At dentsu, our curated marketplace, DMX (Dentsu Media Exchange), focuses on driving true business growth. By enhancing media hygiene, improving ad environments, and focusing on meaningful measurement, DMX optimizes investments and delivers impactful results. Rigorous testing shows how the curation of ‘sites and pipes’ transforms advertising, consistently outperforming benchmarks and building stronger client partnerships.
Optimising The Pipes
Good media hygiene and mitigating wastage is an important part of digital media craft, but often overlooked in programmatic. The ANA’s 2023 report found multiple ways budget can be wasted in the transaction. We focused on three: supply chain fees, out of geo rates, and fraud.
This chimed well with one of our clients wanting to increase working media. We set up a test with the same domains, but with one pot of budget running via publishers directly connected to the SSP, and the other pot running via publishers connected to the SSP via resellers. Unsurprisingly, the direct path only showed a fee of 11% being taken, whereas the reseller path showed a fee of 14% being taken: a big difference at scale. That equates to a saving of £3,000 on a budget of £100,000. For comparison, the ANA report showed a typical fee as 13%. All of this was achieved whilst maintaining almost identical CPMs, an improvement in performance to the tune of 68%, and a better attention score (55 vs 50).
Next, we wanted to see if curation of pipes as well as sites brought better hygiene returns. The self-policing by big tech platforms of things like fraud and out of geo rate has been under the microscope recently in the wake of several exposes. Fraud is where bad actors manipulate advertising campaigns to generate revenue, and out-of-geo rate is where ads are served out with the country you intended to serve them in.
Using an objective measurement party, DoubleVerify, it was shown that DMX significantly outperformed legacy activity in both areas. Legacy activity showed a 60% greater fraud rate than DMX, as well as a massive 820% greater out-of-geo rate. This result shows that we should always verify our activity by using a third-party solution like DoubleVerify or IAS. This will prevent budget wastage and mitigate against spending on fraudulent (or un-safe) media) activity.
Creating Quality Advertising Opportunities
Attention has become an industry buzzword, but it is directional for understanding how likely a brand’s message (an ad) is likely to be seen and consumed. We ran DMX against another vendor’s open market inventory to see which produced the better attention score. Adelaide, an independent metrics consultancy, was used as the third-party measurement provider, and DMX won out , scoring 26.00 vs. 23.08, a difference of 18%. Not only that, it scored higher than Adelaide’s industry benchmark, and outperformed the other vendor on all devices and formats.
So, curation produces better results in terms of media placements, but how does this translate to how a user interacts with these ads? Our next test looked at an ads’ Visibility (time in view, video quartiles) and its Interaction (Scroll, Video play/pause, volume selected). Again, DMX, in partnership with a seller defined audience targeting solution, ran against another vendor’s open market offering in an A/B test. DMX once more proved to be better, 17% higher visibility, and 347% higher Interaction.
Lifting Awareness and Improving Performance
Now we know that curating the right advertising through the right pipes produces quality opportunities for advertising, we now wanted to look at the actual impact on measurement.
We were tasked with driving perception changes to a B2B audience, an audience that is typically difficult to identify and carries a niche set of targeting parameters. DMX was able to yield +14% favourability lift, 13% familiarity lift, and 4.5% message association lift versus the control. A significant increase, and a happy client.
Going further down the funnel, with a luxury fashion house, we tested the impact of on sites’ behaviours post view for our targeting group. In this controlled A/B test, on the one hand we had DMX using cookieless data, on the other was another vendor’s off the shelf cookie data. Though the other vendor had lower CPM and higher reach, DMX delivered more qualified users, evidence by the number of pages viewed (+25%), and the average session duration (+21 seconds).
Lastly, we know that interactions aren’t enough, so we went a step further to explore the qualification of customers, and how that ties back to quality of media. DMX was used to curate quality domains and environments for a fashion brand, using key audience targeting partners. DMX outperformed the other vendor, not only in the cost of an “engaged Session” (-35%), but crucially on the average order value (36%).
Conclusion
DMX proves that curation drives superior results across the media journey, from awareness to purchase. By tackling inefficiencies, enhancing quality, and delivering measurable outcomes, DMX exceeds industry standards. This approach strengthens our client relationships, positioning us as trusted advisors dedicated to creating meaningful business growth and elevating advertising effectiveness.
To learn more about how DMX can help you grow your business, contact richard.nicolson@dentsu.com.