July 2, 2019 – KPEX, New Zealand’s premium ad exchange and second largest online media platform, has entered into an agreement with
AppNexus, a Xandr company and leader in advertising technology, to make seller technology fees on each impression sold
through the AppNexus SSP available confidentially to buyers transacting with KPEX. The visibility into technology fees
enables advertising buyers in New Zealand to better monitor and make strategic decisions to maximize their working media
spend.
As a consortium owned by New Zealand's four largest media brands, including NZME, Stuff, TVNZ and Mediaworks, KPEX
provides programmatic access to online ad inventory across 74 of New Zealand's most brand-safe content sites.
"We take pride in our openness around the sources of our ad inventory and audience data,” says KPEX CEO, Simon
Birkenhead. “This additional transparency into seller technology fees furthers our ambition of helping buyers make the
optimal choices when buying media programmatically. When combined with our premium, brand safe inventory, we believe
KPEX really stands apart from other more opaque media companies. AppNexus has led the industry in fee transparency, and
we are excited about the opportunity to expand this offering to our clients through our work together.”
The announcement follows KPEX’s decision in March to provide full URL transparency for all its programmatic advertising
inventory, a key step in its larger move toward creating a more transparent ecosystem. By making its seller technology
fees transparent to buyers with AppNexus, KPEX hopes to enable all programmatic media buyers to better understand the
distribution of funds within the ad tech ecosystem and make more informed decisions regarding the inventory, and from
which platforms, they are buying.
“We feel very strongly that providing visibility into ad tech fees is a critical step in assisting brands and agencies
to make better media investment decisions, and AppNexus has been at the forefront of this initiative,” said Samuel Tan,
Senior Director, Market Development for JAPAC at AppNexus, a Xandr company. “We’re incredibly proud of the steps we have
taken with numerous partners globally and are looking forward to bringing further trust to the supply chain through our
work with KPEX.”
In Q4 of 2017, AppNexus began approaching direct publisher clients with agreements to offer transparency of their
technology fees to buyers. The agreements now represent 59% of transactions on direct sellers globally.