Hivestack has a Yield Optimization solution to make it easier for an out of home (OOH) company to connect its platform with multiple Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) [think Hivestack, Vistar, Place Exchange, Adomni, OneScreen.ai…]. Billboard Insider spoke with Hivestack Director of Publisher Development Mike Neel about the product
Last year you joined Hivestack after spending nearly 7 years at Admobilize. What attracted you to Hivestack?
The product and the people. I got my start in out of home (OOH) by joining Admobilize right out of college. Admobilize was only two years old at that point. Seven years later we got acquired. I met a ton of people along the way, in the US and internationally. I was lucky enough to be partners with Ayuda and then Hivestack while at AdMobilize, where I met Andreas Soupliotis, Hivestack Founder and CEO. When I left Admobilize last summer I spoke with Hivestack and appreciated their vision and felt the timing was right to join.
What are you doing at Hivestack?
I’m working with media owners in the US and in some cases globally. I’m on the ad server team and responsible for introducing the concept of header bidding to DOOH.
What is header bidding?
Header bidding began in the online world in 2015 – 2016. Header bidding is a tool that allows media owners to offer their inventory to multiple Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) at the same time. The primary goal is to find the highest CPM for any given ad request. Today, media owners want to integrate with as many SSPs as possible, particularly SSPs that are bringing new money into the industry, and this has created a challenge. Some companies have built mediation layers or waterfalls to manage multiple SSPs. Header bidding is designed to not only manage, but optimize the prioritization around working with multiple SSPs.
An SSP is a company like Hivestack, Vistar, or Place Exchange. Media owners are offering inventory to Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), which allow an advertiser to plan, activate, and measure DOOH campaigns using automation. Today, each media owner is calling every SSP individually via some sort of method. This process has worked up to this point, but what we see now is that, with the growth of programmatic and with more SSPs entering the market, the problem of managing all of these relationships becomes harder to navigate. Header bidding and yield optimization solve this problem and create more value for DOOH.
Does the header show the inventory to all the SSPs at the same time?
It works on the basis of a unified auction framework, which is simply an auction of auctions. So every SSP like Hivestack holds some sort of auction to find the best buyer for an available ad slot. What a yield optimization solution does is to unify that process. At Hivestack we hold an auction of all the winners of all the SSPs and take the highest bidder out of that group. It evolves programmatic trading into a more data driven technology.
Whose code runs the unified auction?
We’re building unique coding and features within our ad server that integrate with third party SSPs to hold the auction before delivering the ad to the available screen(s).
Benefits for ad buyers
For the buy side (e.g. agencies and advertisers), it gives them more quality inventory on a regular basis. This increases transparency, which omnichannel buyers are really looking for in OOH. This also will ensure that buyers reach their target audiences in the most effective way.
Benefits for out of home companies
For the sell side, it maximizes CPMs for programmatic revenue streams and saves media owners time/cost by removing the need to build their own mediation layers.
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