With the explosion of the programmatic space in recent years, choice is one thing you won&#;t be lacking when it comes to picking a new DSP (Demand Side Platform).

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For some media buyers, off-the-shelf solutions will fit the bill perfectly; for others, bespoke features are needed to realise their true programmatic vision and business goals on a global scale.

So, if you&#;re in the market for a new demand platform, but you&#;re suffering from a bit of &#;analysis paralysis&#;, the BidCore team is here to help.

To simplify your decision-making, we&#;ve compiled 9 essential questions you should ask to help whittle down your choices and make a better DSP decision for you and your business.

Table of contents

Short on time? Jump to the topics that matter to you most by clicking a section below.

#1: First things first: can the DSP handle the basics?

While any good DSP should be able to bring something unique to the table, there&#;s a core set of functionality the platform will need to even get off the starting blocks.

If a DSP can&#;t get the basics right, chances are it&#;s not going to deliver the performance you need. So, before anything else, you need to confirm that the DSP you&#;re considering has those bases covered.

That means:

• Having a user-friendly interface
• Managing creative assets
• Setting start and end dates
• Accessing quality inventory from various suppliers (SSPs)
• Setting audience targeting options
• Activating first-party data or integrating with DMPs
• Reporting on campaign metrics
• And a logical workflow that saves time and effort

Whether your objective is brand awareness, user acquisition, retargeting, or even all three, your DSP should be flexible enough to support your buying or campaign goals. Moreover, it should also be able to do this across multiple media channels and inventory types, including Display, Video, Mobile, CTV, and Native; the last thing you want to do is switch between DSP platforms depending on the campaign format.

The lower the friction, the more work you get done, the better your return on investment.

Simple.

#2: What&#;s the plan for identity solutions?

The ad tech industry is facing an identity crisis, but perhaps not in the way you might think.

In early , Google will finally remove support for third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, closing the loop on a process which has been a long time coming.

But what does it mean for programmatic advertisers? Don&#;t worry &#; this isn&#;t the end.

To maintain programmatic efficiency in , you&#;ll likely need to leverage various technologies: privacy-compliant deterministic and probabilistic IDs,1st-party data, machine learning and browser-based solutions, contextual targeting, and more.

Between now and when third-party cookies go away, you can expect identity solutions to grow in complexity. We&#;ve already seen over 50 different types of identifiers enter the marketplace &#; many of which may be left by the wayside as time goes on. It is your DSP&#;s responsibility to help you navigate the opportunities and support your choices.

As a starting point, your DSP partner should have a plan for working within Google&#;s &#;Privacy Sandbox&#;, which will require supporting a good number of the so-called &#;avian&#; solutions, including Turtledove, FLoC, FLEDGE and others. With Google&#;s inventory making up a large proportion of supply, it&#;s essential that your DSP has a plan for Privacy Sandbox if you want to maintain access to this supply.

Beyond a plan for Google, your DSP partner should allow you to activate audiences using the third-party ID solution(s) or partner of your choice &#; and help you understand which to use (and when) based on campaign goals for performance, reach, and so on.

Finally, your DSP should be able to assist you when it comes to non ID-based targeting methods, too: contextual signals, data clean rooms, and more.

#3: Can you optimise performance to your specific KPIs?

We&#;ve talked a lot so far about how DSPs work and how to choose one, but, when all&#;s said and done, it really boils down to one thing: performance.

All reputable DSPs will offer some standard out-of-the-box optimisation capabilities targeting the most common digital KPIs, such as maximising clicks or CTR, minimising CPM, maximising viewability, spending budget evenly, etc. For some media buyers, these may be sufficient to meet their goals.

But do these one-size-fits-all metrics actually mean success for your business?

Every company is unique, so KPIs are often equally one-of-a-kind: maximise time-on-site, return visitors, session depth, and many more. You know your business better than anyone, and you know the metrics which matter most to your success &#; so why would you spend time optimising to clicks when you really care about session depth?

