Magnite's acquisition of SpringServe back in July 2021 felt like a natural addition to the company. SpringServe offered a video ad server that could complement Magnite's robust programmatic video offerings.

Rubicon Project had immediately positioned itself as a leader in programmatic video after a merger with Telaria (and the subsequent birth of Magnite) and the acquisition of SpotX. By “Hoovering” up SpringServe (the only realistic option outside GAM and FreeWheel in a publisher's consideration set for an ad server), the company collected the final infinity stone in the Magnite video gauntlet. 

Since Magnite already had the video SSP covered, owning the other key piece of technology that every video publisher needs, an ad server, would allow them to not only make customers stickier but also allow them to optimize the entire ad serving workflow, whether it be direct, programmatic, or combining the two. 

But as anyone who has gone through a merger or acquisition before knows, buying the technology is the easy part — seamlessly integrating the infrastructure and operational processes of disparate technology platforms is where the rubber meets the road. 

After an acquisition, you must make hard decisions around duplicate features, processes, and people. You must merge the parts that make sense and cut the redundancies — which takes up valuable space on product roadmaps. But you can also develop new products and opportunities that weren't before possible.

Elegantly combining acquired pieces has been Magnite's journey for the last five years — first with the unveiling of ClearLine and culminating with their recent announcement of the new SpringServe platform that combines the legacy SpringServe ad server with the Magnite Streaming SSP. I've been following this journey, and Magnite recently invited me to dig into the latest with ClearLine and SpringServe and share what I learned with all of you. [editor’s note: this is not a sponsored post]

ClearLine

Going into my conversation with Magnite, my curiosity centered around the motivation to develop ClearLine in a market filled with buying tools for advertisers of all shapes and sizes. What differentiation could Magnite offer to lure buyers onto the platform? This angle was my first line of questioning for Magnite SVP of Product Paige Bilins and VP of Product Rory Edwards. 

We began with a demo since I had never seen the ClearLine platform before this meeting. Before the demo, I wondered how much ClearLine leveraged SpringServe tech. As a SpringServe user, I immediately noticed how familiar the platform looked, and Paige confirmed my assumption by asking, "Look familiar?" with a knowing smile.

I had known through the press that SpringServe technology undergirded ClearLine, but this flows through the platform's design language. While we can't "see" the backend of ClearLine, the repurposed UI demonstrates how Magnite leveraged its acquisition to streamline the launch of a new product to market. 

The team explained that one of the goals of ClearLine is to create a simplified buying platform for advertisers who don't necessarily need all the bells and whistles of a full-blown DSP.

They succeeded at that, as it was evident that even someone with a whiff of ad ops experience could launch a campaign on this platform lickety-split. I couldn't help but think of grossly utilitarian DSPs I've had the displeasure of using, and some other convoluted platforms came to mind.

However, there is no shortage of buying platforms focused on CTV that aim to simplify workflows as a differentiator, so I started drilling down into some burning questions about the reason for bringing this product to market. 

The Integrated Strategy

It's fine and dandy to build a simple way to buy streaming video, but what can ClearLine offer that other buying platforms cannot? After talking to the Magnite team, I realized this may be asking the wrong question entirely. It's not just what a buying platform can offer but what a completely integrated video platform can offer. 

Working within the programmatic video ecosystem can often be a frustrating experience — especially in a nascent environment (relative to display) like CTV. Programmatic advertising involves a delicate song and dance between various companies involved in any transaction. 

Order management systems, publisher ad servers, advertiser ad servers, verification vendors, SSPs, DSPs, SSAI stitchers, and more can all play a pivotal role in delivering a campaign. All these players and systems must agree on protocols and processes to achieve harmonious programmatic delivery. 

From years of experience and consequent frustration, orchestrating these systems can be more like cacophony than harmony. Programmatic ostensibly offers the benefits of glorious automation and efficiency — yet its participants' competing motivations and priorities often lead to a lack of innovation.

And herein lies a key motivation for Magnite with the recent integration of their ad server + SSP and launch of ClearLine: streamlining programmatic activation. 

SSPs and DSPs have independent customer sets that drive independent desires and strategies. Let's say, for example, that Magnite had a set of publishers who wanted to offer programmatic pause ads — to make this a reality, Magnite would have to 

1. Find a DSP willing to test this new type of ad unit

2. Agree on request/response protocols (ex. ORTB/VAST + Display/Native/Non-linear video)

3. Agree on creative specifications (e.g., 1920x1080 image - is transparency allowed? Is full frame allowed?)

4. Prioritize development on independent roadmaps

5. Wait until both sides finish software development

6. Find test publishers and test advertisers

7. Align testing (Maybe at different priorities at both companies)

However, since Magnite has an in-house buying platform, it has a built-in buying partner and can dictate when to launch a new ad unit on its own accord. It can align internal teams and priorities to rapidly launch a way for buyers to purchase pause ads using a self-service buying platform. 

So Magnite did just that because buying self-serve pause ads is a real feature on Magnite that is available now.

Magnite could skip steps 1-7 above and launch an innovative CTV ad unit via self-serve on ClearLine without waiting for another company to get their act together. The company can then apply what it learned internally to speed up the enablement of programmatic pause ads sourced from external platforms.

Accelerating CTV

New ad formats are cool, but what about the down-and-dirty parts of programmatic CTV? I started probing the Magnite team for more examples of how an integrated approach like this could better serve publishers and advertisers alike. 

