The display advertising ecosystem: just as confusing as you thought
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If you get confused about DSPs, DMPs, SSPs and whatever other acronym du jour comes along in the display advertising market, you're not alone. LUMA Partners has tried to bring some logic to the landscape of technology and service providers:
(A larger version is here.)
In truth, that's not even half of it. Terence Kawaja, CEO at LUMA Partners, sorted through more than 200 companies across a couple dozen categories, but admitted it's not a complete picture. “I am missing companies, there's companies that operate across categories, there's differentiations within category ― this is an impossible task,” he said at last week's Ad Revenue 2010 conference in New York.
The slide, which Kawaja has updated from earlier versions, is pretty famous among the online advertising industry; I heard it mentioned about three times even before it was shown at the conference. (Check out AdExchanger.com for an interview with Kawaja about the latest version.)
Notice that the tools for publishers are just a slice on the right side; most of the terrain is dominated by technology for media buyers.
If you need some help tackling this chart, Kawaja breaks it into three main buckets:
- Demand-side platforms (DSPs). These are tools for media buyers ― planning agencies, trading desks, creative optimization, data optimization, analytics and ad serving
- Supply-side platforms. These are tools for publishers ― ad servers and optimization tools as well as inventory tools for both yield optimization and ad networks;
- Data management platforms: These tools apply to both publishers and buyers — data suppliers, data exchanges, data aggregators and tools to manage data.
And then there's Google, the omnipresent force that has assets everywhere in the system.
Are you still with me? I'd suggest we all get posters of this, but it changes too often to keep track of anyway.
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I have this hanging over my desk now! Although it looks confusing, it's remarkably useful in seeing how all these parts flow into each other and knowing who the players out there are. Thanks Ellie!