To drive real performance, you need to optimise to goals that are meaningful to your business and need to partner with a DSP that is able to provide that level of flexibility. To achieve this, it would be wise to check to see if your DSP partner offers:

• Custom machine learning models and/or buying strategies
• Optimisation to and reporting of unique events
• The ability to optimise to multiple goals at the same time, in one line item

By leveraging optimisation features like these, you can successfully drive the very best performance for KPIs that are meaningful to your business.

#4: How much flexibility can the DSP offer?

One of the great things about programmatic media buying is the superior level of flexibility and control it brings to the table.

If you&#;re just starting out, those basic DSP features we mentioned earlier will be exactly what you need to begin realising the potential of programmatic.

But, over time, you might start to ask some different questions:

• What happens if you need a feature your DSP doesn&#;t support as you expand your programmatic campaigns?
• What if you want to leverage your own data intelligence or bring your own machine learning tools into play?
• Is it possible to update the user interface to better suit your specific workflow or solve problems specific to your business?
• Are you able to create bespoke models to target unique attributes of your particular audience?

All of these questions really speak to one thing: flexibility.

The bigger players in the DSP space simply won&#;t have the bandwidth, or even the technical infrastructure, to help you expand your programmatic processes in this way. And, because their platforms are tailored to a mass audience, it&#;s unlikely they&#;ll have the motivation to make these changes just for you.

So, when looking for a new DSP partner, it&#;s important to consider one that&#;s flexible enough to help you achieve your unique goals as your programmatic buying evolves over time.

#5: Will the DSP help you activate your unique data assets?

In today&#;s competitive marketplace, data is king.

Properly leveraging your proprietary data assets is one of the most powerful tools in any programmatic media buyer&#;s toolkit. Doing so instantly unlocks granular audience targeting which will drive greater campaign performance and a bigger bottom line for you.

Some DSPs offer limited data integration capability, but others &#; like BidCore &#; were built from the ground up with your data in mind.

When it comes down to it, successful data activation is about visibility into the bidstream. More specifically, it&#;s about using your data to locate your target audience with laser precision and in a secure manner. A preferred DSP partner will help you to securely integrate your first-party data and activate your data assets in a variety of ways to maximize your performance.

But targeting based on your first-party data is really just the beginning.

A good DSP will deliver features that help you take your data-driven activity to the next level. This might mean helping you create custom prediction models, lookalike audiences, building bespoke buying and optimization strategies, and much more &#; all leveraging your 1st-party data. Also, if your data is incredibly sensitive, it&#;s important to work with a DSP partner that offers flexible options for how to activate your data in ways that ensure it never leaves your preferred environment.

Only by working with a DSP which allows you to tap into the true potential of your data will you unlock truly differentiated performance in programmatic.

#6: How in-depth are the reporting and analytics options?

Campaign management, inventory supply, and data activation are really just one side of the DSP. Still, they are not truly valuable until you know how well everything is working.

It&#;s here that your DSP&#;s reporting and analytics tools come into play.

At the most basic level, you&#;ll need visibility of metrics like ad impressions, clicks, and cost, all of which will give you a good sense of how your campaign is performing. But why stop there? Whether you&#;re working with partners against specific KPIs, as discussed above, or you simply want to eke out as much performance as possible from each line item, advanced reporting can help.

A good DSP partner should provide additional reporting functionality, such as conversion and custom event tracking, as well as robust reporting APIs that can be used to integrate with your native reporting dashboards and workflows. An even better DSP will offer in-depth reporting on even more granular data points, giving you greater control of your performance. For example, with BidCore and its u-Slicer tool, you can build custom reports in real-time, and even drill down into the log-level data to glean insights other DSPs could only dream of.

It&#;s advanced reporting tools like this that can make the difference between a standard DSP and a world-class one&#; so choose wisely.

#7: How much support does the DSP offer?

It&#;s a bit of an understatement to say that the programmatic world is complex.

