Managing the supply chain with Amazon DSP

Zach Schapira
Team Lead, Advertising Technology Product Marketing

• Web browsers have taken or announced steps to restrict third-party cookies used for advertising purposes.
• Industry bodies have issued standards and tools like ads.txt and sellers.json to help give buyers more confidence about the entities involved in selling or reselling a publisher’s ad impressions.
• Brands and agencies have begun dedicating more attention to the end supply they buy, as well as streamlining the number of intermediaries involved in accessing that supply.

How you approach these developments can have a significant impact on your overall success, since they affect the amount you pay in supply fees, your potential audience reach, and traffic quality and brand safety for your campaigns. To maximize effectiveness, brands can think about the following approach:

1. Buy first-party inventory

The first option is to buy the inventory you want directly from the source, also known as first-party inventory. You’ll spend more of your working dollar on media this way, since there are no SSPs, ad exchanges, or ad networks taking supply fees to give you access to that publisher. Buying direct will improve your reach versus buying through intermediaries, since you remove barriers to accessing audiences posed by advertising ID matching and other restrictions. And you’ll be able to reduce brand safety concerns because you know the supply you’re buying.

You can realize each of these benefits when buying ads on Amazon.com or other exclusive inventory on Amazon owned-and-operated sites, apps, and devices such as IMDb or Fire TV.

2. Use a DSP that has direct connections to third-party publishers

Your second option for streamlining intermediaries is to use an advertising service that has direct connections to third-party publishers. This type of connection will give brands four main advantages over traditional exchange buying:

• Greater efficiency, since fewer intermediaries means more of your spend goes toward media, rather than supply fees. Of course, brands benefit most when there is no supply fee at all.
• Better standing to compete for scarce content and audiences, since you have the opportunity to see and potentially bid on a higher percent of ad opportunities than through other types of integrations that enforce a hierarchy for access.
• Better audience reach on that media property, since the DSP is not reliant on match rates with supply intermediaries such as an SSP.
• Better optimization and viewability, since the DSP can more accurately surface impression opportunities based on the ad’s exact position on the page, rather than relying on SSP-declared slot IDs or bidding without access to slot information at all.

Amazon Advertising offers our advertising customers each of these benefits through Amazon Publisher Services (APS), our marketplace of directly integrated publishers which carry zero supply fee when accessed through Amazon DSP. This includes tens of thousands of high-quality websites and mobile apps, ad-enabled apps on Fire TV, and a growing list of OTT apps through other streaming services.

3. Rely on a DSP partner that has rigorous protections for onboarding exchange inventory

If you want to access inventory that’s neither owned-and-operated nor directly integrated, you can use a combination of third-party exchanges. Amazon DSP integrates with 35+ exchanges, and uses a strict SSP vetting process to ensure we only include those that add value for our advertisers—such as by offering incremental inventory or reach. This also means that even if you’re buying exchange inventory through Amazon DSP, you can rest easy knowing we’re protecting you from undesirable supply sources such as those with a high proportion of resold inventory or duplicate audiences.

4. Make sure your DSP is actively working to help ensure brand safety

We take a variety of measures to help prevent Amazon DSP ads from appearing on third-party pages and apps containing sensitive content, products, and services.¹ For APS supply, our team assesses each publisher before we integrate with them. Our contractual agreements with both ad exchanges and APS publishers require them to ensure compliance with content restrictions when sending us bid requests. And by default, we use signals from independent brand safety providers to filter out third-party webpages those providers classify as unsafe, based on certain categories. If advertisers wish to layer on additional filtering capabilities, they have the option to utilize brand safety solutions from DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Oracle Data Cloud available on Amazon DSP.

¹Amazon Advertising cannot guarantee all sensitive content will be excluded from ad campaigns.