Demand Side Platform

Gone are the days which needed only tons of networking skills and a showcase of your extrovert self to succeed in advertising. Getting the word out about your business no longer relies solely on the long-drawn process of human to human interactions that involved the hassle of negotiations, meetings, manual insertion orders, and contracts. A game-changer in this regard has been programmatic advertising and the advent of demand-side and supply-side platforms. Right from the comfort of your couch, you can instantly reach your desired audience base without having to wait for days or weeks.

What is a Demand Side   Platform (DSP)?

Demand Side platform is a software that automates the process of buying, selling, and publishing of advertisements on the internet. Used by advertisers and agencies, they can deal with mobile, video, search, and display ads wherever the ad publisher has marked out an ad inventory to be shown to their audience. Typically, advertisers are buying impressions in the process and targeting only specific users instead of sending their ads across any and every internet user haphazardly. Agencies dealing with the Demand Side Platform technology can have their own buying platforms called trading desks or focus on particular channels such as a mobile platform or video ads. Major vendors are Invite Media from Google, AppNexus, AlephD, X+1, Turn, MediaMath, DataXu, among others.

DSP and programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising has been an increasingly popular field of marketing in recent years. It employs complex algorithms to publish ads to the website visitor contextually after the das has been bought and sold with the software. Real-time bidding takes place through the Demand Side Platform, and together with the Supply Side Platform, it makes up the concept of online programmatic advertising. The advertisers share the ad content and design, such as banner graphics with the DSP. Then, they specify their target audience and the price for the ad. Bidding war or auction ensues when a prospect lands on the website page, with the algorithms deciding which ad to display to the visitor. Taking into account details like time of visit, their browsing history, and the IP address, the advertiser with the highest bid gets the trophy, all without any human salesperson's interaction.

Displaying ads across multiple platforms

When you are advertising through Google Display Network or Facebook Ads, you are looking for impressions only on the particular platform of Google, Facebook, or Instagram. Demand Side Platforms take you a step ahead and let you buy and manage ads more than one of these platforms from a single place. An ad-exchange is involved in the process where publishers list their inventory on the Supply Side Platform, which in turn communicates with the Demand Side Platform to give all purchase details from the publisher. Depending on the value of the impression to a bidder and the budget involved, you can reach the visitors who'll be valuable to your business.  

Demand Side Platforms v/s ad networks

While Demand Side Platforms primarily serve the same purpose as ad networks, they can be used to optimize marketing campaigns more effectively. From an assortment of inventory to audience targeting capabilities, DSPs, however, are singular tools that take care of purchasing, serving, and tracking of ads. Most online ad space today is an accumulation of features from a typical DSP and ad network. There's real-time bidding as well as buying and reselling of ads at a premium price.

What good does hefty investment get you?

While Demand Side Platforms are meant to be cost-efficient, they do not come without a high amount of investment. Expert marketers say that you're looking at an expenditure of at least a couple thousand dollars a month in advertising. But, if you have the budget, it is money well spent. Undoubtedly, it is a more efficient process, and you can do away with unreliable manual work for ad rate negotiations or ad insertion orders. You can establish a global reach across multiple channels, all from a central point of action. With DSPs partnering with data providers, you can as much information as possible without affecting the privacy of your target audience.  It improves the ad targeting and verification process, giving users a more personalized ad experience that, in turn, leads to more conversions for your business. You also get compressive reports with real-time analytics across all your advertisement sources to drive better-strategized ad campaigns.