Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of talk about an end to the historic ad pricing model in which intermediaries took a share of inventory traded. Instead, the idea went, ad-tech platforms would need to charge a simple flat monthly fee.
We may be far from a full industry conversion to that model, but many platform vendors have certainly begun pricing themselves purely on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis.
That is only fair, according to 4C Insights CEO Lance Neuhauser in this video interview with Beet.TV. He was interviewed during NYC Advertising Week.
“We are a SaaS software license tech fee,” says the boss of the buying platform operator. “We don’t believe that the next incremental dollar of spend should mean we should keep reaching into the pockets of the marketer. That doesn’t make any sense. The best and only way to do that is to ensure that it’s a flat fee, all encompassing.”
That is the model used by 4C, whose Scope platform allows marketers to buy campaigns across Apple News, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, NBCUniversal, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat.
The latest addition to that spectrum, though, was the behemoth that is now making waves in ad land.
In August, 4C added Amazon to its roster, allowing customers to buy Sponsored Product ads alongside formats with the other publishers.
Neuhauser says that “brings one of the most dynamic marketplaces in the world to the ad ecosystem”.
He says: “They, for all intents and purposes, have the ability to tie the equivalent of linear TV through search, social, which are product reviews, ecommerce, as well as offline sales, closed loop that entire process, with addressability at the individual level.”