Every marketer, it seems, wants to participate in real-time bidding (RTB). But what is it that they really want?

They want an ability to price (price, not target!) a particular impression in real-time. Based on the secret-sauce business logic and data science. Fair enough.

But that secret sauce, part of their core competence, is just the tip of the iceberg — and the submerged part is all that is required to keep that tip above water. To wit:

• Designing, developing, testing and maintaining actual code for the UI for targeting, the bidder for bidding, reporting, and data management
• Scaling and deploying such code in some infrastructure (own data center,
  clouds like AWS, GCE, Azure), etc.
• Integrating with all exchanges of interest, including the following steps:
  • Code: passing functional tests (understanding the exchange’s requirements for parsing request and sending response)
  • Infrastructure: ensuring the response is being sent to the exchange within the double-digit-millisecond limit
  • Scaling: As above, but under real load (hundreds of thousands of queries per second)
  • Business: Paperwork to ensure seat on the exchange, including credit agreements when necessary
• Operations: Ongoing monitoring of the operations, including technical (increased latency) and business (low fill level, high disapproval level) concerns (whether these concerns are triggered by clients, exchange partners or,
  ideally, pro-actively addressed internally.

None of which is their core competence. We propose to address the underwater part. It’ll be exciting.

Enter OpenDSP. We got something cool coming up here. Stay tuned.

Watch this space, and by this space I mean this blog, this GitHub account.