Hivestack Launches Header Bidder for DOOH Publishers

Global digital out of home ad tech leader introduces multiple SSP/Ad Exchange support to its flagship Ad Server

Hivestack, the world’s largest, independent, programmatic digital out of home (DOOH) ad tech company has opened up its Ad Server to work with multiple SSP/Exchanges with the introduction of a new, unified auction framework that optimizes publisher yield across various sources.

A recent article illustrated that online Web publishers use an average of six SSP/Exchanges for programmatic monetization, with header bidding technology being used to optimize yield.

Andreas Soupliotis, Founder & CEO of Hivestack compared this to DOOH: “What happened to display, mobile and video is now happening in our space. DOOH publishers are using several DOOH-specific SSP/Exchanges for programmatic monetization. Incorporating multiple SSPs creates inventory optimization complexity that has to be balanced with the direct sales channel.”

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To tame this complexity, some media owners have absorbed the cost of hiring engineers to build their own homegrown mediation layer. These mediation layers are mostly serial waterfalls that check each SSP for bids in a sequence which is suboptimal for revenue. With Hivestack’s introduction of a unified auction framework into the Hivestack Ad Server, publishers can benefit from a first-price, parallelized, unified auction that maximizes revenue without having to hire a team of developers.

Soupliotis continued: “The Hivestack Ad Server is being used by DOOH publishers around the world to deliver true audience-based campaigns across both direct and programmatic sales channels. Until today, the only SSP/Exchange that our Ad Server was integrated with was our own – the Hivestack SSP. That changes today, with the introduction of an upgrade to our Ad Server that has the ability to make ad requests to multiple SSPs/Exchanges, mimicking how header bidding works in online ad tech. And to promote fairness, even our own SSP participates equally in the unified auction framework”.

DOOH publishers will still need individual agreements with each SSP, and the Hivestack Ad Server is not in the money flow between publishers and their SSP partners.

Jennifer Bidwell, EVP Sales and Marketing of Allvision commented “Optimally managing programmatic sales across multiple SSPs has always been a complex challenge. While we had initially built our own sequential waterfall layer, we welcome Hivestack’s introduction of a unified auction – akin to a header bidding like solution in digital advertising.”

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Brendan Dillon, VP of Digital and Programmatic Sales at OUTFRONT Canada also commented “Coming from the digital space, I can share that the move to a header bidding-like ad server that can optimize across multiple SSPs in parallel is a natural evolution to the sell side of programmatic DOOH.”

Francois Deschenaux, Director of Revenue Management at Astral shared, “The introduction of a unified auction framework into Hivestack’s ad server means that DOOH publishers can maximize every impression with optimal yield, improve programmatic revenue, and better serve programmatic buyers.”

Kevin McDonald, CEO of Kinetic Canada finalized “Hivestack’s introduction of a header bidding-like ad server greatly benefits Kinetic Canada. Our media owner partners can now safely make inventory available programmatically to us without worrying about inventory optimization. And means that we gain programmatic access to premium inventory which is a win-win for both the buy and sell side.”

The new version of the Hivestack Ad Server is currently in a private beta with Canadian DOOH publishers and will become widely available in November to publishers internationally in the US, China, Japan, Singapore, the UK, Germany, France, Australia and Mexico.

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