Machine learning is one of those buzzwords that can mean a wide variety of different things but is a black box to most; equally as inscrutable is programmatic advertising. The lack of transparency has shifted from concerning to flat-out alarming, and within the black box of programmatic advertising, there could be a massive leak in dollars. A study from Adalytics has found that fees and intermediaries in the supply chain can be disparate. Over a third of spending goes to DSP and SSP right off the top, on average. Moreover, in some cases, adtech companies received 98% of the bid while the publishers took the remaining 2%. In ultra bizarre scenarios, publishers can take home more than the bid which comes as a result of SSP subsidizing the bid. Advertisers should store and analyze log files if they want to optimize their pipeline according to Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics.
