Real-time bidding (RTB)
In practice, for a UK buyer
The paragraph above is the neutral answer. This is the part a vendor glossary leaves out.
Two consequences a buyer feels. Price is set per impression rather than per campaign, so a plan's CPM is a forecast rather than a rate. And the auction is where most of the ad tech fee stack is levied, which is why the cumulative take between advertiser and publisher can be far larger than any single platform's disclosed rate.
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.
Ad exchange
A marketplace in which advertising impressions are auctioned between demand-side platforms buying and supply-side platforms selling. It matches bids to inventory in the milliseconds between a page or stream starting to load and the advert appearing.
CPM
The cost of one thousand advertising impressions, and the standard price unit for advertising bought on attention rather than on action. Television, streaming, audio, out-of-home and cinema are all quoted this way.
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.
Private marketplace (PMP)
A negotiated arrangement in which a publisher makes specific inventory available to specific buyers at agreed terms, transacted programmatically through a deal identifier rather than in the open auction.
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