Exchanges / DSP’s & RTB’s

By Ashutosh Joshi on February 1, 2012 4 Comments / 1458 views

I have been dealing with online advertising for quite sometime in both the Indian and the International markets (US/UK/CA), in terms of understanding of the medium the Indian agencies and advertisers are far behind then their counterparts in the west. Without Stereotyping anyone here, I still wonder why Online Marketplace and Exchanges or RTB platforms and DSP’s havent entered in the Indian Market? The interesting factor is that most of the back end technology and operations team for DSPs such as Pubmatic, Audience Science and Adjug, but yet they dont cater to a single Indian Advertiser? Is this because of lack of quality at the agency level or lack of understanding at the client level. Also from a publisher (website) point of view would they be willing to try out selling their inventory in this format rather than direct sales?

Comments

Ashutosh Joshi

4 Comments

Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal February 2, 2012, 7:16 am

Excellent question.

I am going to request my colleague Salil Mahadik to answer this in detail.
Salil Mahadik February 3, 2012, 1:10 pm

Thanks, Alok!

Ashutosh, it’s due to the lack of RTB platforms and DSPs in the Indian market. This being said, PubMatic has been very aggressive in promoting their RTB platform in India lately, educating Indian advertisers and publishers about the benefits of RTB. Google is already promoting its DoubleClick Ad Exchange and would definitely promote its newly acquired DSP, Invite Media. As regards the publisher, it will definitely be beneficial for them to use Ad Exchanges and RTB platforms for increasing yields on their remnant ad inventory (premium ad inventory being monetised through direct sales efforts) which accounts to about 50% to sometimes 75% of their overall ad inventory.
Ashutosh Joshi February 3, 2012, 1:19 pm

Thanks Salil, Couple of questions

1) How difficult would it be to educate the Indian website owners and publishers ? Since in my experience they dont want to get out of the comfort zone of fixed pricing models while an RTB and Exchange works mostly on dynamic cpm’s

2) Why arent the Agencies being proactive in this regards?
Salil Mahadik February 4, 2012, 3:31 pm

Ashutosh… answering your queries:

1. I don’t think that publishers are in any kind of comfort zone. They didn’t have any choice until now other than be satisfied with the eCPMs generated by ad networks for their remnant ad inventory. But now with Google entering the fray, it won’t take them long to adapt to the DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

2. Agencies operate within the options available to them. As soon as there’s a considerable mass of publishers on the Ad Exchanges, they will start plugging their client campaigns on to the Ad Exchanges. In fact, Google will make their job easy since they are already buying for their clients on the Google Display Network. They can benefit further through Invite Media which will allow them to buy from multiple ad exchanges in real time.