Sometimes you just need a reliable third-party to help you know your ORTB from your PMP &#; especially when you&#;re new to the ad tech world. That&#;s why it&#;s important to look into the levels of support the DSP you&#;re considering has to offer.

Depending on the level of spend you&#;re bringing to the table, most DSPs will provide a dedicated account manager in combination with a support team for incidental issues. You&#;ll probably also be well-supported during the onboarding phase, but what happens further down the line?

If you&#;re new to programmatic buying, you&#;ll probably need more support during the early days, but ad tech moves fast, so how will you keep up? Huge DSPs often don&#;t have the time (or inclination) to keep their customers informed of industry changes, let alone how to make the most of new features.

For these reasons, it&#;s always a good idea to choose a DSP partner which can:

• Understand your position in the marketplace
• Offer comprehensive support either in real-time or via self-serve documentation
• Listen to your feedback and incorporate requests into the future product roadmap
• Genuinely care about you getting the most out of your partnership

#8: Can the DSP give you access to the supply you need?

One of the biggest deciding factors for any DSP is the inventory it offers.

interwiser supply professional and honest service.

Put simply, if you can&#;t access the inventory, and therefore the audiences, you need, the DSP won&#;t do much good at all. The same goes for inventory types and media channels.

Consequently, one of the first things to do when approaching a new DSP is to ask the following of their supply:

• Does available inventory include all that you&#;ll need for your campaigns: Display, Video, Native, CTV, DOOH, etc.?
• Does the DSP charge a premium for certain types of inventory?
• Which SSPs and/or publishers are they integrated with?

If your DSP offers multiple SSPs and publishers right out of the box, you can hit the ground running when it comes to launching campaigns and generating real results.

It&#;s worth noting here that almost all DSPs will claim to have access to the very best inventory, and in many cases it&#;s true. But so does everybody else.

The real trick is to find a DSP which can carve you a path to high-quality supply, even in more niche markets. A good DSP will be able to make this happen either with direct publisher access or via Supply Path Optimisation (SPO) strategies to deliver peace of mind to even the most risk-averse of advertisers.

#9: How flexible are the DSP&#;s pricing models?

It&#;s a delicate topic, but it&#;s often a deciding factor: pricing and cost.

Traditionally, DSPs have charged using a share-of-media model, meaning a certain percentage of overall spend would go to the DSP as a fee. The only problem? As the marketplace has become more competitive, agencies and advertisers are having their budgets squeezed, making it a lot harder to justify a 15-25% cut just to have their hat in the ring.

Thankfully, the industry has evolved &#; and pricing with it.

Here are two ways BidCore differentiates its pricing models:

• The QPS (Queries Per Second) model. Pricing by QPS is about the volume of bid requests a buyer can listen to and process in a second, but it&#;s also about delivering more control of your costs. This model works well for buyers looking to analyse traffic patterns as well as activate data, machine learning, and data intelligence &#; all while managing costs.
• The Filled Impressions model. This pricing structure means you only pay for the impressions where your ad was successfully served. It&#;s a better way to control your spend and know exactly where every dollar is going, but it may not have as much coverage of the bidstream. However, if you are looking to purchase high-value supply, like CTV, and don&#;t want to pay 15% on a $30 CPM, a filled impression model would be a smart choice.

These are just a couple of examples, but there&#;s a lot more to programmatic pricing than meets the eye. The bottom line for now is that you should always ask your DSP about the pricing models they offer and ask which is best for your business.

Ready to unleash your programmatic potential?

If you&#;re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices when it comes to picking a new DSP, the BidCore team is here to help.

With our nimble, flexible, and scalable DSP, you can discover a programmatic solution that grows with your business &#; making it precisely as complex as you need it to be.

CHOOSING RIGHT PROCESSOR IN DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSING

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Introduction

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) processors are microprocessors designed to perform digital signal processing &#; the mathematical manipulation of digitally represented signals.

