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The Basics You Need to Know About the AdTech Supply Chain

In today’s digital world, digital advertising is a must. If you want your brand to reach audiences effectively and efficiently, getting seen on apps and websites in a consistent, streamlined manner is the only way to go.


However, it is easier said than done!


Unlike the first, baby steps of the internet, where you could deal one-on-one with website owners and buy advertising real estate there for your banners, there are simply too many of them now to do it well, on all platforms necessary for your brand, and at a fair price.


To navigate and wade through the innumerable interactions necessary to get you the advertising package that is optimal for your campaign, you need AdTech. Read on to find out the basics you need to know about AdTech and how to make the AdTech supply chain work for you.


What is AdTech?

AdTech is a system of advertisement management and control tools which allow efficient interaction between the publisher and the advertiser across a large variety of platforms. Such platforms can be social media, search sites, video and music platforms, hosting sites, mobile apps, and more.


With AdTech, as the advertiser, you can monitor your ads, get valuable feedback on customer behaviors, return on investment (ROI), and other insights vital for finetuning your ad campaigns and making them more targeted.


As the publisher, AdTech grants you tools for maximizing ad impressions, getting the highest possible bids for ad displays on your platform, and visitor behaviors while on your platform which you can then turn into valuable information for yourself and your advertisers.


With AdTech, whether you are a publisher or an advertiser, you have the tools you need to maximize your value for money and make sure that you’re matched optimally with your client or provider of ad real estate.


AdTech technology

Depending on whether you are a publisher or an advertiser, you need different AdTech platforms. If you are an advertiser, you’ll be using Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). If you are a publisher, you will be using Supply Side Platforms (SSPs).


DSPs are complex tools that consist of Data Management Platforms (DMPs) and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). DSPs collect massive amounts of data from website traffic such as cookies and mobile advertising IDs to allow ad campaigns to be as targeted and customized for specific audiences that suit your brand as possible.


As demand for protection of user privacy makes data collection from cookies and mobile advertising IDs harder, AdTech expands to using data from telecommunication service providers or telcos. The combined use of those will provide you with sophisticated insights on how to optimize your ad campaign for your brand.


SSPs, on the other hand, work somewhat like auction venues where publishers can run real time auctions for adspace and then serve the ads that have been submitted by the advertisers. This interaction takes place through an ad exchange.


An ad exchange is where all the interaction happens between publishers and advertisers. Very much like a digital marketplace or a stock exchange for ads, it allows publishers to sell their ad inventory to advertisers whose ad creatives are the best possible match.


Because all of this needs to take place concurrently over as many advertising platforms, websites, apps, with millions of advertisers and ads, the AdTech tools are necessary to provide automation and a streamlined flow.


Through AdTech, your ad will take an optimized path from you, the advertiser, to the best publishers available in ways that would be impossible to achieve manually for the amount of time and bulk of options available.


Ad networks

As networks are intermediary platforms that aggregate advertisers and publishers so that they can be accessible to each other in bulk. An ad network will help you increase the scope and reach of your brand’s ad campaign exponentially without the time-consuming need to interact with each publisher individually or directly. Ad networks make the AdTech supply chain efficient on the issue of scope and bulk, while the other components cater to quality and customization.


Ad networks are beneficial to both advertisers and publishers because they can help provide campaign feedback in a fraction of the original time, allow ads to maximize their scope, and publishers to sell the advertising space that wasn’t bought in direct deals.


Benefits of AdTech

It is already obvious that AdTech will offer your brand efficiency and effectiveness in advertising. With the advent of AI and various applications of machine learning, the process of optimizing your ad campaigns becomes even more automated and streamlined with progressively less need to invest time and effort in monitoring them. Beyond that, you will also be benefitting from AdTech by:

  • Optimizing budget usage: Through AdTech, you can maximize the impact of your ad campaign for the minimum possible budget. This frees up funds to further expand your campaigns to more platforms and to reach your target audiences with surgical precision.

  • Differentiating your campaign: Often, campaigns need to be optimized by simply differentiating them according to target audiences. Ad tech will allow you to segment your audience and serve different ads, tailor made for them, to different populations.

  • Maximize campaign feedback: Through AdTech tools, you can get quality information on how your ads are performing almost immediately, in a manner that makes sense and can be immediately applied to improving the campaigns without waiting for them to fully run their course. Through these functions, you can drastically increase the efficiency of your ad campaign.

The AdTech supply chain groups all the necessary tools you need to create, finetune, and maximize the efficiency of an ad campaign so that you can use them easily and at a larger scale than was ever possible before, at a fraction of the price.


In today’s world, using AdTech is a vital key to reaching all your audiences, across all platforms and websites they use, while handling competition in your industry. The more you use AdTech, the more you get quality data and information on how to finetune your campaigns, the more you create successful campaigns, and the more your brand flourishes.

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