Singapore – In a bid to push for more visibility of APAC brands and advertisers into the programmatic supply chain, media investment firm Group M has launched a project to optimize the supply path on digital advertising.

The project is the firm’s answer to advertisers’ growing concerns over transparency. It refers to a study by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) which revealed that about 15% of the amount spent on advertising in the UK was unaccounted for, raising the industry’s question as to how revenue is earned. 

Over a period of six months, Group M gathered a significant amount of data into a single visualization tool which includes loading log level data from more than 400 demand side platform (DSP) seats.

Still in line with improving transparency, GroupM has also enlisted a set of guiding principles for all markets within the tool. The number of seller-side platform (SSP) included has been limited to those who:

  • agree to a code of conduct
  • only have direct integrations with publishers
  • never send inventory as unknown or obfuscated domains
  • Need to provide log-level campaign data to be matched against DSP data

Prathab Kunasakaran, head of the supply strategy for APAC at Xaxis said, “By bringing all of our global buyer accounts onto the supply path optimization dashboard, we gained a clear view of the good and bad actors in the buying process and identified valuable partners to move forward [with] careful due diligence.”

GroupM also aims to become 100 percent ads/apps.txt compliant and support Open Measurement SDK as well as VAST 4.1 and higher. 

In addition, it also eyes to fully comply with ads/apps.txt and support Open Measurement SDK. The firm also shared that it is working with SSP partners PubMatic, SpotX, and local publishers in the APAC region to integrate header bidding into their programmatic setup.