Digital signal processing is one of the core technologies in rapidly growing application areas such as wireless communications, audio and video processing, and industrial control. Along with the rising popularity of DSP applications, the variety of DSP-capable processors has expanded greatly since the introduction of the first commercially successful DSP chips in the early s. With semiconductor manufacturers vying for bigger shares of this booming market, designers&#; choices will broaden even further in the next few years.

Today&#;s DSP processors are sophisticated devices with impressive capabilities. In this blog, we introduce the features common to modern commercial DSP processors, explain some of the important differences among these devices, and focus on features that a system designer should examine to find the processor that best fits his or her application.

Applications

SP processors find use in an extremely diverse array of applications, from radar systems to consumer electronics. Naturally, no one processor can meet the needs of all or even most applications. Therefore, the first task for the designer selecting a DSP processor is to weigh the relative importance of performance, cost, integration, ease of development, power consumption, and other factors for the application at hand. Here we&#;ll briefly touch on the needs of just a few classes of DSP applications.

In terms of dollar volume, the biggest applications for digital signal processors are inexpensive, high-volume embedded systems, such as cellular telephones, disk drives and portable digital audio players. In these applications, cost and integration are paramount. For portable, battery-powered products, power consumption is also critical. Ease of development is usually less important; even though these applications typically involve the development of custom software to run on the DSP and custom hardware surrounding the DSP, the huge manufacturing volumes justify expending extra development effort.

A second important class of applications involves processing large volumes of data with complex algorithms for specialized needs. Examples include sonar and seismic exploration, where production volumes are lower, algorithms more demanding, and product designs larger and more complex. As a result, designers favor processors with maximum performance, good ease of use, and support for multiprocessor configurations. In some cases, rather than designing their own hardware and software from scratch, designers assemble such systems using off-the-shelf development boards, and ease their software development tasks by using existing function libraries as the basis of their application software.

Choosing the Right DSP Processor

One can consider a number of features that vary from one DSP to another in selecting a processor. These features are discussed below:

1. Arithmetic Format

One of the most fundamental characteristics of a programmable digital signal processor is the type of native arithmetic used in the processor. Most DSPs use fixed point arithmetic, while other processors use floating-point arithmetic. Floating-point arithmetic is a more flexible and general mechanism than fixed-point. With floating-point, system designers have access to a wider dynamic range . As a result, floating-point DSP processors are generally easier to program than their fixed point cousins, but usually are also more expensive and have higher power consumption. The ease-of-use advantage of floating-point processors is due to the fact that in many cases the programmer doesn&#;t have to be concerned about dynamic range and precision.

In contrast, on a fixed-point processor, programmers often must carefully scale signals at various stages of their programs to ensure adequate numeric precision with the limited dynamic range of the fixed-point processor. Most high-volume, embedded applications use fixed point processors because the priority is on low cost and, often, low power. For applications that have extremely demanding dynamic range and precision requirements, or where ease of development is more important than unit cost, floating-point processors have the advantage.

2. Data Width

All common floating-point DSPs use a 32-bit data word. For fixed-point DSPs, the most common data word size is 16 bits. The size of the data word has a major impact on cost, because it strongly influences the size of the chip and the number of package pins required, as well as the size of external memory devices connected to the DSP. Therefore, designers try to use the chip with the smallest word size that their application can tolerate.

As with the choice between fixed and floating point chips, there is often a trade-off between word size and development complexity. For example, with a 16-bit fixed-point processor, a programmer can perform double-precision 32-bit arithmetic operations by stringing together an appropriate combination of instructions. If the bulk of an application can be handled with single-precision arithmetic, but the application needs more precision for a small section of the code, the selective use of double-precision arithmetic may make sense. If most of the application requires more precision, a processor with a larger data word size is likely to be a better choice.

