AdTech Ecosystem Participants

The Core Idea: roles, not boxes

In the first chapter we saw the two economic sides of the market: advertiser¹ creates demand², while publisher³ creates supply⁴. Many systems may sit between them, but the map of AdTech⁵ becomes clear once you look not at company names but at roles — logical functions in an advertising deal.

Role, company, and product are different levels:

role — the function performed here;
company — the organization that signs the contract; it may perform several roles;
product — a specific offering of that company: a UI, an API, a managed service, or a set of tools.

Therefore a logo cannot be placed in one cell of the map forever: one product suite may buy media, sell access to inventory⁶, deliver ads, and build reporting, while one role may be split by the advertiser between its own team and several providers.

To analyze any role, use a single card (role card):

Question	What it clarifies
What problem does the role solve?	The reason it exists
Who is the customer?	Who uses the product or service
Who is the beneficiary?	Who receives the economic benefit
Who is the payer?⁷	Who pays for media or the service under contract
What data comes in and goes out?	The technical boundaries of the function
What decision is made or executed?	The actual work, not a marketing label
How does money move?	Media money, a separate fee, or no payment in this flow

Customer, beneficiary, and payer may not coincide: a media buyer⁸ works in a platform’s UI, the advertiser receives the benefit, and the agency⁹ pays the invoice. Without this distinction, contracts, data flows, and reports are hard to read.

Let’s fill in the card for the main economic participant. The advertiser wants to change the knowledge or behavior of an audience, funds the campaign¹⁰, hands over the goal, the budget, and the creative¹¹ — the ad material itself: an image, a video, or text — and receives outcomes and reporting. The advertiser is usually the beneficiary and the source of money, but may delegate the operational work and the payment of specific invoices to an agency. In a specific campaign some roles will be absent and others will hide behind a single contract — which is why the card is more useful than a linear diagram of seventeen mandatory boxes.

Who sets the goal and who executes the purchase

Advertiser — an organization that funds advertising for the sake of a business outcome. For an app with a paid subscription, the outcome may be immediate — a trial or a paid subscription — or more delayed: knowledge of the product and the willingness to consider it later. The advertiser defines the goal, the acceptable spend, the audience, and the success criteria; on its own or through contractors, it decides where to buy media.

This gives rise to two advertising orientations:

brand advertising¹² primarily changes awareness, consideration, or perception — knowledge of the product, consideration of it, and attitude toward it;
performance advertising¹³ is driven around a measurable action or outcome and the cost of obtaining it: registrations, trials, installs, or purchases.

These are not two mutually exclusive kinds of companies. One subscription app may simultaneously run a video campaign to introduce the brand and an acquisition campaign optimized for trials. Moreover, a single user may first encounter the product through brand advertising and later respond to performance advertising. What differ above all are the goal, the evaluation horizon, and the expected evidence of results.

Publisher — an organization that owns or operates a media environment where advertising opportunities¹⁴ arise: a website, an app, a game, or a video service. The publisher defines placements¹⁵ and serving rules, provides context and access to inventory, receives delivery information, and earns publisher revenue¹⁶. Its interest is to sell opportunities profitably enough while preserving the quality of the product and the user experience.

Between the advertiser’s business goal and the technical purchase there often stand people and service organizations:

agency — a contractor company that plans or executes marketing and media work on behalf of the advertiser. It may develop strategy, prepare creatives, choose channels, launch campaigns, manage reporting, and sometimes handle payments;
media buyer — a person, team, or function that chooses media, platforms, and purchase terms, allocates spend, and sets up campaigns. A media buyer may work inside the advertiser, inside the agency, or inside another buying organization.

Agency and media buyer are not synonyms: the former is an organization and a contractual role, the latter an operational function. A media buyer is also not a DSP¹⁷: a human formulates and configures decisions, while a DSP executes part of the buying workflow at scale.

Role	Problem and beneficiary	Typical payer	Data in	Decision or result
Advertiser	Achieve a business outcome; the advertiser itself receives the benefit	Source of media spend¹⁸ and many service fees	Business goal, constraints, customer data	Campaign goal, budget, success criteria
Publisher	Monetize the media environment; the publisher receives the benefit	Usually not a payer in the media sale; may pay technology providers	Placements, context, inventory rules	Available opportunities, delivery rules, publisher revenue
Agency	Perform the work for which the advertiser does not build a team or expertise	Advertiser; sometimes the agency acts as payer on downstream invoices	Brief, budget, creatives, results	Plan, settings, execution, and reporting
Media buyer	Turn the goal and budget into concrete purchases	Not a separate payer as a function; paid by employer/client	Campaign goals, available channels, reports	Choice of media and platforms, allocation, and settings

The advertiser may buy media with its own team (in-house), hand the buying entirely to an agency, or split the responsibility. This determines the control boundary: who has access to the account, raw data, and the contract; who is responsible for setup mistakes; and who can reallocate spend.

