Sociomantic launches index to enforce inventor quality
Sociomantic Labs, the leading provider of programmatic advertising solutions for enterprise advertisers, has launched the Supply Quality Index, or SQX. SQX is a proprietary algorithm that enables Sociomantic to grade programmatic inventory suppliers—ad exchanges and supply side platforms (SSPs)—based on real-time analyses of three measures: transparency, performance and inventory quality.
Sociomantic, a demand-side platform (DSP), has maintained a pure programmatic approach to media buying since placing its first real-time bid in early 2010. Since then, theDSP has connected more than 40 SSPs to its bidder, and today buys media on behalf of more than 2000clients in more than 70 markets.Recent industry-wide concerns such as ad fraud, viewability and transparency motivated the company to develop automated mechanisms to evaluate supply quality in order to increase campaign performance and brand safety for its advertising clients.
“We have conducted in-depth data analyses to derive patterns with regards to SSP quality,” explains Alex Reinhold, Sociomantic’s head of global supply. “The observation of large fluctuations of three measures—transparency, performance and inventory quality—has led us to deploy the Supply Quality Index, an algorithm that weighs dozens of factors to dynamically assign a quality score to every SSP we work with. We factor that score into our bidding, so that we bid less for inventory from low-quality suppliers, and more for suppliers that meet our quality standards.”
Within SQX, the transparency measure consists of a range of factors that characterize whether an SSP operates as a “black-box,” or actually transmits all of the information necessary for Sociomantic to determine where an advertiser’s money goes. The performance measure detects abnormal fluctuations in prices or in the qualitative value of an ad impression being auctioned. Finally, the inventory quality measure records the actual value of inventory being sold. On the basis of these three measures, SQX assigns a supplier-specific score that is multiplied by bids placed for inventory from a given supplier.
Sociomantic clients, supply partners and publishers alike have expressed support for the company’s move to promote quality in programmatic advertising.
“Google’s and Sociomantic’s interests in promoting quality in online advertising are strongly aligned,” said Jan Wittek, head of AdX client development at Google. “Google has always invested heavily to maintain and improve transparency and inventory quality across our platforms, including the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. We’ve always taken invalid activity and ad fraud very seriously, and it’s great to see buyers like Sociomantic support industry efforts to clean up the ecosystem by enforcing ad quality from suppliers through the SQX.”
“It’s our hope that the SQX will incentivize SSPs and ad exchanges to act ethically and re-think their business models, putting quality over easy profits,” said Reinhold. “At the same time, publishers will gain an increased awareness about the quality of the exchanges they work with.”
Sociomantic will continuously develop SQX in an effort to guarantee access to highest-quality inventory, to improve return on investment for advertisers and to promote a more transparent industry that will benefit publishers and advertisers alike.
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