If you are in the business of advertising, then you know that media buying is the process of obtaining advertising slots. This refers to both digital and traditional offline platforms. The world of digital advertising has evolved drastically from simple website ads and banners. after all, these were just the early methods advertisers used to reach viewers.
A media buying platform is a system or tool (online service) that allows advertisers to buy advertising space. Additionally, it helps to facilitate transactions between the advertiser (media buying company) and a publisher (seller). There are a lot of different media buying platforms on the market. Such as, BidMind by Fiksu, SmartyAds, TubeMogul, Simpli.fi, MediaMath, and PubMatic.
With the myriad of ways of advertising from CTV to YouTube and OTT. As such, advertisers have to manage many media types and distribution channels. A media buyer also has to negotiate with publishers to get ad inventory, budget for those ads, and optimize ad inventories to get the most from campaigns. This makes for a very complex and overwhelming set of tasks. Hence why a media buying platform is essential.
In today's highly complicated and fast-moving advertising market, online advertising is mostly done with programmatic advertising. This is the automated buying and selling of ads with software platforms.
An ad agency may have what is called a Trading Desk (ATD). This service allows clients to outsource their programmatic media buying. They also leverage data management platforms (DMP) as well as third-party data to manage the actual advertising content. Thus, this all comes into play when the advertiser is ready to purchase advertising pace. They go through a Demand Side Platform (DSP), which is a platform that provides automatic buying of digital ad inventories.
On the publisher’s side, they provide their inventory of advertising opportunities (impressions) to a Supply Side Platform (SSP). Then, this communicates this information to the ad exchange. The ad exchange generates auctions for the impressions, where the DSPs (on behalf of their clients) place bids on them. As in any auction, the highest bidder wins the auction (advertising impression).
When shopping for a media buying platform, there are several things you should look for. First and foremost is always pricing. What is their structure? Does the platform have a monthly fee? Or, is the fee a certain percentage of the ad spending? Do they charge an onboarding fee? Is the pricing negotiable?
How does the platform generate target audiences? Do they use geographical locations, dayparts, frequency capping, retargeting, and other parameters? Do they have customization and personalization capabilities?
Next is about quality. You ensure that your service provider has a robust and high-quality inventory of advertising inventories across multiple media platforms. The platform should have security tools that prevent ad fraud. And, lastly, you need to investigate the technical support that they provide. This is always important to ensure that they can effectively and efficiently deal with any issues that come up.
Buying digital advertising has evolved greatly. The dynamic and on-demand nature of media today requires that advertisers are able to locate and purchase advertising space extremely quickly. The speed at which all of these processes take place makes programmatic platforms a must. Media buying platforms and services offer advertising agencies a way to get access to advanced tools for facilitating and automating processes to complete ad purchasing transactions. They also give them a cost-effective way to do this without requiring large investments in technology. It also requires less staffing to manage oversight of the processes. The companies that provide these services are all different. Thus, you have to choose one that best matches your business needs.
