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ARTICLE

Supply Matters

October 7, 2013 — by Ari Buchalter    

There’s a lot of great supply out there via exchanges (both open exchanges and private marketplaces), SSPs, and networks. But just how unique is their supply?

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How much overlap is there between supply sources?

We monitored the billions of impressions flowing through TerminalOne and with MediaMath’s Brain Algorithm we were able to see how important the various inventory supply sources available to buyers were to campaign success. We began to notice that some of the inventory within each supply source was actually overlapping with other supply sources, and then sought to figure out just which supply sources offer truly unique inventory, and which ones overlap the most with other supply sources.

A tale of two exchanges

While the names of the supply sources are blinded, we were able to identify the most unique and least uniquesources of inventory available to buyers. “Supply Source 5,” for instance, was mostly comprised of inventory found on other supply sources- meaning it was mostly repackaged inventory from the rest of the ecosystem. “Supply Source 8,” on the other hand, was mostly unique inventory, meaning it had the highest potential to truly add value with each incremental impression.

SupplyMatters

However, incrementality does not equal value in every case. There are some cases wherein sources like “Supply Source 5″ will actually be a good mix of inventory, and while the supply may overlap with many other sources, there may be benefits such as price or page level context that differ from the actual supply available through other sources.

So What Does This Mean?

This study shows us that there’s a lot of overlap among supply sources out there, and adding more supply sources doesn’t always make your campaign work better (as you may be adding more of the same inventory from various sources). Buyers need a way to sort through this programmatically -like a DSP with an algorithm- to truly get the full benefit of all the great supply that’s available.

Ari Buchalter

Ari is the President, Technology, at MediaMath. Ari oversees MediaMath’s Product & Engineering teams, focused on designing, developing, and supporting best-in-class product solutions and platform capabilities for MediaMath’s customers. Ari brings a unique combination of business leadership, strategic vision, practical marketing knowledge, and quantitative expertise. Whether it’s designing MediaMath’s proprietary Brain optimization algorithm, unifying marketing approaches across digital channels, innovating new targeting technologies, or building the open marketing platform of the future, Ari is impassioned by the chance to work on industry-transforming solutions and humbled by the opportunity to lead the best technology team in the business.