Gather sources of information
If you're in the market for an ad server, you've probably only seen or know of a small handful. For those not actively monitoring the landscape, it can seem a bit of a secretive space, especially on the supply side. Honestly, how many ad servers can you say you have experience or intimate knowledge of? Beginning the search for ad servers can be a daunting task. Where do we begin the search?
Search engines? Well, it can be a challenge to find anything past the sponsored links.
Industry media? There are some outlets that do their best to cover trends and highlight platforms that are active within those trends.
Landscapes? These are great to get initial impressions of the size of the competitive space for the market. But, not for judging which platforms are best suited for you.
Word of Mouth? Probably the best source for gathering opinions about platforms. But, very often, this can lead to early bias and risk making subjective choices, rather than objective.
Establish priorities and build themes
There are hundreds of adtech platforms in the market. The noise from vendors and industry media can create confusion. Everyone promotes a solution that solves their chosen problems. As a potential customer, you engage and consume all the sources (as above) to try to build a knowledge-base for an informed decision. And, before you know it, you find yourself in a sea of logos without a clue where or how to draw the lines. It's important to
have anchors to navigate that sea of vendors. So, what are those anchors? They are our priorities. Our priorities help us to define key themes to look for in adtech platforms.
Filter the landscape to identify candidates
Use key themes to filter through the noise and build a clear picture of solutions that are relevant for you. As an example, see the following app that gives a quick filter of a landscape according to themes of SSAI, Programmatic and Omnichannel. It provides a quick answer to a question of "Which platforms have built-in solutions for these themes?".
Build an evaluation framework
Priorities, market analysis, landscape filtering and solution profiling are some of the key elements of a short-listing and selection process.
Bring all these elements into a framework for objective evaluation and comparison of platforms.
Accelerate and enhance your process with industry intelligence
These activities require a lot of industry know-how, time
and resource. In the circumstances where these are not readily available, it's worth looking to experts who can
leverage a wealth of insight and expertise to provide you the tools to select the right video ad server based on your priorities.
