• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, February 24, 2016

Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are plentiful, and marketers often use several.  But why?

That was one topic discussed during the Tuesday panel “Buying Into The Audience-Powered DSP” at MediaPost’s Programmatic Insider Summit. Panel moderator Keith Pieper, VP, technology, IMM began by asking,  “What’s a DSP?"

It’s a buying platform that enables procurement of media, according to Dustin Engel, head of analytics & data activation at PMG.

“I use five DSPs -- MediaMath, AOL, DoubleClick Bid Manager, TubeMogul and The TradeDesk -- and I’ve had to build data infrastructure around them,” Engel said. Video is popular for the brands he works with, so he needs to build specific solutions for video. “Our brands are starting to dabble in TV and there’s a lot of client first-party data. I think TV will be a good fit for them,” Engel noted.

Ryan Mcarthur, EVP, U.S. Interactive Media, uses five DSPs and said he’s working on programmatic and addressable TV as well as radio. “Google, Facebook, Amazon and AOL/Verizon are sitting on mountains of first-party data,” he noted.

Pieper said he uses anywhere from five to 10 DSPs.

“As clients require more flexiblity, we can look at the combinations of DSPs. The IT and attribution aspects are complicated with multiple DSPs,” Engel explained. “We’ve built a tool with business rules built in, so we know what the ad is, how it performed, where it went and the targeting approach. We get a clean view into the overall performance.”

Debating the benefits and disadvantages of having multiple DSPs, McArthur said that they all have different strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis video, mobile and display. Some DSPs don’t do display as well as others. "Believe me, we’d all love to use one DSP,”  he said.

McArthur uses probabilistic matching for targeting but said it isn’t very good. The goal, he said, is to get to deterministic modeling. “We can’t rely on cookies and probabilistic data. We need more deterministic data: from Google, Facebook and others.”

Engel said on the deterministic side, Facebook and Google certainly have the keys to the kingdom: “Facebook’s reach is unreal. We’re trying to be patient, but there’s a lot of ‘wait and see’ while they go through all checks and balances,” he said, referring to privacy issues. “When we do audience matching, we see a 30% to 40% match rate, but with Facebook, we see 70%.” In fact, Facebook had planned its own version of a DSP but pulled the plug on LiveRail recently.

PMG’s Engel said he advocates that clients lease the agency’s technology while they build their own tech stack. “We can remain in a strategy/consulting role.”

One challenge is the ongoing maintenance of infrastructure. “What happens when stuff breaks?” asked IMM’s Pieper.