TRUSTX: The New Digital Marketing Programmatic Platform Revolutionizing the Digital Marketing Supply Chain

Yesterday, TRUSTX, a new programmatic platform for digital advertising that is seeking to reset the digital marketing supply chain (and put more of each media dollar spent into actual working media) fully released its platform after introducing the concept last fall. Unlike ad networks, where publishers take ownership and responsibility for given inventory and only profit upon its sale, and unlike ad exchanges, which create demand since they profit on a higher transaction velocity, TRUSTX is redefining how marketers and publishers interact. It is a cooperative private marketplace and collaboration platform with “trust and transparency as the foundation,” enabling each dollar invested in digital advertising to be spent more efficiently and effectively on actual media.

As we saw in class last week in “The Evolution of Digital Advertising” video that the IAB published, the current journey of an ad from marketer to publisher is complicated, overly circuitous, and fundamentally inefficient. There’s no way this system could perpetuate forever, without someone stepping in and finding a way for more than $0.40 per $1.00 to be put towards actual media spend. And with TRUSTX’s introduction yesterday, it seems like they are the first to the table in attempting to do so.

In addition to making media spends more efficient, TRUSTX is promising increased brand safety (to avoid instances like this this), 100% viewability (revolutionary, given the historical trend of paying for impressions), 100% transparency on what is being bought and sold, and an overly clear view of reporting and billing. They ran a beta test last month and yesterday revealed that in the four weeks, they traded more than 100 million daily impressions to 200 million viewers, with 33 significant publishers already members in their platform.

Given our class discussions, it appears that the needs TRUSTX is addressing are real shortfalls in the current programmatic advertising space. If they can follow through on tenets on which they have founded their company – transparency, viewability (instead of paying per impression), and brand safety, and if they can do so while spending company’s media dollars more efficiently, I believe that this type of cooperative private marketplace could transform how programmatic advertising functions, and could shift business away from more traditional ad networks or exchanges. These organizational changes in how ads are bought, sold, and viewed could also influence the metric outputs we use to measure campaign success – a higher percentage of each dollar will be put toward actual media (lowering middlemen/transaction costs) and with viewability as the guarantee (and not simply impressions), more eyeballs will view a given ad per spend. As such, companies could see higher visits, ad clicks, click through rates, and view-throughs, and higher results could lead to higher advertising spends. TRUSTX seems to be tapping into a growing gap in the digital marketing landscape, and from the sounds of its initial release yesterday, it could be a promising new solution in the space.

http://www.adweek.com/digital/33-major-publishers-are-promising-advertisers-a-new-level-of-safety-and-transparency/