One programmatic vendor wants to give political media buyers the eBay experience this cycle when it comes to bidding on digital inventory.
Matthew Dybwad, SVP of Political at IQM, is talking up the practice of bid shading and making the comparison to the popular e-commerce website, which has an auction component, to help educate the political industry.
“It’s not something that very many people talk about at all. It doesn’t come up at conferences and there’s not a lot of ink given to it, but it is really important,” he said. “In essence, bid shading is your buying technology putting its thumb on the scale for you during the bidding process.”
Dybwad, an industry veteran, isn’t out to educate the political industry masses for benevolent purposes. This is a tool that his platform offers. Still, it’s not something widely discussed in an industry where digital budgets are dwarfed by brand marketers, who can receive more favorable terms as a result of their deeper pockets. In a tight election year, who doesn’t want to hear about a way to potentially save money for a client?
“What bid shading does is it allows us as a demand side platform, as the machinery of buying, to come into that first-price auction and say, ‘Okay, great, we’re winning that pre-roll at $20. What happens if we bid $19?’ So we bid $19, and if we win, we say, ‘Great, what happens if we bid $18?’ We keep going until we start losing, and then we come right back up to where we started winning.
“That is called bid shading. We are shading the amount of the bid itself and trying to figure out where the actual market floor is for that inventory.”
It’s a way to give leverage back to the buyer, who has been at a disadvantage to publishers since the move to a first-price auction environment, which Dybwad compares to bidding on merchandise at a silent auction.
“At a charity event, you walk in, you see an item on a table that you want, you put your name down on a list, you write a number, and you hope that no one comes in and writes a higher number,” he said.
“Bid shading is bringing the ad tech auction experience closer to what you actually see with eBay. Because with eBay, you see every bid so when someone else bids on something, the price of it increases and you’re alerted to that.”
He added: “What we’re doing here is we are becoming really an agent for the buyer and saying, ‘we’re gonna help you not overspend on media.’”
