Digital Display Advertising: Demand-Side Platforms, Continuously Fueling your Plan - Part 3 of 3

In fact, if you carefully vet a digital media firm who pairs modern technology with human expertise, your most complex digital campaigns can be created, executed, and reconciled faster than ever before.

The first two posts in this series talked about site-direct, followed by ad exchanges and ad networks. Today, we’re closing this series with RTB.

If you’re willing to play the bidding the game, RTB offers its own unique set of benefits. For example, if scale, sophisticated targeting, and profitability are key considerations for your digital campaign, then RTB offers a fully controlled, rapid-fire approach.

Download this handy infographic to learn more about each buying method, including when and where they work best.

Real Time Bidding

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is an automated process that enables advertisers and agencies to buy and sell display, video, mobile, and social assets via auction in real-time, at the impression level.

This is made possible through a demand side platform — software that provides advertisers and media buyers with efficient access to display, mobile and video inventory on multiple digital ad exchanges, SSPs, and programmatic direct software providers. Simply put, this layer of technology facilitates automated bids on available ad impressions all in real time.

The Pros and Cons of RTB

Pros:

• Groundbreaking data-driven targeting capabilities like enabling retailers with applications that re-target in-store visitors in real time across platforms
• Offers the widest scale of any buying methodology
• Rapidly changing how advertisers purchase local publisher inventory

Cons:

• Some DSPs operate in “black-box” environments
• Creative is often constrained to standard formats
• Some inventory (i.e. video) is still not as widely available

Leveraging a Demand Side Platform for Display Ads

SiteScout is Centro’s self-service DSP. This real-time bidding (RTB) technology enables marketing professionals and agencies to achieve high levels of transparency and control by building custom allowed lists and selecting publishers that perform most efficiently. In general, DSPs tend to achieve lower CPMs ($2 - $4) for allowed listed local publisher inventory. Our clients often shift spending towards our DSP to optimize for direct response KPIs such as CPA, CPL, Downloads, etc.

Are you just making it by or just about to make it big?

For many of us, digital is a dark, scary world where it’s easy to get lost in algorithms and acronyms, and hard to know how much budget to allocate to which buying method and where. One thing’s for certain — the more buying options you leverage, the greater your chances for success.

When building your next plan, start by building a digital team of experts first. Learn more about Display Advertising with Centro.