We started getting into topics that hit close to home, as some of these issues have plagued my existence during my career. I'm going to list a few examples of how the disassociation of the SSP and DSP causes major headaches for CTV publishers and advertisers:

Fixing Programmatic Guaranteed

Programmatic guaranteed deals make up a critical component for some streaming publishers. As the name suggests, they guarantee revenue for the publishers and guarantee that publishers will fulfill advertisers' budgets in full. However, there are a hundred different ways that a PG campaign may not deliver, and a lot of it has to do with the dissociation between the supply-side and demand-side platforms. 

If the SSP and DSP aren't completely in sync around the parameters of the deal, the simplest things like a misconfigured flight date, budget, or incompatible creative can derail a PG deal in its tracks. Nailing setup on both sides is imperative with PG relative to PMP because of the constricted time frame, and publishers often reserve the inventory in their system, which impacts planning.

The stakes are even higher during live events where PG errors can blow up an entire opportunity and lead to dreaded slate (no ads and a "we'll be right back" message), which annoys users and destroys monetary potential. 

SSPs and DSPs can do their best to mitigate these issues with things like deal syncing, creative pre-ingestion, and sharing creative fail reasons via an API, but it's still not enough to ameliorate all PG issues.

Sometimes advertisers update deal settings after a deal sync between the systems, advertisers don't pay attention to failure reasons, or DSPs don't have mechanisms to communicate publisher creative specifications automatically.

This lack of proper, all-encompassing integration thrusts the promise of programmatic (automation and efficiency) back into the manual stone age. I often feel like beating my laptop with a stick like a caveman each time I have to solve these types of issues. 

A single integrated platform could save everyone the headaches that come with integrating disparate platforms. Magnite understands these woes and has already started moving in a direction with ClearLine to address them. 

Paige explained how Magnite locks ClearLine targeting for PG deals, eliminating one of the issues mentioned above. Typically, publishers should be the only side applying targeting on PG — Magnite can ensure this is the case by locking the deal settings for the buyer once the deal is activated. Even though this is a single example, Magnite now also has the flexibility to continuously improve deal and creative syncing between platforms without waiting to adopt any updates to creative or deal APIs.

Live Events

For something as advanced as the programmatic monetization of live events, some very manual processes are still necessary to ensure smooth delivery. One of these is ensuring DSPs understand the potential spike in QPS (queries per second) that a live event may cause. A deluge of bid requests could tip over a DSP's systems if they aren't prepared. 

Publishers must manually provide QPS estimates for each live event via email, another primitive process baked into a “programmatic” workflow. The industry is working on some standards to at least share these estimates between systems, but those specifications have not yet materialized, and even when they do, it will take more time for adoption. 

Magnite is working on forecasting tools that will allow publishers to preregister live events so it can not only assist with the publisher's forecasting capabilities, but it can also push those expected spikes into ClearLine to assist with scaling and pacing — eliminating the shock and risk that live event spikes can bring.

Speaking of forecasting, since ClearLine has insight into the ad server and SSP, it has complete visibility into supply and demand — an enviable position to be in relative to traditional DSPs who only see the segment of inventory the publisher chooses to share — making forecasting, pacing, and optimization much more difficult. 

Content Metadata

CTV buyers want more insight into the shows and episodes they buy, but publishers must consider laws and regulations that prevent exposing information like this in bid requests. It is generally off the table to share anything more than generic content metadata like genre and rating in bid requests containing user identifiers like device IDs, hashed email IDs, or IP addresses since this could reveal the person's viewing habits. 

There is a world where a DSP could ensure that no person or client can get their hands on both the user identifier and show/series title from the same transaction, but publishers have no technical mechanism to ensure the DSP holds up that promise. Once a publisher combines these two pieces of metadata and blasts it into a bid request, it's out of their hands. 

But what if the publisher's and buyer's technology were on the same stack? Another potential benefit is that a platform like SpringServe could share the sensitive metadata between systems and ensure that no buyers could access user identifiers + show/series names together.

Since they own the end-to-end workflow, they have complete control over handling that data which could open up show level targeting and reporting that wouldn't otherwise be possible between two separate companies on the supply and demand sides.

There are also no worries about mapping SSP genre or category values between systems that often use separate taxonomies, leading to unintended targeting or reporting results.

Pricing

The above examples are not an exhaustive list, but I wanted to move on to another topic that always came across as a potential primary benefit of ClearLine: pricing.

One of the promised benefits of ClearLine is that advertisers can devote more spend to working media. By nature of being built in the SpringServe ad server, ClearLine offers a more direct connection between publisher and buyer than buying through a DSP. And I was told that "The cost to activate purposefully reflects that level of directness."

I figured I wouldn't get many specific answers on pricing, but I did receive some insight from Magnite: 

It's a journey

Before I wrote this article, I viewed Magnite as attempting to take on traditional DSPs directly with ClearLine. After talking with Magnite and writing this article, I understand that launching any buying tool will naturally pull away budgets from other buying products, but I now view the strategy as more nuanced. Magnite wants to offer a more seamless CTV activation path for both buyers and sellers.

By integrating the ad server, SSP, and buying platform, they can remove the friction often involved when coordinating technology integration between separate companies. They hope to speed up activation time and solve previously thorny issues that external collaboration manifests.

At the same time, Magnite continues to consolidate its technology through the combination of Magnite Streaming and the SpringServe ad server. Rather than wholly separate platforms, Magnite looks to introduce ad serving and programmatic via separate but now much more interconnected modules to speed up operational workflows (and eliminate the legacy technical debt of maintaining separate platforms — which should allow them to focus more time on launching new features).

Paige told me that integrating the ad server and SSP is a "journey" and ongoing. The beta of the new integrated platform is live now, and the feedback they earn is sure to mold the direction of the technology and dictate how else the integration of ClearLine can benefit publishers and advertisers alike.