It’s All B2B to Me: Meet Demandbase’s B2B DSP Piper!

You wouldn’t use Yelp to reach your business prospects, so why use B2C tech for your account-based advertising?

Unveiling Piper – Demandbase’s Account-Based Marketing DSP

As you may have heard, Demandbase has built our own B2B Demand Side Platform (DSP) named Piper over the course of many years in order to serve advertising impressions to the buying committees within the accounts you want to reach. What we often don’t talk about is why we embarked on creating this product from scratch, compared to simply partnering with existing DSPs, like other ABM platforms have done.

Creating and deploying the only Account-Based Marketing DSP in the market gives us some unique advantages that directly benefit our customers, resulting in one of the most optimal advertising channels that exists today for B2B. In short:

• Our DSP understands accounts, not consumers
• The pacing of every campaign and balance of impressions across accounts is possible
• We’re able to target the right individuals within the accounts

With these core advantages in mind, we’ve compiled a list of our top 10 reasons why using our DSP, Piper, will give you better results – but this isn’t just any old listicle. This is actually updated and expanded content that builds upon our 2020 piece “Top Reasons Why a B2B DSP is better than a B2C DSP,” and the best part is that it compares what you would experience with Piper versus what you typically get with other providers.

1.Higher Quality Impressions – No Wasted Spend

• Piper: We take data such as the IP address and/or cookies, the historical intent, the content on the page, and the current pacing of your campaign under consideration before bidding for the impression.
• Other DSP: Primarily built for fast decisions and transactions, optimized for quantity and not quality (cost savings). A different methodology that is unable to reach multiple recommenders, influencers and decision makers within product evaluation committees.

2.Identification & Attributes – Reaching the Correct People

• Piper: On the bidstream (real-time ad auctions), Demandbase can identify your target accounts by their corporate or home network IP, or a browser cookie (account, industry, revenue, etc.).
• Other DSP: Heavily reliant on cookies as a major identifier that are associated with a persona (not a company). They utilize consumer-related data categories such as gender, age, income, and interests to build the identities of web visitors.

3.Publisher Properties – Brand Safety is a Top Priority

• Piper: Provides full control over which publishers’ ads are served on and which pages within the publishers to use. This results in the Demandbase white-list of B2B safe inventory, never putting your brand at risk.
• Other DSP: Offers advertising on non-specific pages (volume + cheap). Since segments are based on cookies, less concern is placed on the ad environment. We’ve seen ads for our competitors on sites like TMZ, Urban Dictionary, and discredited (actual fake news) fringe political sites.

4.Transparency – Applying an Account Lens to Each Campaign

• Piper: Able to provide transparent account-level reporting for each campaign, driven by top performing publishers and creatives, along with custom reports with any campaign parameters.
• Other DSP: Limited. Trying to advertise to buying committees within accounts on a platform designed for retail  doesn’t allow strong account-level reporting. Insights become fragmented, difficult, and unreliable.

5.Spend Optimization – Always On

• Piper: All campaigns are optimized for the highest possible business outcomes (beyond CPM and CPC). The ability to optimize by account lift, engagement, and account reach occurs automatically.
• Other DSP: Optimizations are mainly to save costs, to achieve the lowest possible CPM and CPC. This is an important feature of all other DSPs because the primary advertisers are B2C companies. Always remember that for B2B purposes, a lower CPM does not equate to better outcomes.

6.ABX Integration – You Have Enough to Worry About

• Piper: Having our own DSP fully integrated into our ABX Cloud allows for consistent, cross-channel segmentation and activation. This includes using the same segmentation for web personalization campaigns, and more.
• Other DSP: The exact segmentation within a competitors platform is lost when syncing to their partnered DSP. Using a third-party DSP results in loss of data in both the input and output back to our competitors’ platform.

7.Frequency Capping – Avoiding a Big Problem

• Piper: The “pacing” of each campaign and the “balancing” of impressions are managed automatically. This results in an even distribution of impressions across all accounts and individuals, ensuring each account is treated the same way.
• Other DSP: Because they don’t understand the concept of accounts, they are unable to limit impressions at the account level. This results in an unequal distribution of impressions across the accounts in your campaign. However, they do allow frequency capping at the individual/device level.

8.ROI Measurement Measure What Matters

• Piper: Campaign measurement highlights sales outcomes such as pipeline and revenue (account level) as opposed typical consumer-related advertising metrics (which is also available).
• Other DSP: Heavy emphasis on cost-per-click, which is what typical consumer-based digital marketers are used to. What’s missing, however, is how it moves the needle on ABX outcomes (pipeline and revenue).

9.Pricing Model – Consistent & Future Planning

• Piper: A dynamic (or fixed) CPM. This allows you to correctly plan your yearly budget with no hidden costs or extra charges.
• Other DSP: Each competitor of ours has a different pricing model, but the common theme among them is hidden costs. Although they may offer a lower CPM than Demandbase, be cognizant of the total cost of ownership. Oftentimes they will limit the number of campaigns you can run and/or limit the number of accounts you may advertise to on a monthly basis.

10.Cookieless Ready – A Safe, Long-Term Partnership

• Piper: Because we have complete control over our DSP, we can manage our destiny in the event of a cookieless environment. In fact, we’ve already worked on methods that have shown increased campaign performance during customer campaign tests.
• Other DSP: They will first determine how to better identify consumers, not accounts. This puts all competitors that rely on cookies for B2B advertising in a tough position since they’re dependent on the innovation of others.

We pride ourselves on being truly end-to-end, versus being a point solution that layers third-party segments, often with unreliable and untargeted B2C data. We aren’t a media agency, nor do we want to compete with yours. Rather, we partner with your agency to deliver on your ABM outcomes.

If you’re still unclear of the benefits or if you want to talk through possible scenarios – regardless of whether you’re in the market for a B2B Advertising Solution – please contact us. We’d love to address your concerns, listen to your ideas, and explore your company’s potential for growth and success in the realm of B2B account-based advertising.