Private Marketplaces, also known as PMPs, are places where publishers offer their ad inventory to a selected group of advertisers. You may also hear buying in Private Marketplaces referred to as:
- Programmatic Premium
- Programmatic Direct
- Programmatic Guaranteed
- Programmatic Reserved
- Preferred Deals
- Private Auctions
Don’t worry, these are all basically the same thing – just different flavours of PMP.
Programmatic Direct combines the best of direct sales with the targeting and automation benefits of programmatic. PMPs are now a popular method of programmatic trading.
For publishers, PMPs give tighter control on which kinds of advertisers and creatives will be displayed on their site or app, while not having to manage individual advertisers like they would in a direct buy.
For buyers, PMPs allow access to premium quality inventory, and all the bespoke benefits of working directly with a seller – but also allow use of data, targeting and reporting from a single DSP dashboard.
Typically CPMs are higher in a PMP because premium advertisers are competing for the highest quality ad inventory on very reputable digital properties.
Each type of PMP does a specific job for buyers or sellers.
This is a great video from sovrn that covers RTB v PMPs and Programmatic Direct in a little more detail.
Make sure you read the earlier articles in this series to understand basic concepts of programmatic.