Digital Advertising – Display Ads Ecosystem

There typically five ways that advertisers use to reach out to their intended consumers: 1) Display Ads, 2) Social Media, 3) Mobile, 4) Search engine and 5) Email campaigns. 

The combination of technology and services that connect the advertisers with the publishers is a complex process and involves many parties.

• Advertising / Media Agencies are dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising campaigns for its clients.
• Advertising / Media agency will typically run their ads through an ad server in order to have an additional party track and report numbers for verification reasons. This allows the media agency to have two sets of servers tracking impressions and clicks, the Ad server and the Publisher. 
• Ad Servers is a technology platform that can host and serve display advertisements and can manage, optimize and monitor different campaigns analytics (engagement metrics and conversion reporting). It acts as a delivery system, displaying the correct ad when a user visits the publisher’s website. Ad Server also consolidates impression and clicks into one place separating it by media partners which allows Media agencies to accurately monitor vendor performance.
• Creative Optimization companies help advertisers improve the performance of an advertiser’s creative by enhancing the ad unit’s feature set by making it dynamic or interactive ad experiences.
• Measurement companies provide their clients with additional campaign analytics and insights, by measuring, collecting and reporting on the internet data so they can better predict consumer behavior and improve revenue driving decisions. These companies have the ability to query tens of billions of records per second and are able to highlight key metric optimizations in real time for multiple sources. Data Optimization helps to predict an ad campaign outcome based on previously existing data.
• Verification services technology monitors the digital advertising environment to ensure ads appear where and how they are intended to appear. It shows the percentage of ads displayed that were viewable to the end user, what specific websites the ad unit ran on, if it was displayed on the correct real estate and if it was placed next to questionable content. It helps the Media Agency to decide which Publisher, Network or Exchange is the best fit for their next campaign.
• Data Suppliers (DS) compile and sell information from detailed databases on individuals. The data collected by these suppliers include geographic information, household income, lifestyle, preferences and shopping behavior. Data Suppliers sell their information to Data Management platforms. Data Management platforms (DMP) facilitate the access, organization, analysis and segmentation of vast amounts of data readily available for other ad companies to utilize. This packaged data is the used to create targeted audiences and optimize campaign performance.
• Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) are specialized media displaying groups. They use either proprietary technology or a demand side platform to buy and optimize media campaigns on ad exchanges, ad networks and other sources. ATD utilize proprietary technology to buy inventory for their media campaigns like DSPs.
• Advertising / Media agencies can user a few different options when deciding how to buy media for their display advertising campaign.
  

• Ad exchange, a programmatic buying market place where inventory is auctioned to the highest bidder. In the digital advertising world, currently 400bn impressions are up for bidding to online marketers globally on a monthly basis, which translates into 150k ads per second. Most of these transactions are automated through technology and exchanges are efficient for publishers to monetize previously sold inventory without the need for robust sales team as well as for the buyers to buy direct inventory without a middle man.
  • Demand side platforms (DSPs) are sophisticated decision engines that calculate the best value for each impression on exchanges, ad networks and other sources. They are popular ad buying platform because they provide the advertisers the ability to buy from a wide selection of inventory, optimize campaign performance and reporting analytics from one centralized interface.
  • Supply Side Platforms (SSP) provide the inventory available on the exchange. It makes it easier for Publisher to manage and sell their inventory on multiple ad exchanges and networks. The Publisher would set the price and audience type of its inventory on the SSP. These baseline metrics enable the Ad exchanges to connect bidders making calls from the DSP to inventory made available on SSP. SSP gain inventory by accessing multiple publishers. Yield Optimizer assist publishers on optimizing ad allocation, sell off inventory, marketing individual impressions etc. in order to maximize revenue.

• Ad network, a company that has direct rights to sell inventory from a specified group of publishers. Ad networks connect advertisers with publishers matching aggregation of ad space supply with advertiser’s demand. It will package inventory from publishers that have the same demographic of consumers and targeted audience set. It will typically pre buy this inventory from the publishers, package it and then resell it to an advertisers at higher price. Advertiser would buy inventory from an Ad Network on a fixed price, cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) basis.