OpenX is an ad serving platform. It is sold option as a hosted solution for can be purchased as an installed application. It allows for easy inventory management , geo-targeting of ads by country, and provides statistics for each ad placement.
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Simpli.fi
Score 6.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Simpli.fi is the epoymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Fort Worth, for programmatic media buying, display advertising, and streaming / OTT monetization. It is a data management and demand-side buying hybrid platform (DMP / DSP).
What are the best ways to integrate it with salesforce.com? What are the best ways to target our users with this tool? To segment the users? How can I integrate my ads with your adexchange-what sizes are you looking for in terms of banners, skyscrapers and so on. In this way I can plan my in house ad and those for the exchange to be the same size, to avoid duplication of work.
If you don't care where your campaigns are running, if you don't care about your clients then feel free to do business with them. I would not recommend them to other agencies or business if they have a lot of particular advertisers and clients that they work with. It is too much work for them. If you want to do a self-service model with Simpli.fi, then I could recommend working with them. As long as I don't have to deal with their customer service daily, and my company has the control of the campaigns, I can feel more comfortable working with them. But even still, there are a lot of red flags that have been raised over the last few years and I am skeptical.
OpenX is a system that was designed to scale as is evident in some key design decisions found throughout the platform. The multi-server setup that was chosen at Mail.com allowed for a distributed server architecture which separated the front end web delivery nodes from the backend MySQL Database master which replicated data back to each front end delivery node mysql slave. This eased the ability to horizontally scale as needed due to the ingenious separation of the ad impressions data tables on the delivery nodes which were being collected locally on each ad impression and then processed periodically back to to the master database which replicated the aggregated statistics back to the delivery nodes. The ability to load balance across the front end web delivery nodes, add caching at many different layers, utilize a CDN for the static ad images, implement PHP accelerators, and hit memcached instead of the MySQL master made the OpenX platform a service that was very resilient to failures.
The ability to optimize the platform is also something that OpenX does very well. This is evident in many of the config key parameters available. In addition to OpenX specific tunable's, optimizations can be made at many different levels in which the system sits. These include hardware and operating system level optimizations, tcp and networking stack optimizations, web server/php-cgi configurations, and database (MySQL InnoDB) tunable's. There are many different optimization knobs that can be tuned to help scale the application for the best performance possible
The documentation was simple, to the point, and well written which led to an easy initial implementation and roll out of a multi-server setup. The installation and upgrade procedures were straight forward even for the complexities of the multi-server setup. I also found the OpenX team to be accessible and even got a chance to meet some of the team at their Up Close and Personal events at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Core developers were on hand to answer technical questions and also made themselves available to us via email and irq channels.
The open nature of the OpenX platform allows for flexibility in the choice of web serving platform to use (Apache, nginx, Lighttpd) and also the database management systems (MySQL, PostGreSQL)
Simpli.fi's Geo-Fencing capabilities are top notch! The ability to include an unlimited number of geo-fences within a campaign is invaluable, as is the ability to measure the effectiveness of a geo-fencing campaign in driving foot traffic to our clients' physical locations.
Our organization appreciates the knowledge, experience and responsiveness of Simpli.fi's customer support staff.
One of the things Simpli.fi does particularly well is the education of its users and re-sellers. From monthly webinars, to its Bullseye learning courses, they have a way to make the complex understandable to even the most green digital sellers!
I no longer work at the company where I was using OpenX, but if I were then I'd certainly stay aboard. Frankly, there are a lot of sunk costs involved with building all of the infrastructure we had put in place, the system was working very well even if reporting was a hassle, and our team was trained on it. Also, I'm not aware of another product that does everything else we'd need it to.
I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.
They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.
OpenX is less focused than MoPub and it has a bigger reach as it is not limited to the mobile app. Unlike MoPub that focuses on performance, OpenX comes from the branding world and is pushing into CTV and other areas of the industry more catered to traditional media agencies and not pure ad tech players.
We have done a lot of research on many other vendors that offer the same or even more as Simpli.fi and have found a great fit for our business. There are many other options out there for programmatic buying! My advice to you is do your research. Don't just jump into bed with one without knowing all of the facts. Ask questions. Do some digging. And NEVER take anything they say at face value. They are there to sell you the product and if you move forward, you will for sure be disappointed
OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient.
