Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Go to the 30,000-foot level in your industry and point to some open problems that you see ought to be solved that you see are not being solved in consideration of new startups.

Anand Das: Let me just give you a brief overview of the kind of problems that are in the industry. When you talk about ad industry, there are multiple players out there from the advertisers and training desks to data providers. There are a lot of players in between the advertiser and the publisher. The advertiser cannot work with everyone individually. Neither can a publisher work with every AdWord individually. That creates a lot of interesting problems. Everybody has a secret sauce. Nobody wants to share their piece of information. Getting data to actually identify what is happening at what stage is very difficult in this industry because everybody is being protective about their data.

Let’s take the challenge from a different perspective, say an advertiser. An advertiser wants to spend a certain amount of dollars to get a certain ROI. They get the ROI and they’re happy with it. In the next year, they’ll say, “Let’s increase the ROI by X%.” From an advertiser’s perspective, they don’t know which channels are working for them, where they are getting more ROI and if they can get the same ROI with less spend. When you look at it, publishers figure out, “I’m selling these impressions year over year. Sometimes, the rates go down. What is it that I can do to increase my rates? What is the kind of inventory that is brought effectively on my platform? What is it that I’m effectively able to sell at better rates? Where am I actually cutting corners? Where am I selling it at a lesser price because of lack of knowledge?”

Targeting itself is flawed. When you talk about soccer moms, understanding soccer moms has three parameters. This might be totally different from how the publisher views it. This might be totally different from an agency trading desk’s point of view or an automation system that is buying on their behalf. There is a good amount of need in the market to actually give an end-to-end visibility by figuring out what is happening at each layer. I think that’s the biggest gap. Everybody is focused on their area.

Just to give you an example, we are doing optimization. We can provide reporting on what is happening from within our system. We have taken some strides to actually pull in publisher’s data from other sources and give them a holistic view. Getting that data from multiple partners is difficult. If you have a platform which actually puts all of those and gives prescriptive analytics to other partners in this ecosystem, that will be something new that the market can utilize. There is a need for it but nobody is doing it because everybody’s focused on their area of business.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: PubMatic CTO Anand Das and VP Engineering Sri Gopalsamy
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