KPEX New Zealand and AppNexus Offer Increased Fee Visibility

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.

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