MediaMath publicly announced the launch of its updated Terminal One platform last week.
GM Anthony Katsur of MediaMath discussed the new platform and how agencies are working with it.
AdExchanger.com: How are agencies working with your TerminalOne platform today?
AK: Agencies and Holding Companies work with Terminal One in three primary ways:
1. Self-service – The agency directly manages their campaigns via the Terminal One interface, leveraging our insights, analytics, bidders, pixel servers and optimization. They have full control over every aspect of campaign creation, targeting, data buying, optimization and analysis. Everything a real time media buyer needs to create and manage a real time trading desk is in Terminal One. Our standard implementation package includes two days of on-site training for all Terminal One operators where we share core operational principles as well as fundamental best practices to achieve the very best performance for every campaign.
2. Facilitated Platform – Take all the core tenets of our self service offering, add a professional Terminal One operator driving the platform on site and you have Facilitated Platform. Facilitated Platform supports clients requiring the direct operation of Terminal One, but either don’t have the resources in house or are new to real time media trading. The engagement can be as short as a month or extend for several months, even years if the client so desires. The additional benefit of facilitated platform is that it allows us to share best practices and learnings with our clients on-site, over a longer period of time.
3. Federated Platform – Terminal One is a fully modular suite of components. Everything from our optimization, bidders, cookie engine, pixel servers and UI can be licensed piecemeal by our clients. For example, some clients have built out their own pixel servers or want to leverage their own optimization. That’s fine, either plug into our architecture leveraging our API’s, bring your own pixels, own algorithm or hook our core components into your legacy buying or reporting platform and leverage our optimization and highly scalable bidders. We can also operate standalone Terminal One instances in our data centers on behalf of our clients in the event they want complete segmentation.
Is MediaMath finding that agencies have the bandwidth to buy media using the TerminalOne platform directly? Or, do they prefer working with a services layer at MediaMath which does the heavy lifting of data integration, for example?
Both. Holding cos. and agencies are in different stages of their media buying evolution. Clients can and do mix and match how they work with us. They’re more than welcome to work with MediaMath in a blended fashion, running some campaigns themselves on Terminal One or letting us drive their seat remotely. They have complete transparency to our order of operations no matter how they engage.
Is TerminalOne a demand-side platform? Or would you say it’s the user interface to MediaMath’s DSP?
Terminal One is a fully functional stand alone demand-side platform consisting of not only a UI, but all the core components of which a quality DSP is comprised – bidders, optimization, pixel engine, reporting and analytics, APIs to all components. It is available for any and all to use.
When will TerminalOne start offering the ability to buy media across other channels such as search, mobile and video? Any updates coming to the platform in the next 6-12 months that you see as particularly important that you can share?
We support those types of buys today. We can and do support integrations with search data, mobile and video supply. Since there is scarcity of some of those media types, our Professional Services and Supply team works with our clients and supply partners to onboard the appropriate supply mix to satisfy the needs of their campaign.
Terminal One is always evolving to meet the high demands of our clients. We’re constantly iterating on our design and releasing new features on a monthly basis. We operate in an incredibly dynamic landscape and need to be as flexible a technology and product company as possible. Our roadmap is constantly oriented towards the supporting the success of our agency and holding company clients. Future builds of Terminal One will further streamline the buying process, expose more dials of our optimization, even greater business intelligence and forecasting. Our next generation release is just the beginning.
By John Ebbert
