Campaign Crash Course: What is supply path optimisation?

Welcome back to Campaign Asia-Pacific's Crash Course learning series, in which you will learn valuable lessons and practical business tips on trending and essential topics from industry experts in just five minutes. Think of it as a mini mini MBA, if you will.

Lessons will cover the breadth of the marcomms industry, including technology, creative, media, strategy, leadership, diversity and inclusion and more. We'll start off by introducing you to larger topics and delve deeper into specific elements in the future. This series is designed to be useful to C-suite executives as well as those just starting out in their careers.

The 24th lesson in the Crash Course series will cover supply path optimisation (SPO), a tool which promises to fix programmatic's transparency issues by reducing the amount of partners in the supply chain, in turn reducing the adtech tax and protecting against fraud. There are several SPO solutions in the market that have begun to gain traction, but understanding of this concept is still low.

In this lesson you will learn:

• How does SPO work?
• What are the key benefits of SPO?
• What are the barriers preventing implementation of SPO?
• What are the common misconceptions around SPO?
• How will SPO help the programmatic ecosystem?

Your teachers

John Miskelly is the APAC investment director at GroupM. Miskelly has 16 years of media experience across Starcom, MediaCom and GroupM. He was formerly GroupM's chief digital officer in Australia with oversight of Xaxis, Finecast, Plista and [m]Platform. He moved to the regional investment director role in 2018, in which he leads the network's digital operations across all key APAC markets.

Prathab Kunasakaran is the head of supply strategy at Xaxis APAC. Kunasakaran has over 13 years of experience in the adtech industry, and has worked closely with global publishers like Disney, Vice and NBCU to define and deliver their programmatic and private marketplace (PMP) offerings. He is also an IAB Brand Safety Committee Member.

The quiz

After you watch the above video, test your knowledge of supply path optimisation with this quiz:

Campaign Crash Course is an ongoing series with new courses to be released on Fridays. We are always looking for feedback and ideas. Have a suggestion or want to take part? Complete our feedback form or email our editors.