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For smaller publishers looking to harness programmatic advertising, the challenges of creating their own tech stack can be insurmountable. White-Label solutions offer a powerful alternative.
The digital ad market is changing so rapidly that the labor market is struggling to keep pace. There is currently an unprecedented shortage of professionals specializing in building and operating complex ad tech solutions. In addition, startups and SMBs often lack the funds to start their own ad tech stacks from scratch.
This is where a white-label ad tech platform comes to the rescue – essentially a ready-made product that can be rebranded and customized to meet specific requirements, without having to build everything from the ground up.
Also, a white-label ad tech platform is typically backed by a team of experts who have experience in developing and maintaining ad tech platforms. This means that companies do not need to hire their own team of developers and technical experts.
Below are the features and benefits of White-Label ad tech solutions:
A technological lifehack: why is white-label concept so relevant for advertising?
Programmatic accounts for roughly 70% of all media purchases worldwide because content consumption channels multiply, including mobile, desktop, and Smart TV. This gives a huge push to the proliferation of automated media-trading tools and platforms, such as SSPs, DSPs, and Ad Exchanges.
Some publishers open their own SSPs to have better control over their inventory monetization. When it comes to advertisers, they often open their own DSPs to avoid paying commissions to third-party technology providers.
For example, in 2016, Spotify, as a publisher, generated 20% of its revenue from its own programmatic audio platform. Bayer, meanwhile, managed to reduce its programmatic buying costs by $10 to $11 million after bringing programmatic in-house (in 2019).
In simple terms, White-Label provides the tech core of the product (platform) to all other businesses willing to build a complex solution and label it as their own. Here are the benefits point by point:
1) Focusing on their own competencies
Creating a White-Label product usually takes just a week and is much more affordable than developing one from scratch. In a matter of weeks you can unfold your own fully-functional, programmatic platform.
It’s not just a pre-made solution or a boxed solution that you can’t adjust to your needs. These days, a lot of White-Label providers offer additional custom feature development, helping with some rare types of integrations and even setting up additional technical platform modules.
Roman Vrublivsky, CEO of SmartHub White-Label Ad Exchange.
With White-Label, the whole platform is constantly supported by professionals, which means that a publisher does not have to worry about technical maintenance at all. Instead, the business can focus on its core competencies, while the tech part is commissioned to the professionals.
2) Saves time, budget and stress
With White-Label, a publisher avoids wasting time and resources on coding, designing and licensing the tech platform. Unless your company specializes in these areas, and has a dedicated IT team, it’s better to commission this work to someone who already knows the landscape.
Ad tech platforms are super complex and multilayered; for example, solutions like ad exchanges can have myriads of different integrations for analytics, data management, RTB (real-time bidding) auctions and so on. More so, the ad exchange is an open marketplace, meaning that it lets SSPs (supply-side platforms) and DSPs (demand-side platforms) interact with each other to organize media trading. Each of these platforms should be correctly integrated into the ad exchange’s ecosystem so that the demand partners (DSPs) receive suitable traffic and the supply partners (SSPs) effectively sell their inventory to the right demand partners.
This approach to development enables startups to quickly enter the RTB ecosystem without reinventing the wheel. White-label helps to reduce the investments on platform building and maintenance – this becomes the task of a white-label provider – the vendor that makes sure everything works smoothly on the tech side of the business.
3) Avoiding technical and reputational risks
Your business reputation might be undermined if prospective customers don’t trust your brand because of operational inconsistencies or constant technical problems. Building a platform from scratch for the very first time is an immense challenge, and a ready-made solution might be crude or not as strong as its rivals.
Restoring a reputation is a very hard task, and for this reason, many companies give preference to time-tested technologies, like the ones offered by White-Label vendors.
4) Receiving profits and ROI sooner
Technically, the sooner you launch the platform on the market, the sooner you can get profits out of its operation. White-Label undoubtedly shortens the time between the development and release stages, cutting it from half a year to a week or month.
The exact time of development usually depends on the individual case – while one client is satisfied with standard functionality, the other may need additional installations related to the specifics of its business.
5) No headache with updates
The story doesn’t end when you create your own tech platform; in fact, the journey only begins there. In order to make your solution updated and competitive, you also need to constantly improve and enrich it with new features and breakthrough technologies.
Professionals behind White-Label solutions are busied only with your platform; they don’t work for other companies and, thus, are fully focused on improving your system. It is their responsibility to ensure that your solution runs smoothly and is updated and enriched as needed.
6) Easily scaling the business
Again, scaling your business is a task that depends on ad tech professionals and developers. If you have them onboard, it might not be a problem. In the majority of cases, however, it requires time, and your platform might be put on maintenance, meaning it will not be operating in a timely manner.
Technical maintenance is a regular occurrence for many services, but, with the White-Label platform, you can scale without terminating the workflow and media trading inside of the marketplace. As a rule, the White-Label providers already have everything covered to ensure a smooth transition from a smaller to a bigger plan for their clients. Their servers can be located all around the world, so it is important to ask your vendor about it before striking a deal.
7) Expert support
Building a technological platform is not an easy process – it requires assembling the team, coding, designing and testing the solution before it can be released. The same logic also applies to operation – if you are not well versed in programmatic platform configuration, then you might need help to correctly adjust the endpoints of the ad exchange’s DSPs and SSPs. You might also need expert advice on how to manage the platform’s media trading process so traffic is distributed optimally (to let your marketplace achieve great profits).
If you are choosing a White-Label vendor, ask if they support and guide their clients throughout the journey. In many cases, such vendors provide not just technology, but also all-encompassing support, starting from the platform setup and configuration and ending with giving professional advice regarding optimization and workflow.
Conclusion
White-Label delivers outstanding opportunities to those publishers that strive to create their own solutions without spending too much time on platform building, testing or licensing. As a convenient business concept, White-Label gives advertising startups the opportunity to be supported and guided at every step of the platform operation, which is super important for those who are new to programmatic.
Roman Vrublivskyi
CEO, SmartHub
Roman Vrublivskyi is the CEO of SmartHub’s white-label programmatic solution. Starting his career in 2016, Roman was focused on business development in Informational Technologies and SaaS industries. In 2019 he shifted his focus to enterprise-driven advertising technologies within SmartHub.
