Smaato is a supply-side publisher platform (SSP) from the Verve Group since the 2021 acquisition.
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The Trade Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
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The Trade Desk is the eponymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Ventura California, a demand-side / data management hybrid platform (DSP / DMP).
Smaato is very well suited for user acquisition and retargeting companies. Their overlap in terms of audiences and publishers with other exchanges is very limited, which makes it a great alternative when you need to scale a campaign and want to maintain your frequency cap. They work very well in branding campaigns as well as performance campaigns.
After extensive research of DSP and DMP platforms in the market, our agency made the wise decision to license TTD's platform and develop a long-term partnership. TTD continues to innovate and offer cutting-edge media buying solutions, access to more audience data segments, and access to new and emerging media channels like CTV/OTT and digital-out-of-home. We couldn't be happier with TTD's technology and is one of the most advanced agency users of TTD is a key differentiator for our agency.
Reporting platform leaves a lot to be desired. Requires a lot of trial/error to pull exactly what you need to drive optimizations/learnings.
The "stop"/"continue bidding" feature for sitelists, devices, player sizes, etc is awful. When you set something up specifically, you should not have the AUTOMATIC option to serve beyond those parameters.
Trafficking video (VAST/VPAID) tags requires a manual insertion of a click URL. Completely redundant ask and is not provided by advertisers as that URL lives within the ad tag. Should not require multiple actions traffic a video tag.
Creative approval process (manual) doesn't seem necessary and is not a part of peers' platforms. There is no "pause/deactivate" feature for creative, you remove them or adjust the end date.
Smaato has a UI where you can control your line items on the traffic you want to receive. That is a key unique selling point that other SSPs don't offer. Most of the items that you will need like reporting can be done on a self serve manner and that is a big plus, specifically for changes that need to happen really fast and you don't need to deal with account managers that may take some time to answer emails.
It's very intuitive. We had some training materials, but found that users were able to navigate through the software without needing many resources. Our only suggestion would be to add hover-over capability in the browser, so users can see a pop-up message further explaining what each button does.
Smaato's account management team is very professional. They are quite fast in terms of customer support, which is very helpful. One item that stands out is that they are willing to understand what you need for each campaign and what is the best way to move forward. They don't just jump quickly into trying to upsell more of Smaato's products (audiences, data) like other SSPs do.
We noted no issues with our limited interaction with support. The software operated just as expected and we found that we were able to navigate needs on our own. We understand that The Trade Desk offers excellent support, so we believe it will be a good resource to us in the future.
The Trade Desk is a much better product than AppNexus. Even though both products showed promise awhile back, AppNexus stopped innovating and The Trade Desk became specialists on data, cross site tracking and CTV inventory thus having a better and more unique product that actually adds value to your advertising efforts.
The good thing about having an agency account is The Trade Desk lets you add your markups to the client billing.
We had a very positive response from clients regarding their perceived ROI on their ad spend through The Trade Desk.
We did not have many national clients, mostly local dealerships, so it was difficult for them to allocate a lot of funds to display advertising, even though the ROI yield was acceptable.
