John Lilja is CEO & Founder of Delta Projects. We caught up with him to get his views on the current state of the Nordic ad market, Google’s sunsetting of the third-party cookie and buyer preference on open market versus private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed.  

For those who don’t already know you, can you give a brief introduction to Delta Projects?

Delta Projects was founded in 2002, as the first tech company in the Nordics to offer third party ad serving.

Where we started from was around the most basic advertiser needs missing in a new market. Buyers needed validation on what they were buying, and what it provided to them for their investment.

From there, we progressed to a point where our platform couldn’t only serve ads, but also make buying decisions around them. In the first instance, that meant avoiding less desirable audiences in preference of those more likely to be interested in a given brand.

That, in turn took us fairly quickly into the world of behavioural targeting, from 2005 onwards really, when we saw the first retargeting campaigns.

All the while, we never looked at ourselves as a media sales house - we come from tech.

For example, where you have two advertiser clients who want to buy same impression, we always took the tech approach. That means evaluating decisions by their relevance to each specific advertiser and its KPIs. For us, internal bidding began a long while before header bidding came on the scene – in fact, it even preceded real-time bidding, when we were still working with fixed CPMs.

We are a local, independent DSP focussed on Northern European markets.

So, accessing the larger network agencies who work on global agreements was always going to be a challenge. But it turns out, since they have local budgets and local P&L too, many large blue chip advertisers are very grateful for options. 

Not to mention the benefits of specialist knowledge that goes along with tech that concentrates on a specific region.

We’ve noted that the Nordic publishing world has changed massively over the past couple of years – especially in the speed with which it adopts new innovation – and its willingness to stay ahead of the pack. How does this compare to the buyer community across the Nordics?

Most of the Nordic programmatic market is still bought via agencies and their trading desks. Surprisingly, much of that activity is also still bought via insertion orders (IOs), which doesn’t always make sense from an advertiser’s point of view.

So, in some ways, everything changes and moves quickly – but on another level, it is more the same as ever.

It has been reported in a few different areas of the trade press that brands and agencies will be cutting down the number of partners they work this year – what is your view on this? And if it’s true, where will they be cutting down?

If one publisher is represented by a single SSP, as a buyer that means you need to operate with all of them.

If the same publisher’s inventory is available in all SSPs and prices vary, you need to identify the best and most efficient SSPs and supply paths.

In short, it’s important to access media however you can, but equally important to scrutinise each access point individually.

One of the big news stories lately of course is Google’s announcing the sunsetting of the 3rd party cookie within the next two years. What does this mean for brands and agencies? Does it put publishers in a stronger or weaker position?

One thing that’s certain in this business, we’re not going to stand still, or ever stop developing new stuff. And we shouldn’t believe that our understanding of things as they stand today will necessarily be reflected tomorrow.

In other words, I expect them to develop new means for advertising to still be possible to execute. I also think there are other ways to do this that already exist. From a local player’s perspective, we’re looking into other identifiers, such as 1st party cookies. And I would also add I think the overall shift is a good thing, because things need to develop, change and this just pushes things faster.

When we look at programmatic guaranteed vs PMPs vs open market – what would you say are the top advertiser priorities right now, and what are their wish lists for missing features or improvements?

50% of agencies’ business are still through IOs – so our top priority is to help those budgets go to programmatic.  

The easiest way to achieve that is via yearly agreements with publishers. This would logically lead us to say programmatic guaranteed should be our preferred option. But the options around guaranteed are still somewhat narrow. Also, there is still too much admin required, plus not enough people across the Nordics with the right knowledge around it.

In many ways, the ideal situation would be to transact deals via the open marketplace – making it completely transparent for the publisher whose budget is being spent on their inventory, plus around yearly agreements, as they do now in the IO business.

Rubicon Project has invested heavily in creating a clean and efficient supply chain. Do you see this reflected in client performance, and preference to work with Rubicon?

Our opinion is that Rubicon Project offers higher quality than many others, which is quite often also reflected in proper winning price compared to win rate. And we believe this should be recognised in the volume agencies and advertisers buy from them.

As a DSP, clearly part of what is expected of you is to be sure you buy media from the right sources. If you can rely on trust, rather than escalating tech costs to ensure this happens, that is clearly a benefit on all sides.

What would you say are the key benefits of working with Netric/Rubicon Project specifically as a buyer?

Predictability as a benefit sounds a little boring perhaps, but when you work in programmatic and you are data-driven, it really does become a unique selling point.  

Uncertainty adds risk and builds waste – so when we say we perceive Netric as a reliable, predictable place to buy from, that is in fact a big compliment.