Technology
DSP (demand-side platform)
A demand-side platform is software that lets advertisers and agencies buy advertising inventory programmatically across many publishers through automated real-time bidding.
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In detail
A DSP aggregates access to inventory across many supply sources and applies bidding logic, targeting and optimisation on the buyer's behalf. It is the buy-side counterpart to a supply-side platform.
For China outbound, DSPs are both an opportunity and a bottleneck. They are the natural route through which outbound budget could reach international inventory at scale, and they are also the point at which onboarding fails, because the barriers are commercial rather than technical.
Those barriers are credit assessment of Chinese entities, RMB settlement, Chinese-language support and documentation, and fraud screening requiring local context. None are solved by platform engineering.
Related terms
- Cross-border media buying
- Cross-border media buying is the purchase of advertising inventory in one country by an advertiser or agency based in another, requiring contracting, settlement and measurement to work across both jurisdictions.
- RMB settlement
- RMB settlement is the payment of a media transaction in Chinese renminbi, which requires a compliant cross-border path when the media owner invoices in another currency and jurisdiction.
- Trading desk
- A trading desk is a centralised team that executes programmatic media buying on behalf of advertisers, operating demand-side platforms and managing bidding strategy.