Marketers moving towards price discovery of ad inventory: Tejinder Gill, The Trade Desk

The digital advertising market in India is on the cusp of a big change with the marketers seeking price discovery of ad inventory rather than publishers fixing the ad rates for impressions, The Trade Desk India General Manager Tejinder Gill told e4m during an interaction.

“The big shift that we are seeing in the market is that marketers are moving towards price discovery of ad inventory. They don't want the price of an ad inventory to be fixed. What they are saying is let the marketers decide the worth of an ad inventory basis the different kinds of variables that an impression is attached to,” Gill said.

Talking about the multiple variables that are attached to an impression, Gill said, "An impression could be a good impression. It could be an impression of women. It could be an impression that gets served during peak hours. It could be an impression which is a bigger ad unit."

Gill pointed out that marketers have been buying impressions at a pre-determined price. “For example, marketers would buy 1 million impressions at Rs 100 CPM and Rs 10 lakh RO but in that Rs 100 CPM they didn’t know what they are buying,” he noted.

He also said that marketers were earlier making plans on the basis of publishers. "Earlier, marketers used to say that I need X-million impressions on Y-publisher but now they say that we need to target the right audience. They have opened up the entire idea of reaching to the right target audience and measuring the campaign,” he stated.

The Trade Desk, Gill said, is a marketplace that has buyers, sellers, measurement partners, and data partners. “Consciously, we will never like to work in an exclusive environment. In the entire supply chain, we are the only players which is a DSP, unlike the walled gardens which act like DSPs, SSPs, inventory owners, and publishers. The question that marketers are asking the walled gardens is how can you be fair to us?” he said.

The Trade Desk, which is a big proponent of the open internet, has completed one year of operations in India. Talking about the key priorities in its first year of operations, Gill listed five key focus areas of the company.

The first key focus area for The Trade Desk was to set up dedicated offices in India. The second focus area was to hire the best talent and nurture them. “There is a dearth of talent on the programmatic side and in India, people don’t even understand the true sense of programmatic. We hired a very good team with different pedigrees from top-notch companies in India,” he stated.

The third focus area was to grow The Edge Academy which is The Trade Desk’s trademark programmatic advertising education programme. “In Southeast Asia, almost 40% of the folks are from India who have signed up for The Edge Academy. We are not just hiring talent but also upskilling them,” Gill said.

The fourth focus area was the company’s vision of reshaping digital advertising in India. “We are exploring and educating leading marketers about programmatic opportunities on the open internet. Before we came to India nobody had an idea about what open internet is,” he pointed out.

Gill also said that the digital industry is moving from opt-out internet to opt-in internet. “Till now the internet has been operating in a past era. It has become a lot more commercial but the internet has been used at a very sub-optimal level till now. We have used cookies as a make-shift technology to enable relevant advertising. The deprecation of cookies has created an opportunity for us to upgrade the internet from opt-out to opt-in from a consumers’ lens,” he added.

He also revealed that marketers in India didn’t have a clear understanding of the open internet in India. An open internet is defined as equal internet access for everyone, irrespective of content, device, application, or platform. “When we started evangelising about open internet people were unclear about its definition. We explained to them that 70% of users spend their time on the open internet. We told marketers that social media is great, search is great, but there is such a huge growing pie of open internet which has its own advantages,” he averred.

According to Gill, the open internet allows advertisers to do things that cannot be done in walled gardens. "For example, you cannot apply the learnings of one campaign, which is running in a walled garden outside it. If I am running a campaign on Facebook, can I apply the learnings on Spotify? Probably, the answer is no. But on the open internet, you can apply learnings from one platform to another platform. If you are running a campaign on ZEE5 you can apply the learnings on Spotify,” he explained.

Apart from the open internet, Gill said there is a lack of understanding about programmatic advertising in the Indian digital advertising ecosystem. According to Sitecore, decisioning is a technique that blends data, rules, and predictive analytics to make smart decisions about what to talk to customers about, on what channel, at any given time.

“In India, the thinking is that any campaign becomes programmatic the moment it is run through any DSP. The real benefit of programmatic lies in decisioning which can take full advantage of the open internet,” he asserted.

He also noted that the Indian market has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to decisioning. “There is an ad impression that exists but there is a price discovery that should happen. There should be bidding for impressions. Decisioning is the key to programmatic advertising. Unfortunately, decisioning is not happening in India at the scale at which it happens in the Western and Southeast Asia markets.”

The Trade Desk’s goal in the first year was to become the platform of choice for agencies and advertisers. “Fortunately, all the five holding groups in India have welcomed us quite aggressively and they are taking us to their clients for educating the market. They are using us to educate people on the open internet, CTV, what Netflix and Disney's of the world are doing in terms of expanding on ads, measurement, and data, and what will happen to the entire Internet ecosystem once cookies go away,” Gill revealed.

The Trade Desk will continue to expand its team in India. “We have just got the leadership roles in place but we are expanding their teams. In fact, more people are joining us this month and there will be more hiring happening in September. We are building a lot more stuff for 2023 as well. We will be a lot more aggressive in expanding our presence,” Gill asserted.