Supernova Award Category

Marketing & Sales Effectiveness

The Problem

The advertising industry is one in which knowing the audience is critical, and while the proliferation of digital channels has given us the ability to collect a bounty of data, theoretically able to support more personalized and targeted advertising experiences, the industry has struggled to fully leverage these assets.

The rise of programmatic advertising was supposed to offer us a game-changing solution that would enable the best performance and best user experience to align through the “magic” of technology. But this did not happen as planned. What did happen? We ended up with a complex, murky and tangled system in which, according to the ANA, hidden technology fees and costs can eat up to half of an advertisers media spend before an ad reaches the intended audience.

The ad tech industry has created an environment where we waste time and money trying to navigate a convoluted media supply chain with poor standards adoption, an abundance of players and far too many ways for criminals to take advantage. 

The Solution

With 10+ years of operating a successful ad network, Collective saw first hand the growing inefficiencies of an ever-more-complex ad tech stack. The company invested in a development team to create a tool for their own use that would allow management of everything from one UI.

The biggest dilemma was how to create an intuitive and simple interface when the inputs include a myriad of technologies, consoles and platforms. They solved this with API connections and a process of tag assembly and log ingestion.

Collective made the API connections read/write to support access to each vendor’s system from one UI, which created new solutions for integrating partners quick and easy to activate. The tag assembly and log ingestion process enable Visto to consolidate data from disparate sources for unified reporting while helping advertisers measure, test and validate delivery for tracking and billing. 

The results

The system originally created for Collective proved so useful that the company has productized the platform and made it the primary business. The Visto™ Enterprise Advertising Hub is available for brands, agencies and media partners to benefit from the unification of the entire programmatic tech stack.

No matter how many vendors, technologies and channels, Visto users enjoy flexibility, transparency, and efficiency across execution, measurement, and analytics. With one view of their media supply chain, they get accurate insights into:

• Performance across different DSPs regardless of channel (e.g., mobile, display, video)
• Management of programmatic ad buys
• Can see the best path to each impression
• The rates charged by partners and data providers
• Fees assessed at every level of the programmatic stack
• Accurate attribution and ROI

In short, Visto’s unified interface and analytics let advertisers understand where their budget is going and what’s working so they can optimize, not waste, their ad spend.

Metrics

According to a recent comparison pitting Visto against the industry’s still-standard manual processes, Visto’s streamlined workflows sped operations by 92%. But the benefits go beyond speed.

For example, an implementation of Visto with the ad agency McKinney resulted in a 44% increase in their working media dollars overall. Moreover, they executed against all of their stated goals.

• Reduce partner complexity, test 5 buying platforms
• Improve media efficiency
• Reduce fraudulent activity, increase viewability

With Visto, they were able to:

• Easily onboard vendors in order to test multiple DSP, SSP and Network Publisher partners
• Make informed decisions quickly by comparing which partners reached target audiences more efficiently and drove the best results
• Reduce fraudulent activity to less than 2% overall while also increasing viewability 

The Technology

Visto is built on a scalable infrastructure that helps integrate with several platforms for workflow and reporting.  Elements include:

• Postgres database with Scala-based RestAs.
• A Polling and Kafka message-driven adapter framework
• Akka-Http based trackers
• Hadoop spark application 
• HBase for short-term persisted data
• Modeling algorithms for audience targeting
• Vertica for data ingestion
• RestAPIs
• AngularJS  and D3 for data visualization

Disruptive Factor

Digital advertising evolved quickly and without organization leading to our current issues of ad fraud, abysmal viewability and inadequate measurement. One recent study estimated that $12.48 billion of ad spending in 2016 was wasted, either by fraud or as the result of invalid traffic.

With Visto, Collective's enterprise advertising hub is unifying all the pieces of the ad tech stack, bringing management of multiple execution, data and measurement partners together to simplify workflow, increase transparency and optimize ad spend - all yielding better results.

Each piece of the ad technology stack that Visto brings together is unique, with its own feature sets, selling points and capabilities, which required Collective to come up with a way to incorporate all of the elements from a number of different vendors into one user interface. And it needed to be done in a standardized manner, even when platforms didn’t fit into the standard API integration model.

Collective worked closely with each integrated platform, collecting data, testing and iterating until Visto was the single end-to-end interface for programmatic advertising the company had envisioned.

With a singular view into the advertising technology stack connecting planning and billing, advertisers enjoy complete control and transparency into campaigns, with the ability to view, manage and analyze data sets across technologies, vendor partners, screens and formats.  

Shining Moment

Visto was just announced as a finalist for Best Overall Technology for Programmatic Advertising by trade publication The Drum while also securing a position on the 2017 SaaS Awards Shortlist in the category, Best Data-Driven SaaS Product. Visto was also listed as a Gartner Vendor to Watch in the 2017 Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs.