Data Management Platforms Are Only Half The Battle

Much stock has been put into Data Management Platforms in the past few years, and with good reason. A shift has occurred across publishers who used to rely on content to drive advertising value. Now, content drives the audience, and the audience drives advertising value. While a seemingly subtle change, it opens massive opportunities.

Data Management Platforms allow publishers to extract a wealth of knowledge from their audience: who they are, how they behave, their interests, their intent, etc. It changes the way they position themselves to advertisers and substantially increases the value they can offer, which in turn, leads to higher CPMs.

The problem is most publishers stop there. But why? When the next step can unlock a significant revenue opportunity!

What’s The Next Step?

Audience extension is misunderstood as simply: a way to allow advertisers to reach their audience when owned and operated inventory is oversold. But when tapped into effectively, audience extension is a tactic that can make an advertising campaign far more effective and profitable.

Typically, publishers see a budget on an RFP, know they can fill it on their owned and operated inventory, and happily accept it. But there is more to be had. Behind every one of the RFP’s they receive, there is an advertiser trying to figure out how to spend the rest of their money more efficiently to reach their target audience.

Consider the way advertisers and agencies buy media. No one wants all of their eggs in one basket, so they diversify, splitting budgets between publishers who they know reach their exact audience, and programmatic partners with 3rd party data that they hope reach their exact audience.

With Audience Extension, why not reach what you know to be the exact audience more often? The answer: it’s an opportunity advertisers and agencies are rarely presented with.

Why Isn’t Everyone Doing it?

So why don’t publishers do this more often? Well, it’s a lot of work. There’s DMPs, DSPs, sales training to sell it, operations training to manage it, a cluster of systems and reporting. Just trying to figure out if the revenue opportunity is there to support it can be a colossal task.

Unless you can automate it all, it may not be worth it. But you can, and you should.