Programmatic transparency has come a long way in recent years, with many supply-side platforms (SSPs) now offering an interface for buyers to get log-level data. Amanda Martin, vice president of enterprise partnerships at Goodway Group, joins eMarketer principal analyst at Insider Intelligence Nicole Perrin to discuss why buyers are interested in this information, what is still making it difficult to understand and execute on, and her hopes for the future of transparency.

Programmatic Fees. The fees associated with programmatic display transactions will grow this year, alongside overall programmatic display spending. But as a share of total spending on nonsocial programmatic advertising, fees will drop by 1 point this year and then remain steady through the end of our forecast period at more than one-third of all programmatic display spending.

US advertisers are spending about a third of their nonsocial programmatic display ad dollars on fees this year—aka the “ad tech tax.” Read on to learn more about our inaugural estimates of spending on programmatic fees.

Programmatic Fees. We expect programmatic fees paid to intermediaries to rise 26.2% this year, rebounding from slow growth of 6.2% during 2020. Programmatic fees will account for a slightly falling share of nonsocial programmatic spending over time as advertisers, publishers, and their partners continue looking for efficiencies.

The programmatic ad supply chain can be opaque, making it difficult for buy- and sell-side platforms to quantify how much money is being paid to vendors. Our new estimates on programmatic fees may shed some light for advertisers and publishers on how much share of all nonsocial programmatic display ad spending is going to fees.

The ad tech world may feel targeted (pun intended) by privacy-related scrutiny in the press, but the fees earned by the ecosystem of partners that facilitate programmatic display transactions in the US were up almost 20% this year.

Principal analyst Lauren Fisher joins guest host and fellow principal analyst Nicole Perrin to discuss Amazon’s plans to offer video ad inventory to demand-side platforms dataxu and The Trade Desk. They also talk about our new programmatic fee estimates, Microsoft’s purchase of ad-tech firm PromoteIQ and Facebook’s offer to pay for news.

In this Meet the Analyst Webinar, eMarketer principal analyst Nicole Perrin discussed how much these programmatic fees cost, explores (the lack of) programmatic transparency and dives into how advertisers are approaching the infrastructure underlying more than 80% of their display spending.

Entities throughout the programmatic supply chain are emphasizing these practices as important points of differentiation, and industry groups like the IAB Tech Lab are continuing to release standards that make further supply path optimization possible.

Buys executed on Display & Video 360 come with a standard programmatic fee of 15% of a campaign’s total spend, according to a Google blog post in June. Google Ads doesn’t have advertiser fees. Some advertisers will use Google Ads to manage their YouTube buys to avoid paying fees, even if they use Display & Video 360 for other media buying.

A good portion of the remaining 48.7% of programmatic ad dollars spent outside social networks goes to programmatic fees also known as the “ad tech tax.” We estimate $10.35 billion, or 37.6% of all US nonsocial programmatic ad spending, goes to programmatic fees.

According to a new study of US publishing executives, programmatic is leading people to worry more about downward pressures on CPMs than tech taxes or latency.

Parties throughout the programmatic supply chain are working hard to be more transparent and accountable, too. Valérie Latronche, managing director for France and Belgium at ad tech specialist Rubicon Project, noted that transparency has been a key theme for her firm and the industry since 2018.

We are in the process of conducting research that we hope will allow us to estimate the amount advertisers are spending on programmatic fees, also known as the ad tech tax. We expect to publish this research later this summer. In the meantime, read our latest report on US programmatic ad spending for 2019.

But with the ad tech tax accounting for a significant share of all display spending, there’s no way for a digital ad seller—not even Google or Facebook—to crack the highest earnings rankings without benefiting from those revenue streams as well. And Amazon is now making it easier to buy ads on its platform. Many buyers have complained that Amazon’s ad products were confusing and difficult to buy.

It means maintaining full control of their data and not paying an ad tech tax on the attractive profits. However, going in-house is challenging. It requires complete organizational buy-in, because investments will need to be made to build out a full ad stack. That will typically mean ad-serving, trafficking and measurement capabilities built on seamless data flows.

In fact, we expect to see a greater push on the part of marketers—and agencies—to see the true value of the ad tech tax. “Brands deciding what they want to control and what they don’t need to focus on,” Adobe’s Cowlishaw said. “So you’re starting to see programmatic ad technology and ad verification contracts sitting with brands.

Programmatic buyers and sellers are no strangers to the ad tech tax—that is, the fees that are paid to the host of intermediaries involved in programmatic display buying (e.g., demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges, verification providers, data resellers, data management platforms (DMPs), and the list goes on).

But with the ad tech tax accounting for a significant share of all display spending, there’s no way for a digital ad seller—not even Facebook or Google—to crack the highest earnings rankings without benefiting from those revenue streams as well. What’s coming to Amazon’s advertising business in the short term? Amazon is maturing its advertising business slowly, even as revenues continue to soar.

The programmatic supply chain is still rife with concerns about fraud and transparency. A June 2018 study by ExchangeWire found that 78% of media agencies worldwide that owned programmatic buying technology found the lack of transparency in media buying a major challenge, and 59% of respondents cited brand safety as another big concern.

Programmatic supply chains are too long and complex for advertisers or their partners to be completely satisfied with this system, but it’s considered a major improvement on earlier attitudes. Advertisers should make sure their media buyers have such deals in place and understand their terms.

In the absence of a widely accepted reporting mechanism for itemizing costs and fully quantifying the ad tech tax, buyers must be willing to work with—and pressure—each partner to make this a reality. (Blockchain won’t fill that role in 2019, if ever.) But this practice will be far from perfected in 2019.