[DATx Digital Advertising Mini Class] Week 5: Digital Advertising Review — The Story of DATx and Avazu
The last few mini classes, we pierced the surface of the digital advertising industry. It’s now time for a review! Let’s consolidate all that we’ve learned so far and look at how these ideas operate in a business case: Avazu. We’ll also cover a few new terms and concepts while we’re at it.
DATx’s closest partner and launch platform Avazu is a leading global digital advertising platform. However, as a B2B (business to business) company, it doesn’t quite receive the exposure it deserves outside of industry circles. So what exactly is Avazu?
Founded in 2009 in Brunei and headquartered in Shanghai, Avazu provides digital marketing services to a globalized clientele. As an early innovator in programmatic advertising in the Asia Pacific region, Avazu has since expanded to 15 global office branches with over 500 international employees.
After $350 million Series B funding by DotC United Group last July, Avazu became a wholly owned subsidiary of DotC United Group. DotC United Group was established to provide businesses with globalization solutions in a digital age. Currently, its main platforms are Avazu Advertising Platforms, DotC Apps Matrix, and Noogenesis Data BI Platform
Avazu’s partners include major tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and IBM. These partnerships have lent Avazu strong technical foundations and strong resources for worldwide reach. Avazu currently boasts over 1000 customers in 200 countries, averaging 20 billion daily ad impressions.
Avazu’s services consists of three products:
Avazu DSP, as Avazu’s proprietary demand side platform, provides services for advertisers looking for ad placements. As a DSP, Avazu DSP helps advertisers navigate through different ad exchanges and SSPs. Thanks to its large global inventory and multiple ad formats, Avazu DSP is able to help advertisers reach users all over the world, from developed countries to remote regions. It has since developed Avazu mDSP for mobile ad buys. Avazu DSP allows direct CPI bidding with publishers using ad SDKs (advertisement software development kits that connect apps with ad networks).
aNative offers application developers a way to integrate native ads. It allows app developers to fully control and manage their native ads, with real time reporting helping optimize clicks and conversions. It currently boasts 300 million daily active users on its SDK.
APX (Avazu Private Exchange), as an ad exchange, allows Avazu to provide services for both advertisers and publishers. Since APX is DATx’s launch platform, we’ll explore it more in depth.
APX is an affiliate marketing platform, which is a form of performance marketing, where ads buys are on a CPL/CPA basis. In affiliate marketing, publishers earn commission by promoting and recommending advertiser products. Because high eCPM is important for publishers in this model of digital advertising, APX employs native ad technology. This is combined with sophisticated audience targeting tools which conducts big data analysis in Avazu’s database.
APX manages media buying based on Avazu’s RTB technology, which is driven by its built-in predictive tools capable of cost calculations for over one million impressions per second. To help publishers optimize traffic, it provides real time reporting of metrics such as clicks, conversions, and CTR.
The APX platform database also contains anti-fraud technology protecting the platform from digital advertising fraud such as domain masking, human-operated click fraud, and click jacking (similar to domain spoofing, where an invisible webpage is layered on top of a legitimate site to steal clicks and information from unsuspecting users).
With the APX platform serving as the DATx launch platform, DATx will provide APX with hassle-free cross-border transactions, transparent payment trails, an extra layer of anti-fraud systems, and most importantly, comprehensive data sets resulting from a stronger relationship with regular internet users.
