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ARTICLE

Simplfying Integrations Between Demand and Supply Platforms

December 20, 2016 — by MediaMath    

SSPs, exchanges and DSPs aim to connect the world’s demand and supply at scale. Why all the middlemen? Exchanges and other intermediaries exist to minimize the number of direct connections. This saves resources as new integrations between demand and supply platforms are long and intricate. With one exchange integration, a DSP gets access to hundreds of individual supply platforms. 

What if integrations weren’t so complicated? If the ideal is to bring publishers and advertisers closer, how can we change the status quo of integrations?

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has been successful in standardizing the increasing complexity of RTB transactions with the Open RTB protocol. However, there has been an issue with supply platforms then adopting the IAB’s guiding terms as their own technical specifications. In doing so, they often add their own “twist.” This customization may reflect the uniqueness of the supply or the SSP’s own legacy systems. The issue is that even the most minor customization on the SSP’s end puts additional burden on a DSP’s engineers, resulting in longer lead times and leaving more room for bugs during the integration.

The status quo has been that, due to the unique nature of every integration, integrations at MediaMath were taking one to four quarters from lead time through go-live. This presented the most pain points for regionally-focused or product-specialized SSPs, because upgrading our current exchanges took just as long as new integrations. With dozens of direct integrations for a typical DSP and hundreds of SSPs in the market—plus the IAB releasing a new protocol version nearly every year—upgrading integrations and building out new ones could be the sole job of several engineers and product managers! On the other side, these smaller SSPs are forced to sell their inventory through exchanges, diluting the value of the advertiser’s dollar and limiting partnership opportunities with the DSP. It’s a drain on both sides’ resources any way you look at it.

At MediaMath, we recognized the problems of integration status quo: It’s slow, non-standard and reliant on middlemen. In an effort to make integrations fast and painless, we developed our own RTB specifications. Dubbed LITE Integrations, it is a simplified version of OpenRTB with no pesky custom fields. Combined with an online standardized contract to speed through the legal procedure (which always took longer than the actual integrations), our new way of integrating allows supply platforms to get started immediately and connect to MediaMath’s global demand in as little as two weeks instead of a quarter or more.

We think this could be a game changer in the way the industry integrates. If this process is adopted across the adtech ecosystem, global connectivity and the value of the advertiser’s budget will strengthen while engineering teams will have more resources to innovate.