• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 25, 2022

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent To PubWise, a  platform born from header bidding and pre-bid strategies, that significantly reduces bid requests to achieve performance for supply-and-demand advertising partners. The patent, No. 11288699, is related to demand-path optimization.

“We started in 2006 as a gaming company doing social networking for video gamers,” said PubWise Founder and CTO Stephen Johnston. “Then we looked at other opportunities like gaming news and information, which we started in 2012.”

Around 2017, when header bidding emerged, Johnston realized he could build privacy-compliant technology that optimizes bidstream and header bidding based on audiences.

The patent’s technology, which reduced the bid requests from the publisher as much as 40%, improves and configures the behavior of pre-bid, a method for delivery advertising.

It runs in the browser, moves the logic of the winning bid for the ad into the browser and provides a fair auction, where all the participants bid against each other, as opposed to waterfall building, where the advertiser receives subsequent bids.

“We also reduce the carbon footprint of programmatic transactions,” Johnston said. “It reduces the amount of energy spent because it's not even injected into the system."

PubWise, which supports its own exchange and demand-side platform (DSP), optimizes requests across tens of thousands of options worldwide. It can manage thousands of configurations across the globe without adding additional latency and human effort.

The company is using the technology, with several other patents under consideration by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

At the time that Johnston submitted the patent, about four years ago, “the market wasn’t ready in the way we thought of it back then,” he said. “Yes, it was an existing problem. The industry just wanted to get pre-bid working.”

As the adoption continued, the problem became getting the same level of configuration and optimization as previous methods.

Johnston also saw the interception of machine learning and cloud services that in the future would provide a level of optimization for high volumes of bidding.

When asked who would license this technology, Johnston said that would be any company with a pre-bid wrapper or managed platform for pre-bid.

The patent -- titled Digital Advertising Platform With Demand Path Optimization -- provides a method for a digital advertising system that includes “at least one processor configured to execute a plurality of functional modules including an analytics module to receive and analyze client attributes associated with a website visitor and a requested website to define an analytics event. The analytics module ingests and enriches data within the analytics event and provides it to a machine learning module that generates prediction models for potential bids.”

A management platform then receives the bidding prediction and generates candidate configurations.

An optimization module receives the data and applies weights and additional features to select a configuration to generate an optimized script for the selected configuration. A deployment module receives the optimized script and delivers the script to the website visitor.

The patent is the first of several that PubWise filed related to pre-bid optimization, OpenRTB bid stream compression, traffic shaping and demand-path optimization, which collectively comprise its Smart Path Optimization Technology suite.

Until now, supply-path optimization (SPO) optimized publisher supply to the buyer, while demand-path optimization (DPO) optimized demand to the seller, according to the company.

PubWise achieves both objectives, using machine learning to optimize dynamically across the programmatic supply chain and continuously learning to improve performance over time.

The technology is used on PubWise’s licensed properties, and a few enterprise customers through software as a service (SaaS).