• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, September 9, 2014

The digital ad industry appears to be in the midst of a shift of power when it comes to programmatic trading. A rift has opened as a result of marketers' desire to know more and do more, and suppliers are now catering to marketers that want to take programmatic ad-buying into their own hands.

Yieldr, a display ad tech company, this week announced the launch of Yieldr Enterprise, a platform built specifically for agencies or brands building in-house programmatic ad-buying teams. Yieldr will also educate buyers on how to manage programmatic campaigns.

The announcement is timely in that it comes a few days after Accordant Media, an independent trading desk, also made moves to make programmatic buying easier for the “in-house” crowd, as first reported by AdExchanger. Accordant consolidated its programmatic offerings -- a DMP, a DSP, analytics and reporting -- into one stack, dubbed Accordant ATS.

“We released Accordant ATS both as a reaction to marketers' sincere desire to adopt programmatic solutions as well as our sense that agencies are making a mess out of programmatic deployments and point-solution-oriented vendors need to get out of the media sales business,” Arthur Muldoon, co-founder and CEO of Accordant, said to Real-Time Daily.

“Programmatic is 1% to where it is going. We can make the programmatic advertising landscape a much better place for everyone through transparency, control and data activation," stated Tom Triscari, CEO of Yieldr. "The best way to do this is by fostering the growth of in-house programmatic education, knowledge and competency.”

The desire to be more hands-on with the programmatic ad technologies could also be a partial result of the deteriorating trust between brands and agency trading desks. A recent World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) guidance report highlights transparency issues as one of the main reasons that agency trading desk use is declining at a rate of 15% year-over-year. Independent trading desk use, on the other hand, has more than tripled year-over-year.

According to a recent Casale Media report, 11% of the total U.S. spend on programmatic marketplaces in Q1 2014 came from brands directly -- 267% more than the previous year.