Who connects demand and supply

Neither the advertiser nor the publisher can negotiate every short-lived impression with thousands of counterparties by hand. The next group of roles solves the scale problem, but does so from different sides:

advertiser ───────────── direct buying ─────────────→ publisher
advertiser ───────────── ad network ────────────────→ publisher
advertiser / buyer → DSP ⇄ exchange / SSP functions → publisher

advertiser ad server and publisher ad server can support different branches;
no single line is a mandatory universal pipeline.

Ad network¹⁹ aggregates supply and/or demand and sells a managed media offering. The buyer usually chooses the available offer, the goal, and the constraints, while the network takes on a significant share of traffic distribution and publisher relationships. The pricing axis belongs to the network: it usually sets its own price for the buyer and itself decides from which publisher, and at what price, to take the impression, so the purchase price is opaque to the buyer. The network usually accepts media money and settles with supply partners; the specific commercial model depends on the contract.

DSP (Demand-Side Platform) — a buying platform that helps a media buyer evaluate and purchase opportunities from several supply sources according to campaign rules. The customer is an advertiser, an agency, or another buyer. The key trait: the decision is made for each incoming opportunity separately and in real time — in programmatic²⁰ this is a bid²¹ in an auction²²; the deep comparison with networks is in chapter 16, auction mechanics in chapter 18.

SSP (Supply-Side Platform)²³ — a sell-side platform for the publisher. It describes available opportunities, gives demand sources access to inventory, and helps manage its sale. The publisher is the primary customer and beneficiary, although the SSP often takes its payment within the media settlement²⁴ — the actual movement of money between participants, as distinct from the invoice as the issued claim.

Ad exchange²⁵ — a transaction layer or function that connects buyers and sellers and performs matching or an auction. An exchange is not necessarily a separate company between DSP and SSP: exchange and SSP functions are often combined in one product. A useful distinction is this: the SSP represents the publisher’s sell-side workflow, while the exchange performs the automated transaction function between the parties themselves.

Ad server²⁶ selects, delivers, and records ads according to given campaign or inventory rules. It is not just a CDN with files: a CDN may deliver creative bytes, while an ad server applies rules and creates an observable point of delivery.

An advertiser ad server helps the buyer side manage creatives, their delivery, and event recording independently of the specific place of purchase.
A publisher ad server matches available demand sources and manages delivery on the publisher’s inventory.

Detailed order, line item, priorities, and serving mechanics will appear in chapter 11.

Role	Primary customer	Data in	Decision or result	Money relationship
Ad network	Advertiser/agency; also needs supply partners	Campaign constraints, creatives, aggregated supply	Managed distribution and reporting	Usually a principal²⁷: sets its own price for the buyer, accepts media money, and settles with publishers itself at a price opaque to the buyer
DSP	Advertiser, agency, media buyer	Campaign settings, creatives, opportunity signals	Buying decision, access to supply, reports	Paid by the buyer: media cost plus a platform fee, usually a percentage of spend
SSP	Publisher	Inventory rules, opportunity and context signals	Access to demand, sale decision metadata, reports	Paid by the seller side: usually retains a share (revenue share²⁸) of the clearing price (the final auction price) before paying the publisher
Ad exchange	Buyers and sellers or their platforms	Opportunity descriptions and buying responses	Matching/transaction result	Usually a share of the clearing price on the sell side; if the exchange is combined with the SSP, this is one deduction, not two
Ad server	Advertiser or publisher	Campaign/inventory rules, creatives, delivery signals	Selection, delivery, and event registration	Usually a separate license or usage fee from its own customer; media money usually does not pass through the ad server

Who measures and verifies

A platform that sold or bought media sees only its own measurement²⁹ points and is at the same time interested in the outcome of the deal. Therefore advertisers and publishers may connect cross-cutting providers. They are not a mandatory link in the commercial chain, although their code may execute inside creative delivery: integrations receive events and return separate conclusions.

Attribution provider³⁰ matches available advertising touchpoints — for example, an impression³¹ or a click³² — with outcomes such as a registration or a purchase, and applies rules for assigning credit. The result answers the question “to which source, under the chosen rules, is this conversion³³ attributed?”, not “was the advertising the true cause of the action?” Attribution does not prove causality.

MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner)³⁴ — a mobile-specialized category of measurement and attribution providers for app acquisition, installs, and in-app outcomes. Its primary role is to match available acquisition signals with app events and to give the advertiser a consistent picture across all media sources. The motive is clear: without an independent party, each network attributes the install to itself under its own rules, and the sum of self-reported installs usually exceeds the real number; an MMP applies uniform rules to all sources. An MMP is not a synonym for product analytics: product analytics primarily studies behavior inside the product, whereas an MMP links acquisition to advertising sources. Technical details of SDKs, install matching, postbacks, and platform privacy restrictions belong to chapters 27–29.

Verification provider³⁵ creates a separate point for evaluating the conditions and quality of ad delivery. Depending on the integration, it may analyze available delivery, render, placement, context, and quality signals and return verification results to the advertiser, the publisher, or a platform. Verification is broader than fraud detection alone — the questions may also concern the serving environment — but it is not absolute truth: the completeness of its conclusions depends on the environment, the available signals, and the methodology.

