PMP (Private marketplace)
A PMP is a private sale of named ad slots, by invitation only. PMP stands for private marketplace. A website or app offers those slots to chosen advertisers at an agreed minimum price, before leftover space goes to the public sale that anyone can bid in. You still bid, you just know who you are buying from.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
How a PMP deal works
Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. Let's take a running-news website as an example. The site is free to read and makes money by selling ad space next to articles. In the open auction, the shoe ad can land on the running-news website, or on a cheap lookalike site the workshop has never heard of. A PMP (private marketplace) is how the workshop buys the named site on purpose.
Walk the deal. The shoe workshop and the running-news website agree on the inventory (homepage and gear reviews), the floor price ($8 CPM, meaning $8 cost per thousand impressions), and the dates (four weeks in September). The running-news website creates a deal ID in its SSP (supply-side platform). The shoe workshop activates that deal ID in its DSP (demand-side platform) and points a line item at it with a bid at or above the $8 cost per thousand. Bidding then happens inside that private pool. Another uninvited advertiser never sees those slots.
PMP vs open auction
In the open auction a shoe workshop gets scale and low prices, and it accepts less certainty about where the ad landed. A $3 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) can look efficient and still be a made-for-advertising page. In a PMP (private marketplace), the workshop knows the publisher and often the exact placements, and it pays a floor above open-market rates for that knowledge. An $8 cost per thousand is not automatically better media. It is named media.
Private marketplaces usually deliver better viewability (whether the ad was actually on screen) and cleaner brand safety because the inventory is named rather than inferred from a list. Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. The workshop can check that the shoe photo sat next to a race report, not next to a content mill.
When a PMP is worth the premium
A PMP (private marketplace) is worth the premium when placement matters more than price. Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. The workshop launching a new shoe style, a category where adjacency risk is real, or an audience that only one publisher has, is a fit. It is also useful when open-market performance is unstable and the team needs a reliable base of quality delivery while they clean the rest.
A private marketplace is rarely worth it when the goal is pure efficiency at scale and the creative works anywhere. A private-marketplace floor is a cost a shoe workshop pays whether or not that placement earns a sale. Signing ten private marketplaces and splitting a $3,000 budget across them means none of them ramp, and the report looks like a row of underdelivering deals.
Common PMP mistakes
- Activating a running-news deal ID and never checking whether the private marketplace actually delivered.
- Setting a shoe workshop's bid below the negotiated $8 cost-per-thousand floor, then reporting the deal as underperforming.
- Signing private marketplaces with ten publishers and splitting budget so thin that none of them ramp.
Lemonado
Your AI co-worker for marketing
Lemonado is your marketing team's AI co-worker. It connects to your whole stack and does the work end-to-end: reporting, campaign checks, and analysis.
In-house teams and agencies use it so people spend attention on decisions, not busywork.