Hi, I'm very new to programmatic (have previously *bought* GDN, Google Search, Facebook and Taboola, but have virtually no experience on the publishing side).

I'm working with a publisher that currently receives about 30M monthly organic pageviews and is only running Adsense and Taboola for monetization. They are fairly brand sensitive and want to move to a white list of advertisers with direct relationships. My understanding is that this is called a "private marketplace" and that big DSPs like The Trade Desk support this use case, where basically all the parties involved create "Deal" entries and then the whole thing is configured to run an auction where only the invited advertisers get to participate.

However, I'm really very ignorant as to how a publisher would even go about arranging something like this and what the options are (especially if there are companies smaller than The Trade Desk that are easier to work with for this kind of problem, or what kind of minimum requirements are needed in terms of volume to be eligible). The important thing from the publisher side is that they want to be able to have an invited whitelist of advertisers (but none of the publishing networks I'm familiar with, like Taboola, seem to offer this option, it's all just an open auction).

Can anyone give me a high level overview how to approach this problem? I'm familiar with how to create and run buyside campaigns, but I'm really out of my depth here.

Looking at deals from a publisher side in Google Admanager a PMP deal seems to me the umbrella term for (Programmatic) Guaranteed (PG), Preferred Deals (PD) and Private Auctions. (Even tough PMP is not Google AdM terminology.)

However, the way agencies and advertisers phrase things has me confused.

First of all: they never mean a PG deal. Instead this is usually just referred to as a Direct Deal, ‘IO based deal’, or something similar referring to a contract. (To make things even more confusing, some clients seem to use 'direct deal' as an other word for PMP deal)

Then: most of the agencies will just ask you for a PMP deal and expect you to set up a PD. However, not all of them, as one reminded me; “PMP means ‘private - market place’, so I need you to set up a private auction”.

All in all it seems best to avoid the term PMP altogether? But what would you say it means when setting up a deal?

Personally I see no value unless they are incremental, some form of unique demand or truly lead to greater PG or direct relationships.

Ultimately it’s just a way for buyers to track, get better rates and be higher in the auction.

I say this after working on the DSP side and media owner.

Happy to be proven wrong and open to discussion but I see no real value in them.