Real-Time Bidding Platform Development for DOOH to Redefine Ad Exchange Process [Case Study]

With the inefficient and resource-consuming traditional approach to buying and selling digital media space, advertising companies are now adopting OpenRTB standards to simplify programmatic transactions in the Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) landscape. For the ad ecosystem, this shift is proving the ultimate approach to enhance operational efficiency, promote transparency, and open up global marketplace access.

Easy integration of various AdTech platforms like OpenRTB, SSPs, and DSPs empowers pDOOH industry leaders to operate more programmatically with insights-driven analytics. This evolutionary shift from static billboards to programmatic DOOH supports dynamic content, real-time updates, and data-driven location, time, and weather-based advertising campaigns.

Rishabh Software, a leading AdTech software development company, assisted a UK-based global DOOH enterprise with Real-Time Bidding (RTB) ad exchange platform development to monetize their digital inventory & maximize efficiency.

A Europe-based DOOH advertising enterprise operating in 15+ countries wanted to achieve optimal usage of its digital inventory located worldwide and increase profitability. Their existing pre-allocated digital inventory management solution was inefficient in optimizing less popular locations based on lower booking rates, leading to ongoing revenue loss. Thus, they wanted to develop an ad exchange platform based on OpenRTB standards to auction digital Inventories in real-time. This would help optimize the usage of their ad inventories and drive increased profitability.

After an in-depth requirement-gathering process, we moved further with real-time bidding platform development to facilitate seamless ad exchange between multiple data sources and amplify the capabilities of DOOH advertising.

• The existing inventory booking solution could not precisely target audience segments based on various demographic factors.
• Not able to monetize digital media assets in locations due to inefficiencies in the existing inventory booking solution.
• The absence of OpenRTB standards led to an inability to respond dynamically to changing market demands, leading to missed opportunities.
• The absence of real-time digital ad placement on screens due to the pre-allocation approach led to significant revenue loss.
• Without effective monitoring and tracking of ad campaigns, they could not make informed decisions for future efforts.

We developed an OpenRTB (Open Real-Time Bidding) based ad exchange solution that integrates an RTB platform, allowing multiple media owners to bid on ad inventory. The winning ad (with the highest bid) is then displayed to the users.

Following the micro-services architecture, our team developed the following three components within the RTB advertising platform: Product Adapter, Trading Engine, and Auction Stream.

Product-Adapter

Fetches inventory listings from different supply-side platforms (SSPs) and converts them for processing within the trading engine. It also notifies the SSP platform about the final status (when ad inventories are sold) once the auction is completed.

Trading-Engine

Retrieves processed data from “product-adapter” to optimize inventory listing based on various factors and publishes the “Exchange Supply Message” for the auction stream on Kafka. Further, it consumes “Exchange Demand Message” to prepare the final sales data for the SSP platforms and share it back with the “product adapter.”

Auction-Stream

Consumes “Exchange Supply Message” and sends the bid request to the demand-side platform (DSP). Then, based on the auction, it decides the winner and alerts the DSP with a win-or-lose notification. It also publishes the sales data in the “Exchange Demand Message” for the trading engine.

The data team utilizes the Exchange Supply Message & Exchange Demand Message and finally aggregates them in the data lake. From here, the data can be queried from an SSP interface to generate reports that can be viewed by media owners.

• ~30 million digital auctions for OOH ads under 30 minutes with the new platform
• 50% reduction in latency with high execution times
• 100% utilization of available ad assets with hyper-precise targeting by location

A UK-based global DOOH enterprise

JDK-10, Spring-Boot Microservice, DynamoDB, Kafka, Auth0, AKKA, Spring WebFlux