VivaKi, PHD and Ikon first Australian Brandscreen DSP clients
Australian trading-technology company Brandscreen has launched Australia’s first ad exchange trading Demand Side Platform (DSP). Ad Exchange trading offers the beginning of true one-to-one advertising and promises to transform the buying and selling of advertising in the same way the creation of the stock markets transformed the way stocks and shares were traded.
VivaKi (Publicis), PHD (Omnicom Media Group) and Ikon are the first three agency groups in Australia to create their own 'Trading Desks' and start using Brandscreen DSP’s trading tools for local and global campaigns. Brandscreen’s DSP will allow them to bid and optimize across several exchanges in real time as well as managing the buy and creative placement, executing the trades and clearing the funds.
According to Julian Tol, co-founder and CEO of Brandscreen, ad exchange trading will shake up the global digital media buying market, which is valued at $50 billion and growing fast.
“The enormous growth of digital media has broken the old, manual hand-made media trading systems. Buying digital is too slow, too risky and too expensive. Media agencies are demanding better solutions and ad exchange trading platforms will enable them to earn a larger share of revenue in a data-centric world.
“Brandscreen is disrupting and reinventing the way media is traded, aggregating, optimizing, executing and settling orders between ad exchanges and media buyers. We are essentially delivering a stock broking platform for advertising assets,” said Mr Tol. “We’re very proud that an Australian company has been amongst the first to bring such important technology into the global market and that we’ve created the world’s first true Private Forward Market for addressable media.”
Seth Yates, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Brandscreen commented: “Online publishers will continue to sell person-to-person, but these deals will be limited to the higher value 'engineered deals' where humans add value. The rise of programmatic trading will drive enormous efficiencies into both the sell and the buy sides.”
Brandscreen was one of the first companies to secure seats on the world’s major real time ad exchanges including Google, Rubicon, Pubmatic and AdMeld. Each of the seats on these exchanges includes co-located high-speed bidding agents operating inside each ad exchange, which enables access for Brandscreen’s agency customers.
Brandscreen DSP is offered as a web-based software-as-a-service and agency customers use a self-service sign up process which allows them to begin trading within 24 hours. Brandscreen’s DSP enables agency staff to become trading desk professionals who are part media buyer, part exchange trader - looking for better and smarter optimization strategies to drive better performance for their portfolio of clients. It is truly a case of 'Wall Street meets Madison Avenue'.
Brandscreen operates its own bidding infrastructure in several global data centers, including the Asia Pacific region. These ultra low-latency systems are able to support several tens of thousands of bids per second and respond to them within time frames that regular IT infrastructure cannot support.
Ad exchange trading offers the beginning of true one-to-one advertising and is a fundamental change in the way that media is purchased and distributed. Instead of looking for an 'audience', the new architecture allows individual people to be valued and targeted individually and anonymously and allows an ad to be delivered to just that person with exactly the right message. It promises far more relevant, less interruptive advertising experiences for consumers, and for advertisers it promises far better return on advertising investment.
In the time that a user clicks to open a page on the internet, an auction takes place for the right to show that individual person an ad. The whole process happens within 50 milliseconds, and repeats itself millions of times per second around the world.
According to Mr Tol, while the market for online display advertising used to be considered a smaller part of the advertising mix after search, and way behind TV, in the ad exchange it's all about 'addressable media’ allowing every type of ‘served’ media to be managed and counted directly.
“The days of 'display advertising' are over and advertisers now deal with all forms and channels of media that reach a customer – whether on mobile phone, TV; in an X-Box game; or through a Telstra T-Box or a Foxtel red button click. This is truly the beginning of the age of addressable media,” said Mr Tol.
Brandscreen recently opened an office on Broadway in New York, in order to expand into the US market, and to better support its growing roster of global agency customers.