Why white label is not the right strategy for AdTech development and what you should choose instead

Programmatic advertising has been dominating the AdTech landscape for years now. In the US, it contributes to over 70% of the overall digital spend.

It’s not surprising that a growing number of AdTech vendors want to build solutions that enable programmatic ads. In this post, we will take a look at the three common approaches to building such a product: white-label design, custom platforms, and component-based development.

This post was originally published on our blog — here’s the link to the full post.

White-label products: limited room for growth

Using an off-the-shelf tool seems to be a time-saver and a cost-cutter for AdTech teams. However, a handful of challenges lurk beneath the surface. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Limited flexibility and vendor overreliance

The main constraint of white-label solutions is vendor dependence. At the end of the day, AdTech vendors end up at the mercy of third-party engineering teams, their price policy changes, security approaches, and business decisions.

Customization is a lot of effort

Since you don’t control the infrastructure behind a third-party platform, customizing it to fit your team’s needs might be outright impossible or require a lot of negotiation.

Licensing challenges

Another reason to hold off on committing to white-label is the fact that you don’t own the technology that will be integral to your product. Thus, as the product scales, IP considerations can arise.

To find out more about the considerations of white-label development, take a look at the full version of this article.

Custom AdTech development: alternative approach

Another popular approach among AdTech vendors is to hire an engineering team that will build the products from scratch. The benefits are obvious: You own the technology, have full control over engineering, security, even the product’s underlying tech architecture. Still, custom AdTech development is not a perfect strategy, mainly due to the following reasons:

• Custom software development takes a lot of time and planning.
• Building an AdTech tool from scratch is a considerable upfront investment: You need to be fully committed to the idea before you go through with it.

In our blog post, we closely examine the benefits and drawbacks of custom AdTech development — check it out!

Best of both worlds: component-based development

Component-based development is a relatively new approach to software design that entails the use of prebuilt code blocks (components) that can be fully customized to cover the needs of a project.

Here are the benefits of choosing CBD compared to other product development strategies:

• Fast delivery: Relying on prebuilt components instead of building a platform from scratch helps cut development phase by 2–3 times.
• Technology ownership: You own the rights to all the underlying tech.
• Affordability: Since it’s a faster and less resource-straining process, AdTech teams can involve less talent and fewer resources in CBD, exponentially cutting development costs.
• Customization: There’s plenty of room to have exactly what you want.

Which strategy should you choose to bring your AdTech product to market?

To help you make an informed choice between one of the three approaches, we outlined the pros and cons of each below.

If you are serious about building and scaling your AdTech solution, check out our blog. We write posts on AdTech product development and management, share tips for team leaders as well as tech and product teams.