What is a Demand-Side Platform (DSP)? Optimize your B2B Advertising Spend with the Right DSP What is a Demand-Side Platform (DSP)? A demand-side platform (DSP) is software that provides digital marketers access to advertising inventory across multiple ad exchanges through a single interface. Digital marketers manage their bid and pricing strategies within the DSP for serving competitive advertising across the web. How does a DSP work? To better understand a DSP, it’s important to also become familiar with the role of publishers, publisher ad servers, supply-side platforms (SSPs), and ad exchanges. All of these technologies work together to serve the final ad to the end user. It all starts with a publisher. Publishers create digital content such as news, entertainment, educational information, etc. and publish it on their websites to attract visitors. Publishers then sell ad space on their sites to advertisers who want to reach their visitors. When a visitor lands on a publisher’s website, the browser immediately connects to the publisher’s ad server. The ad server then generates the advertising content that is ultimately served on the website. This server tells the browser which ad to serve. These ad servers also decide which company should be given the ability to advertise during the impression opportunity. Many times, these impression opportunities are sent to the open ad market, where they might get a better deal. To accomplish this, the publisher ad server connects to supply-side platforms (SSP). A supply-side platform (SSP) is what publishers use to monetize their programmatic ad inventory. SSPs can apply additional data attributes associated with the web visitor. For example, they may have previously seen the same visitor somewhere else. All the information the SSP gathers about the web visitor (for the impression opportunity) is then sent to ad exchanges. Ad exchanges are where the real-time bidding process takes place for displaying online advertising. They facilitate the buying and selling of advertising impressions. These exchanges connect to multiple demand-side platforms (DSPs) and even different ad exchanges. And that’s how a DSP works and how we see digital ads across the web on different sites. Here’s a simplistic illustration of the workflow: Demandbase’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) Demandbase has a singular advantage over other advertising vendors because we built our own demand-side platform (DSP). Our DSP was specifically designed to optimize impressions for business-to-business (B2B) outcomes. When our DSP connects to ad exchanges, we focus on: Reaching the right accounts Reaching the right people within those accounts Our DSP balances your budget across all the accounts on your list, so you don’t spend it all on just a few large accounts with a lot of web visitors. The result? Maximized value of every B2B digital marketing dollar. do not have the same level of B2B optimizations that Demandbase’s DSP has. With other vendor platforms, you will ultimately spend your B2B digital marketing dollars much less efficiently. Having a true B2B DSP makes a big difference. That’s why we like to say, “Don’t Bring Consumer Adtech to a B2B Advertising Fight.” Learn More about DSP
