• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, April 29, 2014

Simpli.fi, a demand-side platform (DSP), on Tuesday announced integrations with three new ad exchanges: Twitter’s MoPub, Millennial Media and LiveRail.

The partnerships round out Simpli.fi’s platform, giving the company the ability to tout itself as “cross-platform” capable. It now supports display, mobile and video ad buying.

Frost Prioleau, co-founder and CEO of Simpli.fi, spoke with RTM Daily about the new partnerships. 

The company had prior access to mobile inventory through integrations with other exchanges, such as AppNexus and OpenX, but Prioleau said MoPub and Millennial are the first mobile-focused exchanges Simpli.fi has partnered with.

Importantly, Prioleau said the new partnerships open up a host of mobile app inventory. He shared that previously, most of the mobile inventory available to Simpli.fi buyers had been from the mobile Web, which is commonly thought of as one step behind mobile apps.

No less significant is Simpli.fi’s partnership with LiveRail. Prior to tapping into LiveRail’s exchange, Simpli.fi did not have access to video inventory, per Prioleau. 

He said Simpli.fi’s DSP uses “unstructured data” for campaigns, which he believes works well for local-focused campaigns because advertisers can build audiences from scratch using highly specific data. As such, he asserted these partnerships were struck with local advertisers in mind.

“With the growth of mobile -- and especially at the intersection of mobile and local -- we felt it was very important to go out and really bring in some of the leaders in the local inventory space,” Prioleau said. 

“On the video side,” he added, ”we see a lot of demand from local ad networks and newspapers who have video inventory on their sites and are looking to extend reach through a platform like ours.”

Prioleau also hopes these new partnerships will help one of Simpli.fi’s largest client bases: automotive marketers. He sees many automotive advertisers using video ads as well as local calls-to-action.

Inventory from MoPub, Millennial and LiveRail will be immediately available through Simpli.fi’s platform. The company had been beta testing the new partnerships for the past few weeks, and Prioleau said there was “strong [positive] response” from its clients during the beta period. The company has eyes on striking additional mobile and video inventory partnerships.

Simpli.fi has also announced new “optimization algorithms,” which, buzzwords aside, Prioleau claimed are leading to significantly higher click-through rates. The new technology is meant to automatically update campaigns as new data becomes available.

Prioleau said the new algorithms were released earlier this year but had not been announced until now. He said about 9,000 campaigns are currently using the new tech and claimed click-through rates have risen between 50-100% as a result.