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Allison Schiff

It's also what you're very focused on today. Um, but in 2016, you guys teamed up with the ANA and Ubiquity and you did a study about hidden programmatic fees, published a report the following year, found that only 58% um, of every programmatic dollar was reaching the publisher, so just 58 cents.

Ravi Patel

Yeah, so I'll add one thing to it, right? Like I think one of the things is, um, Adfin was an incubated company, um, so its co-founders were just very wealthy people, um, who wanted purpose was to bring the Bloomberg terminal idea to AdTech, right?

Ravi Patel

I think what was misjudged was how hard it was to get access to that data because there was always this what I don't know could hurt me kind of mentality.

Ravi Patel

But then the other piece is also like what we didn't put into perspective was the auction dynamics, right? Like, hey, if uh only 55 cents on the dollar is getting to the publisher, how is this impression still getting bought?

Ravi Patel

But having said that, uh through the years and my experience in AdTech, we learned a ton across uh auction dynamics and how they work and let's like, hey, if you start just focusing more upstream uh in this industry, you can actually control a lot of the stuff that you don't want to be on or you more and try to capture more of the stuff you want to be on.

Ravi Patel

Adfin, what they gave was insights, um, back to brands and agencies of how to improve, but those insights were so could be so granular and you couldn't just say, hey, just, you know, stop, you know, pull this lever in the DSP and it's fixed.

Ravi Patel

The MarTech Lumascape was 150, 200-ish companies.

Ravi Patel

It's still big, like uh and there's so much out there in terms of like everyone kind of figuring out where they position themselves, where they get into the ecosystem and we made programmatic to be supposed to be more simple, supposed to be more automated and it's more scalable.

Ravi Patel

Um, and then there's a subjective then there not even that, that's the subjective piece, right? Like what is bad inventory to one brand is different to another brand, right?

Ravi Patel

uh this publisher domain.com uh has uh, you know, 3% fraud means let's block it from the entire uh, you know, let's just put it on our blacklist.

Allison Schiff

Um, they build block lists, approved publisher lists, so-called premium lists, and it's all based on this idea that if you only buy on sites that you trust, then you're in good shape.

Ravi Patel

Well, they won't know until they've spent the money, right? That's the whole beauty of programmatic.

Ravi Patel

Um, but, you know, it goes back to the grocery store example, like everyone in our industry that's setting up a campaign is going into a grocery store with the money in their pocket.

Allison Schiff

And yeah, I mean the pitch, like we, like you just said, um, I didn't cite the number, something like $20 billion a year, maybe it's more, I don't know, tens of billions of dollars are getting wasted in programmatic.