels or might be additional in some situations. Some brands are probably increasing their overall media spend thanks to curation, but this is hard to identify. To illustrate an extreme case, this is a chart for a "random" brand on a random Publisher. You can see that the brand is now 100% curation... but the brand used to buy through OA in the past.

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From the Publisher's standpoint, the situation is slightly different. We can identify brands that have started to spend with some Publishers thanks to Curation: they had very low media spend in the past and are now spending way more with Curation. These are situations where Curation is creating new demand for pubs. But we also identify situations where some demand shifts from Open Auctions / Deals to curation. Whether the change is positive for Publishers depends on the situation. We are beta-testing a model to estimate the “Net revenue impact” of Curation for Publishers.

Beeler: Do you predict curation SOV will grow?

Jeff Bernard: Yes, definitely. Curation will remain very attractive to Buyers and there is a lot of room to grow. The landscape is still evolving with new tools and features being developed and made available to Curators. New SSPs will launch - GAM is just getting started. Existing SSPs will develop more powerful tools to activate data. Most brands are not yet active in the curation market. New players will also join the contingent of curators (more agencies, data owners, etc.)

High CPM Values in Deals

Beeler: The difference between programmatic guaranteed and open auction is significant. Based on your data, is that gap growing or constant? How about preferred deals and private auctions?

Jeff Bernard: The gap between “transaction types” is fairly stable and evolves slowly over time based on our data. You can expect the PG CPM to be 6x to  7x the Open Auction CPM. It is slowly declining over time (mainly driven by the evolution of PG CPM).

PG CPM can be very volatile. This is because volumes can vary a lot depending on the month. For example, it is very low in January.

PA is around 1.5x OA, it used to be around 1.7 or 1.8 (you can see the decline in the chart). The gap with PD is more stable and has increased a bit.

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Beeler: Is there a way to look at these categories based on volume? What percentage is programmatic guaranteed? Whose getting programmatic guaranteed?

Jeff Bernard: This is the volume we have for December:

Open auction
74.8%
Private auction deal
13.6%
Curated marketplace
7.6%
Preferred deal
2.5%
Programmatic guaranteed deal
1.5%

Seeing how big Open Auction is compared to PG is always interesting. The breakdown in Revenue hides this side of the story. Regarding volume, the premium “part” of programmatic is relatively small. Curation can probably help if the Publishers get their fair share.

No big surprise on the Pubs who are strong on PG. They meet three criteria: strong content, data and a strong sales team. Video inventory is also a strong differentiating factor. The Share of Video on PG is much higher than on Open Auction.

Growth of Instream Video

Beeler: Does Instream have as many companies participating as display does? Are there a few companies that are most active?

Jeff Bernard: Every company we monitor has a display business, but only 70% of them have a significant instream business. Moreover, only a few companies have a larger instream business than display. Overall, the dataset contains a robust and comparable amount of data for both the display and instream categories.

Beeler: Is curation playing a part in Instream video?

Jeff Bernard: Not really. The breakdown of Curation between Display and Video Instream is very similar to what see in the Private Auction market. Instream video is a little bit bigger in Curation than in Open Auction.

Generally speaking, Curation does not play a specific role for Instream video (coming back to a previous point PG and Instream video are much more correlated).

Data: the Share of curtation for Display revenue is 8.6%. For Instream video it is 8.9%

Audio is more interesting. While PA is this media type's major source of programmatic revenue, we see almost no curation. We would expect that to change as the market matures.

Top Brands (still) Dominated by Retail

Beeler: Based on past data, do you anticipate a change in which brands will spend in Q1 or Q2?

Jeff Bernard: Based on historical data we still expect Retail to dominate in Q1 and Q2. However, the SoV of Retail should go down compared to Q4. We usually have a decrease of spending of -40% for retail from Q4 to Q1 (Retail is very strong in Q4).

In Q1 Finance (expect to see strong growth from Tax Preparation services) and Tourism tend to do well (i.e. not as “bad” as others 😀 )

Having said that, most of the top 15 brands remain the same, only the ranking changes.

Download the report here.