As we close out the first quarter of 2025, we wanted to take this moment to recognize the achievements and progress of the last year. From a major growth in trading pairs and expansion of formats, to sustained investments in deals trading and addressability solutions, we’ve been hyper-focused on addressing – and anticipating – our clients’ needs.
As the smart trading infrastructure for hundreds of supply and demand platforms globally, we’re constantly looking for ways to inject efficiency and transparency into the programmatic ecosystem. In this 2024 Year-In-Review post, we’ll look back on a year’s worth of progress, made possible by the team at BidSwitch, that sets the stage for more to come this year.
Unprecedented growth in new platforms & format
2024 was undeniably a year of expansion.
We signed on more new platforms this past year than we had since 2016, a reflection of not only the continued growth of new programmatic players in the industry, but also of the pivotal role we play in connecting a majority of these platforms. Some of these new partners include LoopMe, Opera, and Brave. We’re excited to have brought on suppliers in the Connected TV (CTV) and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) space as these formats continue to gain momentum, and we’ve already started vetting additional platforms to bring into the BidSwitch ecosystem to address the supply and demand needs of our existing clients.
Beyond the growth in new partners, look out for investments into formats such as CTV, Audio, and DOOH. Coming out of the record-breaking political spend we saw last year, a large portion of which came from CTV, we’re planning technical improvements to enable enhanced CTV trading via BidSwitch.
In the Audio realm, we rolled out support for audio2video to allow our clients to trade with audio inventory without any additional development and support needed. Additionally, we started onboarding broadcast radio supply, which will leverage DOOH impression multiplier technology for measurement. We saw DOOH trading ramp up by nearly 80% over the course of the year, and we expect continued growth this year.
Because we’re flexible in the specs that we can build to, we’re able to act nimbly, even as industry requirements and partner needs quickly evolve, to enable you to seamlessly and successfully transact through a diverse array of formats.
Innovation and investment in deals trading
Across 2024, we continued to enhance our Deals Center to address evolving trends in deal-based buying and improve client experience.
- As brands and advertisers increasingly trend towards deal-based buying, we maintained and continued to innovate within our own Deals Center, a suite of both UI and API tools that enable our clients to discover, activate, and manage deals across all their connections in one centralized location.
- Every year since introducing the Deals Center in 2020, we’ve gathered client feedback to identify key enhancements and additions that need to be made. In 2024, we focused on improving our deal discovery toolset, ensuring demand partners can effectively identify deals that best match their buying needs, such as inventory highlights and discovery across BidSwitch-available supply (vs just connected SSPs).
- To service our supply partners, we completed the technical work required to obtain Programmatic Guaranteed certification with Google DV360, opening up a swath of PG deal demand that can be accessed via BidSwitch. We’ve also been added to their preferred partner list.
- We’ll continue growing capabilities that our Deals Center provides in 2025, starting with a deal RFP workflow that will enable demand partners to specify parameters they want in a deal for their connected supply partners to respond to. Deals trading is here to stay, and we’re committed to addressing the needs related to deals trading nuances.
Optimizing SPO
Supply path optimization (SPO) is nothing new to us here at BidSwitch, but it has undeniably become further cemented in our supply and demand partners’ strategies in recent years. SmartSwitch, our proprietary traffic routing system that uses machine learning to filter and deliver bid requests to specific buyers based on individual DSP buying patterns, enables efficiency within even more sophisticated SPO strategies.
In 2024, we made further updates to our SmartSwitch technology, enabling more efficient and effective traffic shaping – these include new features to our machine learning models, optimized internal thresholds for better filtering performance, and reworking logic to allow for increased buyer control and flexibility in managing private deals trading.
We also were excited to bring LiteSwitch, our traffic shaping solution for connections outside of BidSwitch, to a broader audience, as more clients adopted the service in 2024 than ever before. We introduced many new features for inbound traffic shaping, focused on reducing processing costs on inbound requests, providing greater traffic controls, and optimizing bid price, as well as outbound traffic shaping enhancements, focused on maximizing returns on distributed traffic.
With many other features on the roadmap, we’re full steam ahead on bringing enhanced capabilities to clients that will complement their SPO strategies.
Addressing Addressability
While 2024 did not bring quite as much of the sweeping industry changes that were anticipated, we furthered our addressability solutions, developing new features and services to help our clients prepare for the impending and inevitable evolution of addressability and identity.
We enabled Protected Audience API testing within BidSwitch for supply partners to conduct end-to-end testing, laying the critical groundwork for SSPs to start trading in cookieless environments.
For our demand partners, we introduced Protected Audience targeting to facilitate buying on PA API traffic. We also introduced Bidding Services, one of our Privacy Sandbox Solutions that significantly reduces the lift to implement the Protected Audience API for a seamless integration, without the significant development lift and increased infrastructure costs.
As the addressability landscape shifts and evolves, so will we. We’re committed to supporting scalable and interoperable solutions to empower our clients to navigate the landscape with ease and flexibility. Ensuring our clients can access signals across our ecosystem remains a central part of our strategy across browsers, including those where third-party cookie deprecation is already a reality.
Looking further into 2025
Looking at 2025, we’re even more excited for the year ahead. As the industry continues to evolve and grow, we will continue to make investments that prioritize not only clients within our ecosystem, but also the industry at large.