With The Trading Desk Heyday Behind It, Xaxis Shifts Its Narrative To Guaranteed Outcomes

Ad Exchanger, November 17, 2017

As holding companies distribute programmatic knowledge to their operating agencies, trading desks are repositioning to stay relevant to clients.
Xaxis, GroupM’s trading desk that pioneered the model of selling media to clients at a mark-up on a guaranteed CPM, will now buy for clients on guaranteed metrics that impact business performance, such as viewability and incrementality.
“Programmatic should deliver a lot of value to brands, but as an industry we’ve made it very complex and, if anything, less accountable,” said Nicolas Bidon, global president at Xaxis. “The metrics we use, whether it’s CPM or CPC, are really old.”
To deliver on business outcomes rather than click- and view-based metrics, Xaxis is building custom algorithms for clients through its machine learning platform, Copilot.
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