LucidMedia Jumps on the Self-Service Train
ADOTAS – On the heels of the launch of its DSP platform back in February, LucidMedia has made the leap from managed service to self-service DSP in response to client demands to “twist the knobs themselves,” said founder and CEO Ajay Sravanapudi.
Agencies and networks alike have been clamoring for self-service features to both protect data and claw back margin, he added. Clients that want to bring proprietary data into the system yearn for greater efficiency and control over a campaign, “as opposed to just handing off an IO to a network.”
Although Lucid has been using these services internally for 18 months, the underlying semantic contextual targeting technology has actually been in service for a decade to clients in various functions and is a key feature for attracting advertisers to the platform.
Every impression that floats through Lucid’s self-serve platform is not only assigned to one of 14,000 categories in English (10,000 in Spanish), but also evaluated for brand safety and contextual relevance, assuring brands before an ad appears rather than alerting them to a problem after the fact. In addition, contextual targeting is a feature that performance networks will not find anywhere else — Lucid’s categories and core technology have been developed and are owned by the company.
Another highlight of the self-service platform is real-time assessment, which provides nearly instantaneous analysis of real-time bidding availability from heavy trafficking sources such as exchanges. Expecting close to a billion impressions a day from exchanges, Lucid predicts 95% potential reach of U.S. Internet users.
“You can look across all these exchanges as a single source, frequency cap and evaluate the quality of all impressions before you buy as well as the brand safety,” noted Christopher Weiss, director of marketing.
In addition, the self-service platform offers direct training for using the platform as well as custom data integrations with all third-party data providers.
As the publisher base continues to erode, the majority of networks have not found an on-ramp onto exchanges, Sravanapudi said. “For those guys, an easy way to tap into the massive scale of the exchanges is to work with a partner like us.”
Even though it seems like I get a press release from a new DSP twice daily, Sravanapudi doesn’t consider the playing field that crowded.
“I suspect much of the noise is around [attracting attention] in the venture circles,” he said. “But when it comes to getting in front of a client and showing that you have a real product that you can actually use, the number can be counted on one hand — minus a few fingers.”
The next goal for Lucid is built-in audience targeting, as it currently can build behavioral profiles based on content consumption and the company’s indexing.
“We want to enable audience targeting based on native, home-grown data inside the platform that you can seamlessly mix and match with data from BlueKai, eXelate or what-have-you,” explained Sravanapudi.
The company is also in the process of integrating with a mobile ad exchange, which will allow clients to manage their mobile campaigns through the platform as well.
“We’re trying to take a lot of the fragmentation out of buying media,” Weiss said.
“When you own the full stack, it’s a lot easier,” added Sravanapudi. “We wrote our own ad server, our own optimizer — everything we add is a feature rather than a brand new product.”
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