What is AdTech, Anyway?

Advertising Technology (AdTech) refers to any technology or media platform that supports the advertising industry. This is a vast industry with many players in it. Check out the Marketing Technology Lumascape for a full picture of the various AdTech companies out there.

Ad servers host display and CTV creatives, making a creative swaps easy and centralized. They also serve to deduplicate conversions across all supply partners, among various other benefits.

Demand Side Platforms (DSP) is the buy-side tech used to access and bid on display, native, CTV, etc, inventory across the internet. DSPs allow you to set the campaign targeting parameters and allow the algorithms to optimize to your goal.

Supply Side Platforms (SSP) is the supply-side tech used by publishers and ad networks to make their ad inventory available to advertisers to bid on.

Data Management Platform (DMP) is where an advertiser can upload their customers PII, match it to data segments from 3rd party companies, and then send those audience segments to the various media platforms for activation.

Social Media Networks are the popular platforms that people use to connect to each other, or to addictive scrolling content, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, SnapChat, etc. These platforms are offered to the public for free so that they may generate advertising revenue.

Search is largely dominated by Google, but also means Bing, Yahoo, etc.

Brand Safety companies like IAS and DoubleVerify offer solutions to completely block the advertisers ad from appearing on unapproved content, or less extreme options like more transparent reporting.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the different types of AdTech companies, but you get the point. Working in any of these (and more) AdTech platforms requires some specialized knowledge and a lot of setup time. That's where we come in! You create the strategy and we can do the tedious setup work for you.