What is an Auction engine?

The most basic and common terminology that every Adtech guy should know about is  an "Auction". What is it in terms of our business, how it works and manipulates the things in real time.

In simple words, it's an algorithm which considers all of the values from the partners (demand) who are willing to serve their ads on specific set of inventory of publisher.

For example: ebay.com/furniture has 2 ad placement of ad size 728X90 and 300X250 respectively. Now in order to fill this space in real time there will be number of bidders who would compete and best fit will win over the rest.

How will it win? What's the best fit? Why only 1?

Well, that's the logic when we say an auction. Everyone will be having specific set of instructions with them which have encoded values like, identity, category, price, serving technology etc. Auction engine will receive the all inputs, process them and find the best fit out of all depending upon the inventory type.

let's consider (assume) an expmple what an auction engine can do.

DBM (DSP), Nestle(Advertiser), Brazil(Targeting region), 27-40 (Age), Male(Demographic), $5.00 (Cost)
MM (DSP), BMW(Advertiser), New York(Targeting region), 27-40 (Age), Male(Demographic), $5.00 (Cost)
Ad.com (DSP), Ford(Advertiser), US(Targeting region), All (Age), Male & Female(Demographic), $2.50 (Cost)
Turn (DSP), Budwiser(Advertiser), US&CA(Targeting region), 21+ (Age), Male(Demographic), $3.00 (Cost)
.
.
.
.
AOL (DSP), Loreal(Advertiser), CA(Targeting region), 27-40 (Age), Female(Demographic), $7.00 (Cost)

Among all the bidders who've entered the auction, engine (program) will consider each and every parameter and compare with the available inventory. This comparison will start with the price and can scale upto technology, ad type, browsers, and many more granular data etc.

Once, everything has been matched the one with most relevance and highest price will get the advantage and win the auction to serve the ad (creative).
This overall phenomenon looks pretty simple and straightforwrad at glance, but if you go to understand the exact expectation and layers of auctioning you'll gauge the complexity of the concept and find it more interesting.


Feel free to get in touch for further discussion :)

It's "diffcult" to organize

After knowing the fact that, this industry is just a decade year old, it's really difficult to rely on someone to inherit the best practices and processes while managing overall operations and transactions in this domain. While working with different modes of businesses and different type of people, I've figured out these few quick steps which may be useful for early stage folks.

Hiring: Hire the people on the basis of their rigor and enthusiasm. I mostly look forward on these factors rather than going with the traditional screening processes where one is evaluated on the basis of academics and the certificates. Of course, these are the important factors for coming to the conclusion if the person could be a good resource or will be consistent for the organization but like just as other secondary criterion. 

Train the best: The very important thing is how do we adapt them in the system. Generally, people seem to take this phase very casually and think anyone can take the step forward and build the resource. In fact, I'd say building a long term resource is a very important phase where you need such a kind of expertise and mechanics to understand the resource and mold them per the role or business requirements. If your peer feels comfortable with you, it will be an easy task to get the things done and chase down the highly impossible targets as well. 

Keep following up: Not only in terms of hiring or training, but on each and every tasks that we manage, follow-up is a key to success of service industry. Since major part of this digital Eco-space comes under Client service and satisfaction, this becomes a crucial decision whether to or not do a followup. Sometimes your simple acknowledgement to client's email with "Thank you!" can also make them happy while at times your detailed synopsis can bock them as well. Be constructive while writing anything to them (client), it should be less annoying and highly representing. 

Things work better if done together: The best part, what should be prioritized first and focused at, should be the "Sync-up" within the teams or people. Sooner they get synced-up, lesser will be the operational cost and other overheads. Majorly, the advantage of this (working together) would be to analyse each and everyone's abilities and utilize the strengths and weaknesses to make proper decisions. 

Most of the times, teams fail to achieve the operational stability and end up with hell lot of confusions and misunderstanding which in return is very harmful to the organization and it's growth. Let's hope this write-up will catalyze at-least one small team to gel-up together and create the mysteries.

Programmatic is a BOOM !

• Programmatic, since we all are now well aware about, is the way of buying and selling advertising using Real time Bidding. There are plenty of confusions and basic difference in understanding about programmatic. I hope this small piece of information will help a bit..
• What is Programmatic?
• In my words, It’s an opportunity that every entity can have in digital ecosystem to present the capability to analyse data which will ensure guaranteed returns on their investments.
  Programmatic, is more about a way of trading to buy or sell your digital portfolio (Inventory & Ads of course) with help of technological platforms like DSP’s and SSP’s.
  In other words, we can say it’s an extension to RTB approach to buy and sell the ads in real time. I.e. Right time + Right place + Right value. With the use of Programmatic approach, it completes the equation as below:
  ( Right time + Right place + Right value ) / Right data = Guaranteed Returns (Best ROI)
  RTB is a technology Programmatic is an approachReal time bidding enables, agencies and publisher to manage and optimize their transactions to achieve the desired campaign goals.
  Programmatic buying (pre-negotiated) ensures the campaign goals along with the conversion ratio should get achieved with an effective cost.
  In short, it gives more logic to your bids / inventory with the help of data analysis and automation, which directly results into more precise sell/ buy.
  Perks of programmaticIt not only helps to sell / buy remnant part, but also facilitates to upscale the premium section of available inventory / media i.e. both guaranteed and non-guaranteed.
  Therefore, it’s always a best practice to look for a programmatic push, whenever you feel there’s a potential requirement to drive additional performance through your orders.
  Here’re few quick links to know some basic stuff about Programmatic
  ProgrammaticProgrammatic and RTBRTB Vs. Programmatic(By Jellyfish)

S_L_R Digital Marketing

I'​ve came across this question number of times(recently, a couple of days back when I met with a colleague from previous organization) and many of marketers are still confused about the key factors of digital marketing and how to go about it. In fact, te transition from physical to Digital channel, RTB and then Programmatic is really so drastic and one should have to be on his toes to gather each and every single result or insights about the marketing strategy being implemented. Let me try to figure out how to go about it in my perspective and proven success:

SLR methodology:

Start: As soon as you're recognizing your brand, it's always essential that people should also accept it. If not even accept, at least come across what, who and where are you, before going for actual market conversion(Direct purchase). This is a correct time when you should start promoting the brand with small components which are really close to your target audience (depends upon your product, audience, demographics and Market area). This will ensure that you're at least spreading the awareness of your presence in the market. At the break-even of this phase you will realize this isn't enough and you should seek some actual business coming from the marketing channels.

Lap: Now, when your audience knows you have presence in the market, and you wan to appeal them to be your customer(?) it's a right time to start with some small laps of dedicated market areas to see how much you're good and of satisfying customer requirements from your product or service. In either ways, your ultimate goal is conversions and enhancing the product quality by continues feedback. However, this is a non guaranteed channel and may create inadequacy to resolve your future plans to expand or improve your product and services. Let's gauge this so quickly then, and see if you can have some guaranteed channels to have more granular and precise datasets for business forecasting.

Run:​ Run partnerships with direct potential sellers who has combo of inventory Premium + Remnant. This ensures to maximize your guaranteed ROI by managing the expected yield and genuineness. Plus you may have a leisure to have guaranteed agreement between both the parties to sustain with your marketing goals.

This approach is almost can be termed as waterfall model of SDLC where result of one step is input for the next phase and so on. To define your overall strategies, you can have your own team or a team upon which you can rely for your complete strategic requirements to accomplish your marketing goals from digital assets. Going with a dedicated agency or trading desk is also helpful as they will have complete understanding of all possible channels through which you can increase your reach and achieve desired goals. Also, they can take you through all the technology requirements you may have to go and sustain with this.