Overview

Magnite (formerly known as Telaria) is a leading video marketplace for brand-effective advertising. Their premium video marketplace offers the full spectrum of video ad products and services, including premium programmatic buying and selling, and analytics that connect the two. Magnite helps premium publishers maximize their monetization across screens as well as serve trading desks, agencies, and brand marketers who want to take the guesswork out of buying effective, programmatic cross-screen brand advertising.

Core to their offering is providing full control and transparency to clients which is reflected in the No.1 ranking in the Video Seller Trust Index, an industry-first cross-screen rating system for video advertising sellers.

We spoke with Craig Berlingo, VP of Product, who has helped built Magnite’s Video Ad Exchange and SSP for premium publishers and DSPs.

The Challenge

Digital video consumption continues to be a hot area of advertising growth within the digital advertising umbrella. Rapid growth combined with exciting new capabilities—both technical and creative—mean that video is poised to have greater impact than ever. According to the latest eMarketer report, digital video spend surpassed $10 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $18 billion by 2020.

In this rapidly evolving market, consistent and accurate device data is essential to reduce discrepancies between various parts of the ad tech puzzle. Video advertising platforms like Magnite need to ensure their customers are getting more bang for their buck by providing them access to any audience segment on mobile, OTT, Connected TV and desktop. Granular and accurate reporting must also be provided which offers more value for the advertisers purchasing ads, as well as making sure that publishers get maximum value of their inventory.

Before implementing DeviceAtlas, Magnite were using an open source solution to take the user agent from devices, which forced them to manually maintain a database and investigate non-standard User-Agent strings themselves. As they scaled up their business, a more robust, high-performance device detection solution that offered lightning fast recognition of visiting devices was required.

The Solution

Magnite embedded the DeviceAtlas API into the same servers as their platforms which gave them access to high-speed, industry grade device detection. This has allowed Magnite to verify the type of requesting device, thereby increasing targeting options and ad traffic transparency. Some of the properties they target on include screen sizes, device model, OS and isTV which enables them to cluster devices into ‘device families’. On the supply side, publishers can get a better understanding of how their video inventory is performing by monitoring and understanding their customers’ buying patterns according to device.

Another benefit for Magnite clients includes the ability to deep dive into campaigns and see which connected devices are having an impact on their ad performance. They can quickly see, for example, if the creative is displaying incorrectly in their ads for certain devices and re-optimize. The detailed insights on devices provided by DeviceAtlas helps Magnite continually improve their platform.