It seems that the benchmark for coming of age has shifted from 18 years to 18 months – or at least that’s true in the world of advertising technology. A year and a half ago AudienceScience radically changed its business model away from behavioral targeting to becoming an Enterprise Advertising Management System (EAMS) company, providing a platform for advertisers to regain control of their online advertising campaigns with total transparency.
As new kids on the block, bringing a totally new way of doing things into the marketplace, we have been working hard to bring on board the best available scale and quality of inventory for our advertiser clients.
This has been growing fast and, as of today, we have over 1,543,000,000,000 impressions available every month in our worldwide display inventory alone.
Being a technology-driven firm, this has meant dealing with publishers on behalf of advertisers to integrate their inventory into our system. However, with the launch this week of our Open API (application programming interface) initiative, called ASI Inventory API, things are changing – and signaling a real coming of age for AudienceScience and the EAMS approach to programmatic trading.
So why are Open APIs such a big thing? First let me explain what they are: a means for us as an enterprise business to open up our system to external partners and make it much simpler for them to link with us. Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite, explains Open APIs in the Wall Street Journal with the analogy of a Walled Garden versus Partner Ecosystem. Essentially, working with the Walled Garden model, a tech company keeps access to its suite of products closed, strictly controlling access to partners. In online advertising, this means that advertisers have to request that their DSP (demand side platform) make a custom integration with a supply partner, which typically takes weeks of development.
However, the Partner Ecosystem model centers on Open APIs. In our case, with our ASI Inventory API, we are enabling supply partners to integrate their inventory with our EAMS, AudienceScience Gateway, much more quickly. These integrations are handled en masse without any resource constraints, making the process significantly faster and more efficient, while still maintaining inventory quality. Initial supply partners already taking advantage of this include LiveRail, MARKETPLACE (AOL Platforms’ SSP) and sovrn.
It makes total sense for us, as a technology company, to communicate with other systems in a very inter-connected way, rather than via manual work. However, for the industry this is a change in mentality and, with more and more adoption on the sell-side, the overall integration time is reduced and the advertiser benefits from getting hooked into many inventory sources across the globe independently and programmatically.
What’s also interesting to me, though, is that Open APIs mean that publishers are integrating with us by working to AudienceScience’s specification, rather than theirs.
Why is that important? It’s because the launch of ASI Inventory API is a result of increased outreach from quality inventory owners who want to be part of Gateway as they understand that, if they’re not, they’re going to be missing out on a huge sales opportunity. The reason why this signals a turning point in programmatic buying hierarchies is because it shows ad tech partners no longer have to chase inventory – it’s the inventory owners that are starting to do the chasing.
To me, this is another indication that EAMS have proven their case and are starting to take their rightful seat at the top table. For AudienceScience, 18 months on, I guess it’s a case of ‘API Birthday’ rather than Happy Birthday!