3. Speed

A key measure of the suitability of a processor for a particular application is its execution speed. There are a number of ways to measure a processor&#;s speed. Perhaps the most fundamental is the processor&#;s instruction cycle time: the amount of time required to execute the fastest instruction on the processor. The reciprocal of the instruction cycle time divided by one million and multiplied by the number of instructions executed per cycle is the processor&#;s peak instruction execution rate in millions of instructions per second, or MIPS.

A problem with comparing instruction execution times is that the amount of work accomplished by a single instruction varies widely from one processor to another. Some of the newest DSP processors use VLIW (very long instruction word) architectures, in which multiple instructions are issued and executed per cycle. These processors typically use very simple instructions that perform much less work than the instructions typical of conventional DSP processors. Hence, comparisons of MIPS ratings between VLIW processors and conventional DSP processors can be particularly misleading, because of fundamental differences in their instruction set styles.

Two final notes of caution on processor speed: First, be careful when comparing processor speeds quoted in terms of &#;millions of operations per second&#; (MOPS) or &#;millions of floating-point operations per second&#; (MFLOPS) figures, because different processor vendors have different ideas of what constitutes an &#;operation.&#; Second, use caution when comparing processor clock rates. A DSP&#;s input clock may be the same frequency as the processor&#;s instruction rate, or it may be two to four times higher than the instruction rate, depending on the processor.

4. Power Consumption and Management

DSPs are increasingly being used in portable applications (such as cellular phones and portable audio players) where power consumption is a major concern. As a result, many processor vendors are reducing processor supply voltages and adding power management features to give programmers greater influence over processor power consumption. Power management features available on some DSPs include:

Reduced voltage operation: Many vendors offer low-voltage (3.3-, 2.5-, or 1.8-volt) versions of their DSP processors. These processors consume far less power than five-volt equivalents at the same clock rate.

Sleep or idle modes: Most DSPs feature modes that turn off the processor&#;s clock to all but certain sections of the processor, reducing power consumption.

Programmable clock dividers: Some DSPs allow the processor&#;s clock frequency to be varied under software control to use the minimum clock speed required for a particular task.

Peripheral control: Some DSPs allow the programmer to disable peripherals that are not in use.

5. Cost

Obviously, processor cost is a major concern for products that are to be produced in volume. For such applications, designers try to use the lowest cost DSP that meets the requirements of the application, even though such devices may be considerably less flexible and more difficult to program than costlier processors. Among processor families, the least expensive family members tend to have significantly fewer features, less on-chip memory, and lower performance than the more expensive members.

A key factor in processor pricing is the dependence of price on device packaging. For example, plastic thin quad flat pack (PQFP and TQFP) packages can be significantly less expensive than pin grid array (PGA) packages. Finally, when considering prices, it is important to remember two things. First, processor prices are continually falling. Second, prices are strongly dependent on quantity, and prices for, say, a quantity 100,000 order may be significantly lower than for a quantity 1,000 order.

6. Ease of Development

The degree to which ease of system development is a concern depends on the application. Engineers performing research or prototyping will probably require tools that make system development as simple as possible. A fundamental question to ask when choosing a DSP is how the chip will be programmed. Typically, developers choose either assembly language, a high-level language &#; such as C or Ada &#; or a combination of both. Surprisingly, a large portion of DSP programming is still done in assembly language. Because DSP applications have voracious number-crunching requirements, programmers are often unable to use compilers, which often generate assembly code that executes slowly. Rather, programmers can be forced to hand-optimize assembly code to lower execution time and code size to acceptable levels.

Conclusion

Despite some manufacturers&#; claims, there isn&#;t a single best DSP chip. Rather, the right DSP depends on the application; a good choice for one application might be a poor choice for another. In this blog we have reviewed a number of criteria useful for choosing a DSP: arithmetic format, data width, speed, power consumption, cost and ease of development. Which of these are most important is a decision the system designer must make based on his or her application.

Blog By: Rajaram Patil, Sanmit Patil, Pushkar Pawar and Vipul Pisal

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