Just 10 milliseconds of time is driving a major shift in programmatic advertising, with innovation in the sell side unlocking new efficiencies and creating greater value for advertisers.
In a keynote speech at Campaign’s Media360, Andrew Casale, president and CEO at supply-side platform (SSP) Index Exchange, said that technological advances and access to richer data are enabling advertisers to invest smarter and with greater precision. “We do really believe this is the early emergence of the next chapter of innovation in programmatic,” he said.
Buy v sell: redressing the balance
Historically, said Casale, all of the value in programmatic has lived on the buy side. “A lot of the value creation, a lot of the layering of data, optimisation, suitability, and curation, all live in the demand-side platform [DSP],” he said. “Therefore, the perception has always been that the buyers had all the data, the buyers made all the decisions and the buyers sourced all the value.”
In contrast, the sell side of the market has traditionally been responsible for handling the scale of programmatic advertising requests from the likes of television streaming, podcasts, and YouTube. Casale said that 500bn requests are made every day, with the job of SSPs to “handle the requests and squeeze them down into a really small pipe so that we are not overwhelming DSPs with requests.”
Casale said this has created a lopsided dynamic in the market between buyers and sellers. However, this imbalance is set to change. “This isn’t about making the sell side smarter than the buy side,” he told the audience. “This is about getting us to a form of equitable balance.”
Data: driving greater outcomes
When the show you’re watching on a streaming platform goes to an ad break, Casale said it takes just 200 milliseconds for a request to be sent out to DSPs, such as DV360 or The Trade Desk, for a bid to placed on behalf of an advertiser, and for the SSP to pass it back to the streaming service, for you to watch the ad. Just 0.2 seconds.
However, Casale describes the new opportunity on the sell side as “a new pocket of time that’s creating an opportunity for innovation.” He explained: “It’s not 200 milliseconds, it’s just 10 milliseconds.” Previously, in those 10 milliseconds, the sell side would vet the opportunity, scrub traffic and verify the integrity of the environment. Grunt work, essentially. Now, in those 10 milliseconds, technological advances have enabled “a whole lot of new, innovative things that historically were completely impossible.”
These advances have given the sell side access to rich, granular data at scale, from URLs to global placement IDs. “All this data can start to activate really interesting capabilities that historically were hard to send through that funnel down to the DSP,” he said.
The result? When the sell side performs its primary task of squeezing the avalanche of requests into an efficient pipe for the DSP, it is done in a much smarter and more effective way than ever before. Ultimately, this drives greater outcomes. “This new shift is allowing us to harness the vast scale of the open internet in a way that used to be really hard to do,” Casale said.
Bigger audiences: everyone wins
Casale said this shift is good news for media agencies because it is making the curation of supply path optimisation smarter than before by “going directly to the impression level and selecting the actual impressions that are most suitable.” Index Exchange is currently using this solution with global agencies.
“What’s exciting is that this doesn’t just benefit publishers, the sell side, or companies like us at Index,” he said. “It’s really helping a whole new swathe of companies reimagine where use cases live in programmatic. Because, when you move data to the sell side, you actually start to find more audience.
“We think that, as this continues to emerge, you’ll get as close to the publisher, to the environment, and to consumers as you can be, and you’re as close as possible to the root signal. And, as use cases can flow to either side of the transaction, you can start to apply the use case where it is the most commercially and economically beneficial to the end buyer.”
Learn more Unlocking New Value in Programmatic: The Rise of Sell-Side Decisioning