Supply-side platform OpenX announced Monday that it is deepening its partnership with ad agency Horizon Media by integrating Horizon’s blu.ID into the OpenX platform.
The integration is the latest sign that agencies are getting serious about supply-path optimization (SPO) by forging direct relationships with SSPs. These SPO partnerships are being spurred by buyer demands to bypass multi-hop supply chains and eliminate wasteful emissions produced by convoluted programmatic auctions.
The integration also illustrates the need for SSPs to differentiate themselves from their peers by providing publishers and broadcasters with unique connections to demand sources, said Brian Chisholm, SVP of strategic partnerships at OpenX.
By integrating Horizon Media’s blu.ID into its platform, OpenX provides its publishers a source of unique demand they can’t get from other SSPs.
The growing push to cut down on emissions produced by programmatic advertising also influenced the deal.
This type of direct connection reduces the processing power required to run auctions in two main ways. First, Horizon Media’s clients can now buy inventory directly from OpenX without relying on resellers or intermediaries. Second, buyers and sellers already have their identity graphs matched within the platform, so less data processing needs to happen in real time. Plus, OpenX claims to run a carbon-neutral platform.
In addition to creating a more environmentally friendly supply path, the integration made sense because OpenX audiences tend to drive business outcomes for Horizon Media’s clients, said Horizon EVP and Chief Data Officer Laura McElhinney.
Now Horizon Media clients can combine the identity graphs they’ve created in Horizon’s data platform with OpenX’s OpenAudience data platform to target individual users who are associated with a blu.ID.
Advertisers can use Horizon’s blu.ID to combine PII licensed from TransUnion with advertiser first-party data to build audience graphs. The blu.ID integration allows all that hashed data to be packaged into a deal ID that can be transacted on within OpenX’s SSP.
Using a deal ID means advertisers can reach more potential impressions that would otherwise be lost on the open web as bid requests pass through traffic-shaping filters from SSPs and queries-per-second (QPS) filters via DSPs, Chisholm said.
“The single match enables us to distribute this deal ID to any DSP that’s integrated with OpenX,” Chisholm said. “And that means that there’s not data being pushed around to a bunch of different places, which could lead to leakage.”
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Combining audiences in this fashion allows advertisers to target known users and prospect for potential new users based on first-party data from both buyers and sellers.
Advertisers can create custom audiences across OpenX’s entire publisher ecosystem. And if buyers want to buy audiences from a particular publisher, they can do so through private marketplaces (PMPs).
The speed of the integration will also be an advantage for Horizon clients. Advertisers can create a custom audience and deliver ads to that audience in the same day. Without a direct integration with an SSP, it can sometimes take seven to 10 days for the audience-creation-to-delivery process to play out, McElhinney said.
Same-day delivery also gives advertisers the ability to be more flexible in their ad spend, which is especially important given today’s tough macroeconomic environment.
“If a campaign or an audience isn’t working, and we’re not seeing any results, you can quickly shift and create a new audience or suppress an audience and make real-time optimization changes,” McElhinney said.
The integration will provide Horizon Media more transparency into match rates between buyer and seller audiences, as well as what OpenX inventory their clients are buying, McElhinney said. With that information, the agency will improve its understanding of how clients reach their target audiences across all of OpenX’s inventory, which reduces time spent on channel planning and media mix modeling.
Although this is Horizon Media’s first formal announcement of an ID integration with an SSP, the agency has been partnering directly with SSPs for at least the past four years, McElhinney said, and it plans to continue to pursue these types of deals going forward.
