No one company can be the best at everything. No matter how many Adobes, Googles, Apples, and other behemoths try to acquire, build, and develop everything under the sun, there is always an innovative start up that comes along and does it better, faster, cheaper.
Take Canva. Canva was founded by Melanie Perkins who was frustrated that Adobe Photoshop was too cumbersome and complicated. She decided to build an all-in-one, easy to use web-based design software and has flourished. This agility and creativity led to Canva being one of the most successful and innovative software companies in the world and competing and outpacing Adobe in design for the masses.
(Credit to Canva – we use their platform for nearly all of our content design, and it’s a fabulous tool to make great looking materials.)
Taking on the Big Players
In Adtech, the major established DSPs have market share and scale on their side. They have been building their stacks for 10+ years and have a plethora of tools and partnerships.
However, all of this scale and history does not mean they always win. As we have seen first hand, having the ability to scale with precision, create custom optimization models, and adapt a buying platform to the needs of buyers has proven to drive better performance and results, especially in newer channels like CTV. Pontiac clients have seen vast improvements in cost efficiency, inventory targeting, and confidence in inventory quality as compared with their buys on other more well known DSPs.
Spurred on by these wins, we have pushed to innovate further. While testing and building our own tools is our core strength, we also want to be open to other outside innovation and leverage the advantages other small players bring to the market.
Innovating Through Partnership
Getting the best results and providing the most control isn’t a zero sum game. Sometimes partnership is the best route to discovering new capabilities. One of our premier agency clients, Rain the Growth Agency is always pushing the bounds of new capabilities, and they have worked with Chalice Custom Algorithms to develop specific strategies for campaign optimization.
In our partnership with Rain, we want to stay on the cutting edge alongside them, and our CTO Erik Thorson was able to configure our bidder to ingest external optimization models. With this capability, we have been able to ingest Chalice optimization models to reach specific streaming inventory based on linear TV data.
This data combination has enabled our buyers to target inventory effectively based on Linear TV performance. It’s like TV Guide targeting on CTV inventory.
To the Future
As we continue to evolve, we will always be on the lookout for new and innovative partners, and we look to our clients to bring requests and challenges that will enhance our platform and our capabilities.
If you have a challenge you’re struggling to navigate, drop us a line. We’re happy to talk it through even if it’s not running on Pontiac.
