June 19th, 2012

Case Study: ClickDistrict launches Platform161 in partnership with Google & IPONWEB.

With help from Google and IPONWEB, ClickDistrict’s newly launched Platform 161 efficiently acquires high performance display advertising for its clients with its own real-time bidding (RTB) technology.

Part ad network, part technology company, ClickDistrict delivers performance display advertising to significant advertisers and agencies across Europe, the Middle East and the Asia Pacific region. The company started buying on ad exchanges a number of years ago and have rapidly ramped up their presence in the realm of real-time bidding (RTB) to  maintain a competitive advantage in the fiercely challenging world of online display advertising.

Gaining advantage through efficiency
Marco Kloots, ClickDistrict’s CEO, explains how the company came to grasp the urgent need to embrace RTB. “As the internet marketplace gets larger and larger, there is a vast abundance of supply,” he says. “There was
a need for a mechanism like RTB to find value for advertisers amidst all that supply, because finding value in a traditional way by working through a broker or a middleman becomes really inefficient.” Previously ClickDistrict worked with an optimisation engine, but found the marketplace quickly became saturated as other players flocked to the same solution. This led them to seek an alternative. “For us it was really about increasing the efficiency of RTB for advertisers and agencies,” Marco says. “So as a premium solution, we decided to differentiate ourselves by building our own system.”

Fine-tuning for new opportunities
ClickDistrict partnered with IPONWEB, a world leader in the development and operation of sophisticated media trading technology, to create a bespoke real-time bidder engineered exactly to their specifications.
The idea was to leverage IPONWEB’s best-of-breed ad serving, predictive modelling, big data analytics and other expertise for the technology back end. ClickDistrict focused on building a high quality, flexible user interface and campaign logic layer that brought all of the complexity of RTB into an intuitive toolset that optimised workflow and created operational efficiencies for the company. “At the end of the day, the front end is what is being used most and needs to work seamlessly for our business,” explains Marco. IPONWEB then integrated the new platform into the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX). AdX is Google’s dynamic media marketplace for buying and selling display advertising space. It exists to help media buyers and sellers connect, providing real-time and impression-by-impression access to a large pool of high-quality inventory. Ad networks like ClickDistrict can bring their own data, optimisation and bid strategies to the exchange in order to meet their clients’ advertising goals.

You can read the full case study here.

German coverage here.

Dutch coverage here.