Deciphering the ‘AdTech’ and ‘MarTech’ ecosystems
The key stakeholders involved in advertising transactions initially consisted of a publisher and an advertiser, where the latter would pay the publisher to put specific content in front of certain audiences.
One of the issues was that marketing before the digital age seldom provided campaigners with a way to accurately measure an advert’s effectiveness and performance. Albeit physical newspaper advertisements are still very much in existence, a large portion of advertising has now turned digital. The ability for companies to promote their goods and services on a bigger scale now comes without difficulty – thanks to technology.
Practically speaking, AdTech (advertising technology) and MarTech (marketing technology) cannot be mutually exclusive because advertising is a facet of marketing. These terms are loosely defined but hold the following generally accepted notions:
AdTech is technology that assists marketers and agencies manage advertising of any kind. More specifically, it is the use of technologies which have the ability to target very specific audiences and reduce wasted spending on advertising. These solutions maximise a company’s advertising budgets.
MarTech is the use of technology to manage marketing processes - like the creation of digital content - to achieve marketing goals and objectives. There are high chances that you already use MarTech in your business through the use of analytics. The data which you gather after sending a weekly newsletter to a target audience is the simplest example of this.
The type of technology used
A publisher’s aim is to sell its advertising inventory (i.e. its available ad space) at the best possible price. An advertiser’s aim is to have high success rates on its ad campaigns targeting a high-value audience. The technologies involved with AdTech and MarTech reflect these objectives through the use of online advertising and marketing software. These programmes are essentially responsible for sorting and arranging customer data through specialised platforms like those for data management. These platforms will vary depending on the nature of the company:
an advertiser would use software designed to implement programmatic ad buying. This is millisecond algorithmic purchases of advertising space in real time (more simply, using IT systems to purchase ads); and
a marketer would use software designed for the collation and analysis of data to ultimately produce optimisation insights to improve the effectiveness of websites and mobile applications. This includes tools like customer relationship management systems (CRMs).
The AdTech ecosystem uses demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) alongside other customised development components to create a complete advertising solution.
A DSP is a type of software that allows companies to purchase mobile ads, videos ads and search ads from an ad inventory owned by publishers. DSPs enable a company to advertise across multiple bidding networks (i.e. a range of publisher sites).
An SSP is a type of software used by publishers to manage, sell and optimise available inventories on their websites and mobile applications in an automated way. SSPs thus allow publishers to show adverts to their viewers which they in turn monetise. In a nutshell, SSPs use algorithms to handle processes beyond the scope of this blog such as real-time bidding transactions, ad-network optimisation, frequency capping, managing the latency of ad networks and streamlining ad-buying processes.
AdTech and MarTech are now used by companies to find celebrities and social media influencers to promote their products online. Ultimately, the digital advertising ecosystem is a complex one but continues to prove an increase in efficiency to businesses through its ever-growing automation.