By OpenX in Brands & Agencies|April 25, 2017

Buyer Spotlight: Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners

1. What is BSSP’s unique expertise in the industry?

Performance marketing is something we’re passionate about. Our performance marketing team is made up of specialists across paid search, social, and programmatic. The idea behind that is developing cross-channel learning across platforms to apply those learnings to campaigns. If we see something working in paid search, we’ll apply those microtrends to how we look at other strategies. We focus on putting forth an effective solution for our clients.

2. How do traders at BSSP educate themselves about inventory, quality, fraud, viewability and on the “next big thing?”

We regularly participate in conferences and trade journals. We also rely on our vendor partners to keep us updated in case there’s something we should be aware of early on. Things typically move on the supply side before they hit on the demand side, so having relationships with supply vendors is crucial for us. We want all of our internal teams and clients to be up to date on everything we need to know on data and tech.

Often on the buy-side we want more channels, formats, and capabilities that are not readily available today, but we work with our partners in the industry to find solutions to these challenges.

For example, we worked with OpenX, who has brought new ideas to table for us, like being able to customize and curate different types of supply completely tailored to us – something we hadn’t tried at scale previously.

3. What do your clients expect from programmatic?

They expect a lot. A lot of our clients range from DR to awareness/consideration so a lot of what we do is set goals, KPIs and expectations. Some clients have more experience in the space than others, but they all see value in programmatic. For example one client knows programmatic can drive the most efficient cost-per to meet aggressive lead goals. Another client may see programmatic TV as a more effective way to buy TV outside of entering the upfronts or a scatter buy. Our clients expect different things and work with us to bring them the best solutions.

If we see something working in paid search, we’ll apply those microtrends to how we look at other strategies. We focus on putting forth an effective solution for our clients.

Brian O’ Kelley, CEO, Co-Founder

4. What is most important in your relationships with partners?

There are three for us, the first being that the partner fully understands the tech, the ins and outs of their own platform and where it’s going in next few years. Working with partners who can understand limitations and opportunities with their own tech gets us much further.

The second, and perhaps most important, is helping us troubleshoot and diagnose performance or campaign problems. For example, if we’re setting up a PMP deal, we want to understand how to scale and to make sure we see inventory coming through. There may be a variety of variables that we don’t have the purview into, so having a partner who can help us diagnose those issues is something we look for. A partner who is transparent is important for us.

And third, coming up with test and learn situations. We found that most of our clients are ambitious in terms of what they want us to do, whether it’s testing a new data partner or new bid strategy. Having a partner that helps us strategize and then implement those types of scenarios is valuable.

5. What’s next for BSSP in the programmatic world?

We’d love to move a significant portion of our buys into programmatic TV’s cross-screen world. Instead of only relying on video through YouTube or other online video providers, we’d like to be as expansive as possible using both TV and video dollars. A move toward more video cross-platform play will help us with our effectiveness because we can see global frequency capping across device I’m also personally interested in seeing what happens with VR, and if it’ll be the next distribution channel for content. When those collide, I’d be interested to see how those match up.

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