Fellow Marketer, How Well Do You REALLY Know Your DSP?

If in 2016, you were a brand who not just talked about the benefits of programmatic media buying, but truly embraced it, you should feel proud of your accomplishments! You likely focused on many of the core essentials that have fundamentally defined today’s modern marketer, such as:

– Harnessing the power of your valuable data to hit your KPI’s & ultimately make more informed buying decisions;

– Focusing on unique creative experiences & messaging that set you apart;

– Leveraging technology to automate the buying process to more efficiently reach your target audience.

If you were not one of the few marketers to invest in your own technology, you likely have chosen one or more 3rd party demand side platforms (DSP’s) to help you along your journey to automate your media buying efforts.

You likely did a fair amount of due diligence with your DSP of choice, asking questions such as:

– What is the reach potential to find my desired audience?

– What service levels do you offer?

– What level of control/visibility/reporting/insights do we receive?

– What are your areas of focus & expertise (i.e. brand, DR, retail, cost per download, etc)?

– Technical review & vetting of the DSP’s current customers

– Costs

These are great foundational questions that should be asked. However, what you may not realize is that your DSP may be employing tactics that are inhibiting your ability to execute properly & scale your programmatic strategies. You as the marketer control the messaging, but how that message is delivered is the territory of the DSP?—?and there are unforeseen land mines that can drastically affect optimal delivery of that message. Asking the next set of questions to your DSP will help clear a path for your message to be delivered to its fullest potential.

The key items you should consider, include:

1) Deal ID Best Practices

There is no doubting that direct orders (aka private marketplaces, PMP’s or Deals) are now considered table stakes when you talk about programmatic features. With direct orders, a marketer gets access to premium inventory and formats, along with the ability to tap into unique data sets that only the publisher can offer.

I think marketers may be surprised to learn that some DSP’s can’t turn off their campaign optimization algorithms for Deals even if the marketer simply wants just basic delivery as their KPI?—?or some DSP’s have bidding logic that sort Deal ID bids by price only (i.e. the DSP not basing their bidding on non-pricing rules that the marketer has negotiated with the publisher)?—?or some DSP’s apply margin discounts to Deal ID bids into the ad exchanges which often times causes the Deal to fail to function properly.

These are just a few of the many examples that need to be fleshed out properly if Deal ID is an important tactic to you.

2) Support for Mobile

There is no denying that mobile is the future & that future is now! Many DSP’s claim to do mobile, but in fact, do not even allow the marketer to properly ingest/target/optimize/report on the basic OpenRTB mobile signals (i.e. Device ID, app bundle, app ID, App Store URL, lat/long, rich media flags, connection type, etc) that ad exchanges commonly pass to DSP’s for real-time decision making. The list is lengthy and requires deep due diligence before you can truly check the box that the DSP supports mobile web & mobile app properly. There are some DSP’s who do desktop & mobile quite well; there are still many who do not.

3) Multi-Bid

As a marketer, how would you feel if your DSP only sent one bid back to the exchange in an effort to win the impression? Imagine that one bid is not your bid, but instead, you were the 2nd or 3rd highest bid & very eager to win that impression. Then imagine that many 1st bids are deemed invalid or are blocked by publishers for a myriad of reasons. This all adds up to a missed opportunity for marketers. As a marketer, wouldn’t you want these publishers within the exchange to know that you had the intention of bidding for their inventory at $XX price so that said publisher can potentially relax a block rule, lower a floor price, or negotiate a private deal with you? Unfortunately, there are still many DSP’s who fail to represent the marketers’ bids properly in the auction.

4) How is the “Plumbing” Setup?

a. Support for Multi-Coast Datacenters (East & West Coast):

You’d be surprised how many DSP’s only have support for one US datacenter. The problem is that the DSP’s one datacenter on the east coast is likely not fast enough to return a bid for traffic on the west coast. This means that the DSP would not even have the opportunity to bid on your behalf across a wide swath of US traffic, which would limit the DSP from accessing 25%+ of the ad exchange’s US inventory.

b. Support for Secure & iOS 10 inventory requirements:

More and more publisher inventory is moving to secure environments, a move that will protect against certain ad hijacking attacks and will allow publishers to enable encryption on their websites for better security. Apple recently announced that they will be enforcing minimum secure connections for all iOS 10 application traffic. Publishers don’t want non-secure ads running on their secure sites. Many publishers mitigate this RISK by blocking the entire non-supporting DSP from buying their inventory. If your DSP is not setup to access & buy this secure inventory, you as the marketer are missing out on this opportunity.

c. Creative Screening:

In today’s world, premium publishers are scrutinizing the ads that appear on their website like never before. At Rubicon Project alone, we employ a crowd-sourced system that allows us to proactively screen & classify 1,000’s of DSP creatives every day into their appropriate advertiser (over 120,000 advertisers registered to date), category, and creative attributes (i.e. does the ad have audio, does it expand, does it auto-play video, etc).

You may also be surprised at how many premium Comscore 100 publishers on ad exchanges will not be willing to take the chance, and as such, will setup rules to not allow any DSP to win their inventory if they have not set up a pre-defined creative screening process with the ad exchange. Does your DSP offer this screening capability on the major exchanges?

d. QPS Restrictions:

How does your DSP determine what inventory that the ad exchanges send to them? It’s expensive for the DSP to process 10’s of billions of bid requests every day. How the DSP decides to limit the number of requests it receives?—?commonly referred to as throttling?—?could be causing lost opportunities for the marketer. Make sure the throttling techniques your DSP employs align with your marketing strategy.

e. Buyer Identification:

Premium publishers want to know who is buying their inventory (by buying, we mean the “budget controller” such as an agency, agency trading desk, etc) and the buyer is greatly benefited when their identity is available to the publisher. Publishers who can see your buying behavior on their inventory can better work with you to meet your needs (i.e. publishers can offer you preferential access, discounts based on volume, etc). In fact, did you know that more and more premium publishers are requiring that the DSP return the identified “buyer/seat” associated with the bid before they will allow such bid to win their impression?

Also, one bad apple can spoil the bunch. If your DSP doesn’t identify the buyer and one of their clients violates a publisher’s rule, the publisher’s only recourse is to block that DSP, which means you’ve lost access to the publisher’s inventory through no fault of your own. If the DSP identifies each buyer, the violating buyer is identifiable to the publisher and only that buyer is blocked by the publisher.

5) Innovate to New Offerings

Does your DSP have a track record for building to innovation (i.e. native, video, mobile video, etc) quickly? Is your DSP’s embracing new API’s that certain ad exchanges offer them to streamline how Deals are discovered, merchandised, negotiated, & executed? I have seen many DSP’s adopt a wait and see” strategy on new formats & emerging trends. Nothing wrong with that strategy per se, but how does that align with your strategy? How important is it that your DSP is a first-mover vs. a follower?

It is my opinion that, as a marketer, you really shouldn’t have to worry about all of this minutia as you embrace programmatic. The pipes should just work, right?

Unfortunately, that is not the reality of today, and you as the marketer not only need to be cognizant of what is happening behind the curtain at your DSP, but also vigilant in your due diligence if you want to truly maximize the immense opportunities before you in this fast-paced programmatic marketplace that we live in today. You as the marketer need to remember that you have the leverage to affect positive change & innovation at your DSP. Use it wisely!

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here represent my own opinions. This post does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion.