IPONWEB launches its BidSwitch today at DMEXCO. With the number of bidders and customised solutions exploding, BidSwitch is seen as an attempt to solve the fragmentation problem in global programmatic supply and demand. Here Derek O’Neil, Chief Business Development Officer at IPONWEB, discusses the new solution and how it will fit into current eco-system.
What is BidSwitch, and why are you building out the solution? What problems are you solving for the industry?
Put simply, for any RTB trading system, BidSwitch makes it incredibly easy to get connected to other trading partners in the ecosystem.
To give that some perspective, consider that by our count there are somewhere in the order of 300 RTB enabled players globally and this number is growing by something like 20 more every quarter.
So, if you want to get global coverage of trading partners across all media, you have a lot of commercial conversations and technical integrations to take on, which really challenges the scaling capability of most systems. Even if you are playing in a single geographic market, the number of trading partners is large when you consider the growth in mobile and video as well.
Instead of reaching out to each company that you want to trade with one by one, and establishing commercial and technical integrations individually, you are able to establish a single commercial agreement with IPONWEB and do a single technical integration to the BidSwitch. Then through the BidSwitch be trading with a significant number of RTB enabled counter-parties straight away and manage that centrally and holistically.
Mechanically, how the BidSwitch works is that through the single integration, a participating Supply Platform sends a bid offer to the BidSwitch, and the BidSwitch relays that bid offer on to all integrated Demand Platforms that are in agreement to buy from that Supply Platform.
The Demand Platforms in turn send their bid responses back to the BidSwitch, and the BidSwitch aggregates these bids and sends them all back to the Supply Platform in a single response.
The key benefit that manifests here, is that each time a new Supply Platform or a new Demand Platform becomes available through the BidSwitch, all the other already integrated participants can immediately start trading with the newcomer. No commercial or technical efforts required. For the newcomer, the BidSwitch in full momentum will offer near instant scale and reach.
So, back to the original question, this problem, of getting access to the RTB eco-system as efficiently as possible, is the problem that the BidSwitch solves.
You can read the full interview on Exchange Wire here.