• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 12, 2014

engage:BDR is rolling out in beta a platform that provides cross-device targeting across households with multiple computers and mobile devices. It will also allow brands to identify and optimize media buys through a demand-side platform that shows high viewability scores.

"A lot of inventory sold on a DSP is generally remnant and serves below the fold," said Ted Dhanik, CEO at engage:BDR. "We measure viewability now across every impression we serve, and it's pretty scary."

Dhanik calls the platform First-Impression. He believes viewability will "reinvigorate" display advertising.

engage:BDR is scoring points with brands. One of its platforms that is built around proprietary machine learning technology, along with the ability to optimize bids, earned the company a No.1 spot on comScore's March 2014 list for display ads by serving ads to 97% of the U.S. online market during the month. This means the company out-served Rubicon Project, Google Ad Network, Conversant, Advertising.com, Criteo, and Casale Media during that month.

Aside from the talented staff and engineers, Dhanik points to the technology as being the key behind the company's success. One hundred DSPs might make the same bid request, which saturates the market, but the platform measures times in each hour of every day to make the most sense of bids per site and placement. "We're painting a graph to bid on one impression every minute on every site," he said, adding that the bids are high to catalog the prices that win the bid. "We know the peaks and valleys, along with the maximum bid prices for the clients."

He said mapping out the delta between the win and bid prices to identify the lowest price allows engage:BDR to "double-down" and take all the inventory. That enables the company to gain more volume and compete in a less saturated environment. The company also measures pacing, dayparting and viewablilty by time of day. A high viewability score and low cost makes the perfect bid, he said.