AdTech: Can you get the data you have the rights to?

Ravi Patel
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

The complexity of this issue cannot be overstated. The lucrative nature of digital advertising (specifically programmatic advertising) has created numerous inefficiencies in the industry as a whole, with countless third party companies muddling the process by which advertisers and publishers interact with one another. Data in particular is emerging as one of the most valuable resources money can by in this dawning of the Age of Information.

Like any figurative gold rush, people identify money making schemes and figure out a way to carve out their piece of the pie. Arbitrage has been a somewhat controversial aspect of this rapidly growing industry, and unscrupulous agencies and companies have established a system in which they dictate the terms of contracts, while customers get cheated.


With a newfound emphasis being placed on transparency, it is important to ask yourself, and those companies you choose to work with, a few questions:

Do you own the contracts to your ad servers, data management platforms, demand side platforms, and ad-tech vendors?

Do you have a sample of the data you are entitled to? Have you requested data before? Are they putting up a fight or charging you for the data you are entitled to?

Are demand side platforms charging you extra fees to access your log files containing important pieces of information such as, data costs, winning bid price, vendor names and fees, as well as trading desk, tech, and agency fees?

Are you aware that your that your agencies might be handing your programmatic buying to another service, causing you to incur costs on top of what you already pay? E.g. You pay an agency fee, who hires a managed service and can charge up to 20% to manage the programmatic execution (on top of Agency fee).

Have you asked for meta data when requesting your files, in an effort to understand charges and fees from third parties? Knowing just “Total Data Cost” is different from knowing each vendor and what you are paying them (and how they are performing).

Do you have the capacity to ingest/normalize data with the resources you have? Ability to ingest transaction level data requires Dev Ops Engineers, Data Engineers, ETL processes, Database Administrators, Data Scientists, and Data Analysts to ingest and understand the data.


If you are worried you are among those being taken advantage of, fret not. The way we now purchase digital inventory has begun to change — rather than bundled in services with unclear purposes, companies are opting for itemized costs in an effort to better understand what their money is going towards. In other words: the power is shifting back to the clients.

You are well within your right to ask these questions of those you work with, to control your own access to data, and avoid being double or triple charged by brazen middlemen with hidden costs. The marketplace is friendlier than it once was and those agencies resisting change are losing out on business in comparison to their alternative counterparts.

To answer the original question: Yes you can get that ever important data you are entitled to, but it’s up to you to carefully choose who you work with (and contracts you setup), and realize that there are new advantageous processes to navigate these turbulent waters, without losing out on money and important data.

Ravi Patel
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