Is real-time bidding the future? Zach Coelius, CEO of demand-side platform Triggit, thinks it is. The reason, believes Coelius, is that when RTB offers price transparency and aggregates multiple inventory sources, it allows buyers to target narrow audience segments at scale, restricting buys to purchases that match a pre-determined quality standard.
Coelius, who counts Kodak, Mazda and Orbitz among Triggit’s clients, also believes that integrating the feedback loop of online and offline transactions is essential to maintaining a competitive edge and adapting to advertisers’ increasing demand for more accurate, comprehensive data.
“The amount of high-level inventory now available on the exchanges has created a very different marketplace than what existed two or three years ago,” said Coelius. “Before if you were to sell inventory to marketers you either had to own it or you had to work with one ad network, there was only so much opportunity for scale that could be offered to marketers. Now we have access to more inventory than any ad network or publisher ever had.”
That scale allows Triggit, which built its own RTB and analytics platform, to not only upgrade and test optimization technology across a vast inventory, but it permits advertisers to enforce rules of engagement with ad exchanges that simply aren’t possible with a single exchange.
“We allow clients to download data from their websites and CRMs and execute those insights across multiple exchanges,” stated Coelius. The key, believes Coelius, is staying away from “poor quality” and “non-transparent” inventory.
“RTB will continue to grow. It’s still a young part of the industry and it represents a small portion of dollars spend on internet advertising, but it’s been proven that it’s a better way to buy inventory,” said Coelius. “It’s more efficient, there’s less waste. It means higher prices for publishers, and I believe in the next few years the majority of ad buys will be executed this way because it’s very transparent and scalable. It allows you to execute buys across these massive pools of inventory and really do amazing things that weren’t possible a few years ago.”
