AdTech: boosting the silent backstage of digital advertising

While enhancing user experience, tech applied to manage and optimize online advertising is also able to democratize the industry and create unimaginable competitive advantages for all the players

By Gonzalo García, AdTech Director at etermax.

For several years now, it is impossible to think of society away from technology. Technology is part of our day in all of our routines and actions — it revolutionized the way we buy, sell, pay, educate ourselves, play games, run our business, connect, and the list could go on forever.

Sometimes those tech breakthroughs happen without us even noticing them. We perceive that a situation is solved or a process is eased but we don’t see exactly what happened behind the scenes to optimize that experience. An example is the rise of FinTechs: although there seems to be a boom in recent years, it is actually a deeper transformation that began at least a decade ago, when new players found niches in the financial market that had been overlooked by traditional banking and were able to shake them up through technology, sustained by their flexibility, agility and great adaptability.

The same has been happening within the advertising industry, which is transforming rapidly as media and entertainment, but often without us seeing it. We can all agree that the foundation of digital advertising was probably set at least in 1994, with the first AT&T banner on HotWired (now wired.com). Today it represents 58% of global ad spend, according to Zenith. Since then, the way in which ads are bought and sold on the web has evolved in large and silent steps.

This evolution is what we call AdTech or Advertising Technology: tech applied to manage and optimize online advertising. In other words, everything that happens under the hood of an app, a website or even a digital billboard so that we see a certain ad.

The delivery of this ad, which is perceived by us as users as something immediate and almost random, actually involves an infinity of decisions, exchanges and negotiations that are agreed in milliseconds. It is a very complex ecosystem, where there are many participants and intermediaries that help a medium and a brand to agree to reach the right audience with the right message at the right time.

How do you do that? Analyzing large volumes of information with artificial intelligence and data analysis. AdTech is also the art of simplifying and optimizing these processes, in order to satisfy the main players of the equation, advertisers and publishers, and provide an excellent experience for users. Although sometimes we renege on ads, it will always be preferable for us as consumers to see few and good ads, about products of our interests or that we can relate to, and that load quickly and without failures.

For over 12 years, at etermax we’ve combined technology and creativity to develop software, especially for video games. Our know-how on mobile games prompted us to grow in the field of AdTech, merging our expertise in gaming, Artificial Intelligence and data analysis.

Without limiting ourselves to our products, our goal is to revolutionize the digital advertising industry, offering competitive advantages that until recently were unimaginable for the players that make up the business today. We are convinced that it will be a revolution that will transform the functioning of the advertising industry, but it will also be part of our daily lives, from one day to the next, without even realizing it. We will see if time gives us the reason or not.