Hong Kong-based the South China Morning Post is leading the exit from the open marketplace.

The privately-owned publisher withdrew all its inventory from the open marketplace in January - becoming the first in Asia to do so - offering instead a non-OMP solution it says benefits advertisers, agencies and brands.

Digital vice president Ian Hocking says in an INMA blog that OMP spending has "shaped the way" most display media is bought and sold developing into the primary activation channel for most digital brands.

"While this has improved buying efficiency and led to a better ROI, the OMP also presents problems for both agencies and clients," he says.

These include media value loss, the chart illustrating the type of ad-spend erosion across the programmatic activation pathway.

"This is the main issue buyers face; a complex ecosystem of intermediaries each take a certain percentage of the original CPM," he says. The UK-based ISBA's Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study indicated that, on average, 49 per cent of the original media value was lost, meaning that an OMP buyer may be less competitive than direct buyers and may not be able to access some inventory.

Priority and reach issues - such as the relative position in the ad stack and ad serving priority for each buy type (shown with typical reach achieved at the OMP priority) are also critical.

"Sponsorship-level deals get access to the first impressions of a user," he says, "important if you want to reach specific, hard-to-find users."

Hocking says having more inventory allows a more even delivery and better campaign optimisation. It also allows access to options such as hard-to-buy formats and context.

"What this means for advertisers and brands is that the OMP is at the bottom of the ad stack and buyers must make do with what is left," he says.

Ad fraud may caused by things such as bots (fake clicks), domain spoofing (such as SCMP.co.uk), or click farms.

"The world of digital advertising is hard to police and monitor," he says. "Although some companies such as WhiteOps and initiatives including the IABs Ads.txt have had some success tackling or even taking down major bad actors, the technology that is used to defraud buyers and sellers grows in complexity all the time."

Hocking also raises ad targeting data issues, pointing out that data from companies such as Nielsen and ComScore have shown that data used to activate campaigns may be less than 50 per cent accurate. A ComScore vCE Benchmark from 2014 showed that the average accuracy for finance targeting was only 44 per cent.

There are also brand safety issues. While the commonly used tools of IAS and Grapeshot have helped make the OMP a safe advertising environment, "they are not perfect," he says. "They require a URL to get significant traction before they will read and categorise the content - if they can read it at all - as all apps require a publisher-side SDK (software development kit) for the technology to work.

"Also, keyword lists need to be so broad that they often cut out quality sites or block access to key users, as you cannot check a longtail of 2,000 or more sites for editorial standards. This leaves brands vulnerable in the OMP.

With the growing concerns the OMP presents for advertisers and publishers, Hocking says it is getting more challenging to create efficiencies that drive success.

"We believe programmatic deals offer brands and buyers a better way to transact programmatic media than the OMP. It allows us to optimise efficiencies and increase advertisers' ROI by connecting our market-leading first-party data and persistent user IDs to programmatic deals (preferred deals and programmatic guaranteed)."

Marketers can potentially gain from non-OMP advertising solutions, with benefits including increased buying transparency, higher quality data, fewer brand safety issues, and more targetable attributes.

With fewer intermediaries, the publisher has more control and transparency, allowing it to pass important buying information back to the buyer and optimise the campaign to the chosen KPI more effectively.

SCMP's 'Lighthouse' audience segments have been built with first-party declared and observed data - giving the precise quality of every attribute - and making segments available with known ad quality. This also reduces the risk of ad fraud.

The SCMP 'Signal' brand safety tool is built directly into the CMS, ensuring every article is tagged and measured before going live.

Hocking says the availability of more targetable attributes may be the biggest single difference in the future. "The third-party cookie will be deprecated and the identifier for advertisers will be restricted to advertisers. With that comes the end of several key drivers for the OMP.

"Basically, the marketers' ability to create a relationship with a user and then build on it to drive that user down a funnel will be eliminated in the OMP."

He says SCMP will be able to create an ongoing relationship with individual users after migrating to first-party cookies and user logins that do not degrade over time.

"These attributes will help SCMP to meet our clients' branding needs and drive ROI," he says.

Ian Hocking joined SCMP from Rupert Murdoch's News UK at the end of 2018.