Understanding Display Concepts: How a DCO, DSP and DMP can Work Together

Display used to be simple. Impressions were purchased directly from a publisher. And now, display looks like this:

Source: LUMAscape (http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumascape/)

Fragmented and complex, the display industry has developed into many a large landscape of technologies and offerings. The value is in being able to connect these technologies to work together in advertising campaigns.

One example of a display campaign utilizing multiple vendors is a large scale 1^st party retargeting campaign with dynamically optimized creative served through multiple ad exchanges through a demand side platform.  I’ll start by breaking down what some of these words mean, then into how they all connect and finally the step by step for implementation.

DCO: Dynamic creative optimization

DMP: Data management platform

DSP: Demand side platform

1^st Party Data: proprietary data owned by advertiser

 

Display Concept In a Nutshell:

The DMP has likely already tagged pages so the DCO can place a piggy backed tag to collect and match data.  The DSP is where campaigns are built to target inventory and audiences. The audiences are mapped from the DMP. The DCO then optimizes the creative for each individual user in targeted in the inventory within the DSP’s reach.

 

Step by Step

1. Connect DMP & DCO by adding a piggy back tag
2. Build audience segments in DMP
3. Share segments with DSP
4. Build campaigns targeting the segments & specify inventory & other targeting tactics (geo, frequency cap, etc.)
5. Assign ad tags created by DCO to DSP’s ad server/campaigns
6. Launch campaign, DSP sees a user so DSP fires the ad tag
7. Tag communicates with the DCO
8. DCO optimizes creative based on user attributes
9. Optimized creative is served to user via ad tag on DSP ad server