A DSP, an SSP, an agency and a publisher walk into a room.
Believe it or not, that isn’t the lead-in to a bad joke. It’s the model used by Medialive, a new AI startup that brings media buyers, sellers and vendors together to collaborate directly in a shared (digital) space.
Joe Prusz, former CRO of Magnite, recently joined the company as CEO and co-founder.
Having every party involved in a campaign able to collaborate in the same place with access to the same information “is actually very sexy,” Prusz said.
(Someone please introduce ad tech folks to wine and chocolate; this isn’t the first time someone has described an AI solution as “sexy.”)
Talk to me
Medialive’s goal is to make the entire media buying process “as easy as a conversation,” said Prusz.
There has always been a communication gap between buyers, sellers and vendors, he said. Medialive brings them together into one “room” where they can communicate about a specific campaign brief.
Whoever is launching a campaign, be it an agency or an individual advertiser, can invite participants into the room, including DSPs, SSPs and all of the publishers included in the brief. There’s a separate chatroom for each publisher, though, to accommodate any proprietary tools or sensitive information they may want to keep confidential from competitors.
Prusz described the room as like Slack or WhatsApp for media buying, where all participants can easily chat and negotiate within a shared space. (And, apparently, use emojis, as per a new update.)
Keeping it brief
With better communication channels comes fewer errors and quicker fixes.
Rather than having to go through a dozen different communication channels to identify the source of a mistake, Medialive’s technology pulls campaign data from all of the relevant APIs, agents, DSPs and SSPs, Prusz said. Medialive then uses AI to look at the setup and immediately pinpoint any errors, such as a mislabeled geographic region or imprecise targeting.
The AI can also read a brief the moment it’s uploaded to the platform, Prusz added, identifying potential problems before the document is even brought into the shared communication space.
And the system doesn’t just identify problems; it fixes them. Medialive’s agent can log into DSP consoles and automatically update targeting parameters and other campaign details, like time of day, based on its own research and by interfacing with agents and chatbots from other vendors.
Also, because the entire platform is centralized, said Prusz, there’s never a situation where a problem can only be solved by one specific person.
“If you’re a manager and your trader is out sick,” he said, you don’t need to dig up the right emails or log into the trader’s account. Instead, you can use natural language prompts to ask the AI about the status of a campaign, and the AI will spell out any necessary steps that need to be taken.
We’re all in this together
But Medialive stresses that it isn’t trying to step on anyone’s toes. DSP and SSPs remain essential players in the digital advertising ecosystem, Prusz said.
SSPs drive value for publishers by increasing yield and showcasing relevant inventory, he said, and DSPs help advertisers target and buy that ad space more efficiently.
“We want to be the enabler in the middle that makes all of those tools communicate better together,” said Prusz. “We don’t want to replace anyone.”
