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Six ad firms—including four that buy online ads and two whose technology helps sell ads—have told ADWEEK that they are limiting their clients’ exposure to streaming ads from Pluto TV, whose parent company Paramount has agreed to merge with media company Skydance.
They are worried that Pluto TV is taking advantage of programmatic auctions to sell more ads at higher prices.
At the center of these concerns is a practice called bid duplication, where publishers and their tech partners send out multiple opportunities to buy a single ad.
Bid duplication tricks programmatic platforms into thinking a publisher has more scale than it really does. These ad-buying platforms use automation to buy ads from the publishers with the biggest audiences.
While not illegal, bid duplication is a controversial practice. It can drive up ad prices because it causes more buyers to bid on a single ad, essentially increasing demand.
Flooded with bids
A source within Pluto TV said there are multiple reasons why a live channel selling programmatically would send more than one bid request for each impression. Publishers like Pluto need to be able to choose from a wide variety of bids to ensure a better audience experience, this person said. For instance, Pluto needs to make sure that it can fill ad breaks, or people don’t see the same ad too frequently, or competing advertisers aren’t in the same pod.
Andrew Casale, CEO of ad platform Index Exchange, agreed that these features would require a larger number of programmatic bid requests.
But other sources told ADWEEK they were concerned about the unusually high volume of bid requests Pluto and its tech partners send compared to other streamers, including FAST channels (free, ad-supported TV) that were similar to Pluto.
This source noted that across deal IDs one day in June, Pluto and its tech partners sent out 9.4 billion bid requests in a single day, compared to 133 million for Tubi, 750 million for the Roku channel, and 1.3 billion each for Samsung and Vizio WatchFree+. A deal ID is a way ad sellers can automate buys with specific ad buyers.
