I caught up with Rubinstain to muse about real time. Here are excerpts from the conversation. 

Data & Programmatic Insider:  How real time is real time and what is required to reach consumers in the moment?

Rubinstain:  Real times means tens of milliseconds. What we’re looking for in the moment is quality, safe and suitable ads to be matched with content opportunities on which we bid in native programmatic auctions.

Historical campaign data and supply data is run on a continuous base to provide real-time technology with the information we can use in our auction and ranking process to select only safe ads and the most suitable, relevant, engaging and monetizable ads. In other words, we’ll know the types of ads to serve based on historical campaign performance. We can analyze the relevant campaigns in real-time to serve the ad that will perform best based on the demand for the ad on that publisher site or source for the supply.

D&PI:  Where is the data pulled from to stay in the moment?

Rubinstain:  The data comes from our supply sources and publishers after we verify the quality. We integrate technologies with companies like GeoEdge and others, as well as our historical data based on campaigns for advertisers, publishers, users and supply sources through a proprietary machine learning and AI technology. Amazon Web Services hosts it. The quality and safety of each ad is vetted in real-time using all our data sources before the ad is bid in the auction.

D&PI:  How does programmatic work with real time?

Rubinstain:  Programmatic is auctioning technology run in tens of milliseconds for bidding on ad impressions and placements that was developed for real-time transactions. But to make smart transactions in real time, we need historical data to ensure that we’re making the best decisions in the moment. This historical data helps us to rank the options, so the programmatic auction results can be precise and optimize campaign performance. 

Think of a restaurant menu with millions of items. But let’s say quality, suitability and relevance ranking data show that 90% of guests between the ages of 6 and 10 either order pizza, pasta or hamburgers -- we can offer only these options, ranked, once we’ve identified that the guest is between the ages of 6 and 10 years old.

D&PI:  What is my6sense working on and how will it change the industry in 2019?

Rubinstain:  We are working on a range of technology solutions that will improve the effectiveness of programmatic advertising by enabling our supply partners to benefit from real-time exposure to more ad and demand sources. Our goal is to make native programmatic pervasive for publishers and advertisers.