Smaato launches ‘first Inventory Discovery’ feature for mobile advertisers

Mobile ad platform Smaato has launched what it describes as “the advertising industry’s first Inventory Discovery feature.”

Part of the company’s SDX (Smaato Demand Platform), it is a self-service tool so that advertisers can automatically identify the mobile inventory they want to buy.

Filtering allows the identification of inventory based on such parameters as time, Queries Per Second, geography, ad format, operating system or device types. After locating the inventory they want, advertisers can then begin receiving requests for bids.

One might think that programmatic ad platforms are automated throughout, but Senior Vice President of Product Garrett McGrath explained otherwise.

Demand-side platform (DSP) technology can automatically process and bid on specific ad requests for a targeted demographic, he said, such as males aged 18–34 in a specific geography as represented by specific kinds of inventory.

But, he added:

“…the original decision of why to target certain inventory is usually [a] strategic question that’s [manually] agreed upon by the advertiser and the DSP, and related to campaign goals.

“More specifically, the process of assessing available inventory is a rather manual one, requiring a DSP to either keep a record of an exchange’s entire traffic (and to be able to interpret those records), or to request a breakdown of available inventory from the exchange, which will be transmitted in a static fashion, such as a presentation or a spreadsheet. This information can then be used or aggregated for proposals to advertisers, which ultimately result in a decision of which inventory to target for a given campaign.

“Inventory Discovery takes a lot of the manual work out of that assessment, enabling DSPs to directly query availability of exchange inventory (even segmented by various criteria, such as country, app, OS etc.) and use that information, without having to make a phone call or ask for a spreadsheet.”