Ad exchange
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Mostly invisible to a buyer, and mostly should be — except that each hop in the chain takes a margin, and the number of hops is rarely disclosed. Supply-path transparency, meaning a published account of which intermediaries a bid passes through, is something the largest advertisers now demand and smaller ones almost never get.
What this one connects to
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Supply-side platform (SSP)
Software a publisher uses to sell its advertising inventory to many buyers at once, running the auction and setting price floors. It sits on the seller's side of the same market a DSP buys from.
Demand-side platform (DSP)
Software an advertiser uses to buy advertising across many publishers through one interface, bidding on impressions in real time. It sits on the buyer's side of the market and charges a fee, usually a percentage of the media spent through it.
Real-time bidding (RTB)
The auction mechanism underneath most programmatic advertising: when an impression becomes available, buyers are invited to bid on it and the winner's advert is served, all within roughly a hundred milliseconds.
Ad tech tax
The cumulative share of an advertiser's budget taken by the intermediaries between advertiser and publisher — demand platform, exchange, supply platform, data vendors, verification — none of which individually looks large.
More on buying and commercials
How media is transacted and where the money goes. The terms in this group are the ones a fee conversation turns on.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience and watch it compile into seven targeting specifications, each with the score for how much of the definition survived.
Talk it through