Dynamic Ad Insertion (DAI) represents a cornerstone in bridging the gap between content creators and advertisers, offering a seamless avenue for monetizing live and on-demand (VOD) streaming content. In a digital landscape where every interaction counts, ensuring that ads reach the right audience at the right time is paramount. This is where broadpeak.io shines by simplifying the intricate choreography with Supply Side Platforms (SSPs) (through the Ad Servers), making ad insertion in streams feel effortless.

Our solution is built on a robust Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI) framework, which facilitates a streamlined ad insertion flow by manipulating HLS and DASH manifests, ensuring compatibility across various devices without the need for any client-side logic. This approach also aids in circumventing ad blocking, ensuring that advertisements reach their intended audience.

broadpeak.io also provides tools for real-time monitoring and detailed reporting on ad insertions, offering content providers actionable insights into the effectiveness of their ad insertion efforts.

Ad Targeting: A Necessity for Modern Streaming

In the contemporary digital landscape, ad targeting has transitioned from being a luxury to a necessity. The ability to deliver relevant advertising to individual viewers enhances engagement, optimizes the advertising ROI, and enriches the overall viewer experience. The essence of ad targeting lies in the precise alignment of advertisements with viewer preferences and behaviors, ensuring that the ads resonate with the audience.

It is however critical to understand that ad decisioning is the remit of the Ad Server (and/or SSP), not the SSAI solution. However, DAI solutions like broadpeak.io play a pivotal role in facilitating effective ad targeting. By processing client requests and transitioning information to SSPs, SSAI solutions serve as a conduit for transmitting vital data that informs ad decisioning. This data, which may encompass viewer information, content metadata, and other relevant metrics, is instrumental in selecting ads that align with viewer preferences.

Ad Decisioning Flow

A typical data flow looks like the following:

• The playback request comes from the player/app (bottom right). The request comes with headers (such as IP address, user agent, etc.) and usually with query parameters (with metadata such as identifiers for content, user, device and/or any other contextual data).
• The request goes through the CDN to broadpeak.io. Those headers and parameters are retained and forwarded by the CDN.
• broadpeak.io extracts information from those headers and query parameters and maps them to headers and/or query parameters sent to the Ad Server. Additional information extracted from the source content (in particular from SCTE markers) can also be added to this mapping.
• The ad server uses that information to evaluate its targeting rules, perform the ad bidding (if using Programmatic advertisement) and essentially determine which ads to serve. It is common for the ad server to retrieve and/or use additional data acquired from DMPs (usually for audience segmentation) and from the CMS (typically content metadata). The way it obtains that data is specific to each ad server and implementation.

In such a typical flow, the broadpeak.io SSAI is only responsible for the mapping and transit of data that it receives from the client-side. No decisioning is made about whether to insert ads or not, what type of ads, or even which SSP to send requests to.