The rise of a few players to dominate the global DSP market has resulted in several advantages for marketers, including scale and standardization. But like towns where every high street has the same shops and cafés, it has left some people searching for more.
Until relatively recently, if there was something distinctive about your company – business models, performance goals, proprietary data assets or supply access – and you wanted to do something truly unique in programmatic, you needed purpose-built technology to enable it.
But a maturing market has made it incredibly challenging and expensive to launch a new platform into the programmatic ecosystem. It’s difficult and time-consuming to secure the supply, data and measurement integrations you need, and catching up with the capabilities on offer from existing DSPs would be nearly impossible. At the same time, consolidation has also meant commodification; current DSPs do what they do very well, but the opportunity for users to tailor them to meet their needs is very limited.
The result is that, while very few people want – or can afford – to build their own technology, there are still plenty who want a DSP customized to incorporate their Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
According to Michael Rasmussen, Iponweb’s vice-president of global marketing, the company’s SaaS-based BidCore platform solves this problem. It combines core DSP functionality, built using the company’s 18 years of experience, with full customization support. As a result, BidCore users can activate the buying platform as if it were purpose-built, but without the headache of actually building technology from the ground up.
Business models and performance goals
Rasmussen uses buying strategies as an example of how BidCore can accommodate different business models and performance goals.
“Most DSPs provide a core set of buying strategies, such as ‘optimize to clicks’, ‘spend budget evenly’ or ‘spend budget ASAP’,” Rasmussen explains. “But what if your goals are more complex than that? Maybe your business model is to charge advertising partners based on the time a user spends on their site after clicking through to a landing page? Current DSPs don’t give you that option.
“BidCore allows you to build bespoke optimization strategies that will record any event you like and feed those events into prediction models that will optimize your spend towards maximizing the outcomes that matter for your business.”
With Bidcore, you can also prioritize to multiple goals at the same time. This means the engine automatically strives to hit each of your goals, within whatever constraints you give it and in the order you assign, by the end date of the campaign. That way you don’t have to constantly check how a campaign is pacing because you chose a CTR strategy, for example.
Capitalizing on data assets
Proprietary data is another tool for potential customers to differentiate themselves. BidCore enables these buyers to bring their data assets into the programmatic environment easily and securely to enable more precise targeting, bidstream filtering, and campaign optimization, which ultimately drives greater efficiencies and performance. For companies with highly sensitive data, the client part of BidCore can even be hosted in their own cloud instance, ensuring the most secure data never leaves their own environment.
Bring your own supply
Rasmussen explains that BidCore also allows companies to integrate their own supply, and buy it programmatically.
“Most DSPs only access supply through SSPs. BidCore has a supply integration layer, so buyers can integrate their own publishers via header integration and access that supply for their own buying, creating a new programmatic self-serve-buying ecosystem,” he says.
User profile
BidCore is aimed at data-rich companies already in the RTB space. This includes ad tech companies, networks, data providers, digitally native brands, and specialist agencies. Because of this, Iponweb designed BidCore’s UI and API to be extremely flexible. Companies can shape them to match their own unique buying and campaign management setups and hierarchies. The UI can be enhanced to support specific buying parameters or unique entities or clients can build their own UI on top of the API.
Iponweb offers flexible pricing models to accommodate the variety of BidCore use-cases. While the big DSPs charge on the traditional ‘percentage of media’ model, BidCore users can pay based on the volume of traffic they listen to (which is good for buyers trying to match users in the bidstream or feed their own intelligence models), or based on impressions filled (which is better for buyers transacting high-value inventory, like video or CTV).
“Our philosophy is that our clients have a USP that differentiates them from their competition, and they want to do programmatic advertising,” says Rasmussen. “We want to be the enablement platform that lets them bring that programmatic vision to life.”
To find out more about BidCore, click here.
