ClearLine, OpenPath, and the Future of the Publisher-Buyer Relationship

This spring, another new variety bloomed in the garden of disintermediation with Magnite’s launch of ClearLine. The platform aims to provide media buyers with access to premium CTV inventory sourced directly from publishers, a departure from Magnite’s traditional role as an SSP.

PubMatic’s Activate seems to be making a similar play, focusing on offering buyers direct access to CTV and digital video inventory in another instance of SSPs venturing into the buy side.

Many in the industry were quick to compare these moves to Trade Desk’s OpenPath, which launched last year and lets buyers access publishers’ inventory directly without the help of an SSP.

These new technologies demonstrate the industry’s hunger for more direct buying environments, consistent with the broader Supply Path Optimization (SPO) trend. But as DSPs and SSPs make plays for each other’s business, who is benefitting, and who is getting left behind?

Here’s why big players are releasing products that connect publishers and buyers directly, who is benefitting from fewer intermediaries, and how the trend can go even further to power advanced media planning and premium publisher revenue.

Waging turf wars

Magnite’s recent unveiling of ClearLine represents one response to a growing challenge facing SSPs. Without a connection to the publisher’s product and inventory reservation  system, how can these platforms get in on the action of more direct deal types?

Magnite has been wisely laying the groundwork to transcend this obstacle through acquisitions that connect into publisher ad servers, putting them in a unique position to push the boundaries of the SSP role. And those integrations are what makes ClearLine possible, granting buyers access to product and inventory information.

Magnite’s play for more turf in the adtech space is seen by some as a competitive response to OpenPath, which took on SSP duties and encroached on the role of technology providers like Magnite. Both sides of the industry are trying to satisfy buyers’ appetite for more direct deals, and this is likely just the beginning of the hybridization of platforms geared toward both publishers and buyers.

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Providing buyers with more direct access

It’s no coincidence that ClearLine made its debut with a focus around CTV inventory, where demand for premium media is reaching a fever pitch. If you can provide access to CTV media sourced directly from publishers, you can get traction right away.

With an initial focus on CTV, ClearLine is aiming to make a splash similar to how Amazon first made a name for itself with books, where the product drew buyers into a new type of shopping experience that then grew to encompass more variety.

But ClearLine isn’t just getting in on the mad dash for CTV. The platform, and others like it that aggregate access to direct deals, are solving a technology void for regional agencies and mid-tier direct markets, of which there are tens of thousands in the US.

These agencies and brands want access to premium inventory, but top-tier premium publishers typically won’t cover their smaller accounts via traditional direct deals. When a tool can pool these regional agencies to create scale and connect them directly into a system with publisher revenue already secured, the agency can access a new level of media quality more directly, and publishers open up a whole new revenue stream.

We’ll see more tech providers make moves similar to Magnite’s as they aim to reap the benefits of democratizing both sides of direct deals.

Bringing media planning into the forward market

Solutions like OpenPath, ClearLine, and likely many other forthcoming tools are a step in the right direction toward a disintermediated adtech ecosystem that values the relationship between publishers and buyers, not tech providers and their wallets.

But where these solutions don’t go far enough is in addressing the translation needed between the ad server and publisher products. To offer truly viable guarantees and automate media planning in real time, these new platforms still need a connection into the only real system of record for publishers’ products, inventory, and pricing: the publisher’s order management system (OMS). And with that, they need a translation layer that can present OMS information in a way that makes sense to buyers, not just to ad servers. This is the missing piece the digital ad ecosystem requires to make automated direct deals widely available to both publishers and advertisers.

Bringing premium publishers into the forward market of direct deals will benefit the entire ecosystem with direct product information and real-time transparency for buyers and media planners. As marketplaces figure out how to work with premium publishers, they’re also helping solve a problem similar to what regional agencies face. By pooling their inventory together in direct marketplaces, premium publishers can achieve the scale they need to compete with walled gardens, marking a meaningful opportunity to advance the diversity and health of the digital media industry at large.

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