Oh Where, Oh Where Has My SSP Gone?

by Blake Suggs on 10/26/2009 at 10:31 am in Commentary, Feeds, Industry News

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard the news about Yahoo SSP’s planned demise on December 31, 2009. This piece of news is big for travel in many ways, the biggest of which might be its effect on how travel advertisers spend their budgets. For many travel advertisers, SSP has been a savior for years as far as overall program profitability. Advertisers were able to spend more in other channels due to the incredible efficiency and volume of SSP which brought their overall ROI down to an acceptable level. No more, ladies and gentlemen.

So what are we going to do now?

My answer is three-fold:

1. Get better about what we’re doing elsewhere
2. Redistribute – believe it or not, there are other low-cost high-efficiency channels out there
3. Reset expectations all around.

The answer above means that we’ll have to work harder in managing more programs as well as putting more work into the actual maintenance of these programs. That’s okay, though, because it has always been known that SSP would eventually cease to exist.

On top of working harder and finding new channels and ways to expand current ones, we’ll have to reset expectations. Our job is to help our clients not only explain the SSP change, but it’s also to help them reset expectations within their organizations if possible. While it’s true that ol’ faithful is leaving us in December, we’re not in a position where we need to cut spend – in fact it becomes even more paramount to solidify our presence in other channels.