The DSP space is pretty jammed, but that hasn’t stopped new, specialized demand-side platforms from spawning.
Many are fighting for a sliver of the CTV pie.
There are DSPs for out-of-home, B2B, health care, politics, small businesses and local marketers.
JamLoop is one such DSP. It launched in 2018 with a focus on local CTV advertising, and the digital-style targeting it offers appeals to local advertisers that want to reach as many people as possible within a certain location or region.
More specifically, JamLoop courts small and midsize businesses by pitching planning tools designed to pace smaller marketing budgets throughout a campaign’s flight window without spending too much at once.
Smaller, local advertisers are an “underserved segment,” Founder and CEO Leif Welch tells me. “And that’s what we’re really going after.”
Back to the basics
The majority – around 85% – of JamLoop’s customer base is made up of independent agencies that represent regional advertisers, such as Things UP, a marketing agency for local car dealerships, and Political Communications Advertising, a marketing firm that services political candidates. Other advertisers that buy CTV supply from JamLoop include local banks, hospitals and retailers, such as Jarons Furniture Outlet, which serves the western part of New Jersey.
The rising demand for local streaming inventory is behind programmers’ push to secure new CTV budgets by partnering with DSPs that service local and midsize advertisers. Both NBCUniversal and Disney boasted integrations with 30 DSPs for this purpose during CES earlier this month.
Standing out
But because there are dozens of DSPs trying to win local media budgets, even with a niche focus, JamLoop needed to refine its niche even further.
It pitches itself to buyers as having an ad tech stack built in-house, including a proprietary bidder that Welch says gives the company more control over the data it uses for targeting and the level of transparency it offers. Traditional TV advertisers expect details about where their ads ran, he says.
And speaking of the “where,” streaming gives local advertisers the opportunity to geotarget.
JamLoop can target interest-based audience segments by ZIP code by working with an array of data providers such as Comscore, Acxiom and political data companies L2 and i360. Its reporting dashboard breaks down impression delivery by ZIP code and TV network or app.
It also measures reach, frequency, unique views and video completion rates by household and device as indicators of performance.
Direct contact
Still, streaming is a new frontier for many local advertisers.
JamLoop’s reporting is self-serve, but media buying is only done as a managed service to help these advertisers get more comfortable buying CTV.
“Our focus is working with smaller media buyers that might not have the resources to execute [CTV] campaigns,” Welch says.
As for supply, JamLoop prefers accessing CTV inventory through direct relationships with programmers to ensure it’s only getting high-quality (as in, not fraudulent) inventory.
Two-thirds of the company’s media buys happen through private marketplaces with deal IDs that programmers create for JamLoop clients. In other cases, it buys media through a programmer’s preferred supply-side platform, such as Magnite or FreeWheel.
Either way, Welch says, JamLoop prioritizes direct relationships wherever possible, both with programmers and agencies.
Programmatic CTV might be blossoming, but maintaining direct relationships in TV ad buying is here to stay. 🤝
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