The Programmatic Glossary
A practical glossary designed to help marketers, advertisers and ad-tech professionals understand the terminology that powers programmatic advertising
Platforms & Tech
Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
Software that advertisers and agencies use to buy digital advertising programmatically. A DSP (Demand-Side Platform) connects to multiple ad exchanges and SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms), allowing buyers to access enormous amounts of inventory from a single platform and target their campaigns precisely.
HOW IT WORKS
Advertisers upload their campaigns, creatives and targeting criteria into a DSP (Demand-Side Platform). When bid requests arrive from exchanges, the DSP's algorithms instantly evaluate whether each impression matches the campaign targets, calculate the optimal bid price and submit a bid response. All of this happens in under 100 milliseconds. The DSP manages budgets, pacing, frequency capping and reporting.
EXAMPLE
A travel brand sets up a campaign in their DSP (Demand-Side Platform) targeting users who have visited travel websites in the past 30 days, aged 25 to 45, in the UK. The DSP automatically finds and bids on relevant impressions across hundreds of publishers and exchanges, without the brand needing to contact each publisher individually.
RELATED TERMS
SSP (Supply-Side Platform) | Bid Request | RTB (Real-Time Bidding) | Ad Exchange | Deal ID
★ LIMELIGHT INSIGHT: Limelight integrates with all major DSPs (Demand-Side Platforms) including Magnite, Xandr, PubMatic, Freewheel and OpenX, giving publisher partners access to the broadest possible pool of demand.
