Broadcasters scale personalized advertising utilizing SAS 360 Match On AWS

Media Publishers, particularly broadcasters, are facing increased challenges in today’s fiercely competitive and rapidly expanding streaming landscape. Providing a personalized viewing experience has become a necessity to enhance the streaming experience to attract and retain viewers. To deliver personalized messaging at scale, it is essential to rapidly scale advertising operations, reduce time to market with new ad products, and manage operational expenses efficiently.

In response to these challenges, SAS 360 Match, an open API-driven first-party Ad Server, empowers broadcasters with full scalability while effectively curbing operational costs.

SAS 360 Match

SAS 360 Match is an advertising solution that gives you absolute control over your digital advertising ecosystem. It enables the delivery of precisely targeted, relevant promotional messages, and advertising content to your customers. The solution, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), supports any ad format on any platform, including mobile and video output devices.

SAS 360 Match is your key to making more informed decisions faster across your entire business. It enables you to manage:

• Advertising Sales Orders
• Inventory Level Simulation and Forecasting
• Pricing Optimization
• Targeted Ad Delivery
• Billing and Invoicing Reports
• Visualization and Analysis of Ad Delivery Details

Media companies use SAS 360 Match for precise, personalized advertising across their sites, driven by audience data and real-time events. Ads follow defined business rules and seamlessly connect with third-party exchanges, enabling competitive inventory bidding aligned with your objectives.

“When I was MD [managing director] for the Czech Publisher Exchange, SAS 360 Match achieved remarkable success in the very competitive Czech Publisher market, with five of the top 10 publishers adopting the technology. Publishers appreciate its independence, allowing them full control over their inventory without vendor constraints, and its remarkable versatility, enabling them to diversify their advertising offerings and explore various business models effortlessly.

The API-driven platform not only allows full scalability, its seamless S2S [server-to-server] integration with SSPs [supply-side platforms], free from revenue share fees, along with native support for pre-bid, positions it as an excellent tool not only for direct, premium campaigns but also for programmatic advertising. This success has led us to make SAS 360 Match the foundational technology of our innovative startup, ‘Cruxo,’ dedicated to creating a robust retail media platform,” says Matěj Novák, CTO Cruxo.

Solution Overview

SAS 360 Match is a first-party ad server for owned and operated site properties. This means, SAS 360 Match can integrate with a customer who owns their media and websites, and sells advertising both programmatic and to third-party exchanges.

At its core, SAS 360 Match consists of a decision and rules engine that helps determine what campaign ads to serve based on real-time incoming parameters (to accomplish the goals of the advertiser) while maximizing value for the media owner. The solution also has sales workflow built in to plan request for proposal (RFP) responses, generate invoices and sales approvals. The forecasting and planning help enable management of the sales workflows and campaigns. The reporting tool supports exporting data in various formats to be consumed by other business intelligence (BI) tools.

Solution Key Benefits

For ad streaming, SAS 360 Match supports both configurable pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll duration. This locks down the timing of the ad within a media program and the number of ads that can fit in to the streaming video to support simulcast linear replacement technique.

In addition to determining the ad’s eligibility criteria and prioritization of it to be presented for a viewer, the solution also supports ad monetization. This feature helps customers to request and receive open market bids based on impressions for the ad using cost per mille (CPM) rate, effective cost per mille (eCPM) rate or click rate mechanisms. These metrics support the most optimized ads to be shown for viewability.

The solution also supports subscription-based models for customers who would like to personalize the ad display behavior. The ad response behavior is stored in an ad server for customers to access the attributes using APIs.

SAS 360 Match, as an open solution, facilitates integration with customer connectors that help support the required metrics for ad management by the customer. The data also support modelling and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capability by customers for predictive analysis using Amazon SageMaker.

Figure 1 – SAS 360 Match high-level architecture

SAS 360 Match Architecture

Ad requests from streaming data sources (desktop, CTV and mobile) provide input to SAS 360 Match. Additional data from batch data sources is combined to make advertising decisions in the SAS 360 Match solution. SAS 360 Match runs in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and consists of different modules for:

• Decisioning
• Peak Capacity Management
• Traffic Management
• Programmatic Auction
• Inventory Forecasting
• Sales Workflow
• Business Intelligence

Streaming media customers anticipating high demand can employ Peak Capacity Management (which utilizes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to plan ahead of time for anticipated abrupt changes in capacity requirements.

The SAS 360 Match output can be shared through external connectors to Snowflake or to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for a data and analytics team to perform advanced analytics. Agency partners and advertisers can also enable SAS 360 Match connectors within their portal to self-serve their customers Ad Tech needs.

Conclusion

SAS 360 Match, built on AWS, helps media companies build a unique, highly scalable advertising proposition that can deliver targeted, addressable campaigns across a host of leading platforms. SAS helps publishers boost ad revenue and control by merging direct sales, self-serve, and programmatic exchanges into one flexible framework that uses both first and third-party data.

Check out more AWS Partners or contact an AWS Representative to know how we can help accelerate your business.

Further Reading

• AWS Auto Scaling
• Amazon Simple Email Service
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
• SAS Streaming Hub
• SAS 360 Match overview
• SAS 360 Retail Media overview

About SAS

SAS customer intelligence solutions help companies achieve a customer-centric business strategy with an integrated decision management approach to solving critical challenges across marketing and advertising. Learn about SAS 360 Match by watching this interactive demo video or get started by visiting SAS 360 Match.