How to Optimize Your Supply Path in 15 Minutes

Quotes

• “At the start, Sharethrough is ad exchange. We work on both sides of the equation, advertisers and publishers, to create a marketplace that’s transparent and fraud-free, high-quality, and ad programmatic-driven. We act as a technology layer that connects both sides of the equation allows programmatic media buyers to succeed with both traditional display formats, video formats as well as native formats.” -Dan“My understanding of programmatic ads is that there is a supply and demand. You have publishers and advertisers and essentially you are serving as the intermediate layer connecting them through your technology.” -Ben “The programmatic ecosystem was born 15 and maybe even 20 years ago, just as a display ad and it has exploded since. You got huge independent businesses like TradeDesk, which is now a multi-billion dollar public company. You have Google as the backbone of the industry and Facebook as kind of an independent walled garden which in some ways are programmatic.” -Dan“It’s always been a funny dichotomy. The core of our business is always been about designing ads for humans. The idea of native advertising is that the component parts of the ad assemble themselves based on the page layout. So based on the page, it fits into the fonts, colors, style, layouts so it fits into the feed, clearly described as an ad.” -Dan“It’s not the pixel size of the ad that matters, it’s whether that ad is comprehended or not. To me, the whole purpose of advertising is in very few cases purely just emotion and in almost every case, it’s comprehension.” -Dan“Supply path optimization is a term that’s taken over the industry over the past few years and I think there is a lot of confusion around it. At its most core, it is buyers saying, I have a lot of different paths that I can take to run an ad on the page but ultimately I’m going to arrive on the same page.” -Dan“What supply optimization does is it takes something that is inefficient and it helps the advertiser optimize through a more efficient, more effective performative path.” -Dan“The background here is many of the middlemen are facilitating the serving of your ads and they are all going to mark up the price. Essentially what you’re talking about is the slimming down and making the most direct path to be able to serve your ad, having fewer middlemen to touch it to get it to the right place.” -Ben “Before you go down the whole long audit of latency, overlaps, adtech challenges, simply ask your team where do I spend my money by exchange and how does it perform by exchange and you can pull that report from any DSP.” -Dan “At the level of the exchange, there’s probably only like 30 exchanges that matter. Every one of these exchanges has so much volume that no individual marketer unless they have super tight targeting caps, is goingto find volume challenges.” -Dan “At the core of this, the reason why this matters so much is that Google and Google AdX is so large on the web, it’s just on every longtail website and it’s out 6 million websites that have it. It’s so large that in any given moment on any given campaign, they’re just asking for a budget from a DSP so many times that without a market purposely saying I don’t want to spend 80 to 90% of my budget on Google, your money is just going to that supply path.” -Dan“When you’re spending through programmatic, you need to be able to evaluate your performances on the level of each of these exchanges. That’s the first primary cut to be able to just go through and look at what is your CPA, and your overall spend to make sure you’re putting more budget towards the right exchange and not necessarily just the right site or the right ad unit.” -Ben This is a new world where the exchange actually influences the performance of the ad. And even more than the performance, the exchange actually influences what the human being who sees the ad on the screen actually sees on the screen. That is a new thing that didn’t exist in programmatic advertising 5 years ago. That is the new paradigm.” -Dan