Amazon Ads, Google DoubleClick & the Ad Tech Value Chain

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How does Sizmek, and their assets, compare?

Sizmek was more on the advertiser side than it was on the publisher side. For those advertisers – and there are a lot of them – who wanted an independent ad tracking system, that wasn’t associated with Google or any of the big tech players, Sizmek provided a very strong alternative. There are two things. It was a good pipe of technology that kept things running, but it was also a measurement pipe, just to make sure. A publisher, at the end of a campaign, might say, Mr Advertiser, we’ve delivered this number of banners and then the advertiser says, hang on, we’ve only seen this number and the Sizmek number is the number that we trust because we know that that technology only delivers when you deliver. Actually, one of the things that is quite interesting is, in some markets where publishers are, perhaps, not comfortable having that type of technology, because they want to deliver the biggest revenue possible, it doesn’t always work for them if the ad technology doesn’t deliver as much as it should do, but it is what it is.

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In the DOJ complaint, they said that AdX has 50% market share.

The thing is that because Google's connected with publishers, then publishers can drop inventory they haven't sold into the Google AdX exchange. This is what publishers will call 'waterfall systems'. When a page is called on a website, or on an app, they'll go, have we got a paid for ad that our team has sold? Yes/no. If they have, then they push that out. That may be on a Google technology; it doesn't have to be on the Google technology, but it's more than likely it is. Then the waterfall will go, actually, if you haven't got an ad, we’ll then go to another place and see what other things we've got. There's a variety of different exchanges and models for that. There are people called the SSPs, who sit in between, who try and optimize for publishers, what their yield is for each time they have to go to the waterfall. Sometimes that'll be through Google AdX, sometimes it might be through another exchange, or another supply.

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In terms of other exchanges, who are the big other players in that, because from the DOJ, they say it's 50%?

Most of these SSPs are sort of exchanges as well. They both provide a service to the publishers, but create an exchange on the back end of that. That's how it generally works. There are some other technologies, people trying to provide exchanges, but the thing about exchange, you have to have scale. You have to be constantly providing money back to your stakeholders, your publishers and stuff to make it work. You've got to keep working on that. The Magnites, the Index, PubMatic, they're all pretty much the same exchanges that have been there. That's the other market share but I don't think they've reached optimal scale yet.

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