For a single app ad, the systems may receive partially overlapping events:

impression / click signals ─┬→ buying and selling platform reports
                            ├→ attribution provider / MMP
delivery / context signals ─┴→ verification provider

install / subscription events → MMP and the advertiser's systems, if integrations allow it

Discrepancies between reports are not necessarily an error. Platform reporting answers what the platform itself observed; the MMP applies its own attribution rules to acquisition and app events; the verification provider evaluates the delivery conditions available to it. These are different questions and different measurement boundaries.

Who supplies, organizes, and connects data

The word data hides several different tasks. Supplying an external dataset, managing an audience segment³⁶, storing a customer record, and matching identifiers are not one role. A separate operation is activation³⁷: handing data or a segment to a system that will apply it to real impressions, for example a buying platform for targeting³⁸; before activation, a segment remains a record in storage.

Role	Customer and data in	Persistent state	Result and activation	What the role itself does not do
Data provider³⁹	Advertiser, publisher, or platform; its own or collected datasets	Datasets, attributes, or segments	Data for permitted activation, decisioning, or analysis	Not required to store its client’s customer record or make media decisions
DMP⁴⁰	Advertising/marketing team; audience data and campaign signals	Audience profiles and segments in the chosen product model	Segmentation and activation through advertising integrations	Not required to be the system of record for the full customer lifecycle
CDP⁴¹	Advertiser; first-party events and customer data from the product, CRM, and other systems	Persistent unified customer record	Customer profiles, events, and segments made available to downstream systems	Not required to buy media or assign attribution credit
Identity provider⁴²	Advertiser, publisher, or platform; identifiers from permitted sources	A mapping or identity graph within the specific solution	Linked or translated identifiers for activation and measurement	Does not create consent, does not register all events, and does not prove the identity of a real person

Data provider sells or provides datasets, attributes, or audience segments. The customer pays for an additional signal: for example, a context classification or an audience attribute that can be used legally and technically.

DMP (Data Management Platform) — an advertising-oriented system for managing, segmenting, and activating audience data. CDP (Customer Data Platform) maintains a persistent unified customer record and makes customer data available to downstream systems. The historical rule “DMP — cookies and anonymous data only; CDP — PII only” is unreliable: modern products and deployment models overlap. The working boundary lies in the primary task and the record model — advertising audience activation versus a durable customer record.

Identity provider links or translates identifiers for permitted activation, measurement, and adjacent use cases. For example, one integration may know the advertiser’s customer ID while another knows a platform-specific ID; the identity function helps establish a permissible correspondence.

Distinguish four operations:

identity    → links users, devices, or their identifiers
tracking    → records events
attribution → assigns conversion credit according to rules
consent     → expresses permission or a choice in a separate governance/legal context

An identity provider does not create legal permission merely by matching. Specific identifiers, resolution algorithms, and privacy rules will be covered in chapters 24 and 40–42.

In the running example, the subscription app sends first-party trial and subscription events to the CDP to maintain the customer record. A DMP or platform integration can form and activate a permitted audience segment. An identity provider helps link the necessary identifiers between permitted environments, and an external data provider can enrich the segment with an additional attribute.

One campaign: data and money kept separate

Let’s assemble the roles in one scenario. A subscription app is advertised inside a mobile game. The advertiser has hired an agency; a media buyer at the agency runs acquisition through a DSP. The game’s publisher provides the opportunity through an SSP whose product also includes an exchange function (in mobile in-app, this sell-side role is often performed by a mediation platform or an SDK network — chapter 12). An MMP measures mobile acquisition, a verification provider optionally evaluates delivery, and the data/identity functions are connected only where they are needed and permitted.

This is one possible composition, not a mandatory chain: the advertiser could have bought media directly or through an ad network, and several roles could have belonged to one company or been absent altogether.

Data flow

advertiser / media buyer
  ── campaign goal, settings, creative metadata ──→ buying and serving systems

publisher app
  ── opportunity, placement, format, permitted context ──→ sell-side and decision systems

decision systems
  ── the selected ad + delivery metadata ──→ publisher app

publisher app and participating systems
  ── impression / click / delivery events ──→ reporting, MMP, verification

subscription app / advertiser backend
  ── install, trial, subscription events ──→ MMP, CDP, and advertiser reporting

Not every participant receives every event: the set depends on integrations, the environment, contracts, and privacy/platform restrictions. The event flow is often bidirectional and asynchronous; it need not repeat either the creative path or the financial relationships.

Money flow

The direction is the same as on the map in chapter 1: the advertiser’s media spend goes through the buying channel to media sellers and becomes publisher revenue, while technology providers receive separate fees. What is new here is who exactly pays whom in a typical programmatic setup:

Who pays	Whom	For what	Kind of money
Advertiser	Agency	Planning and running campaigns	Usually a fee or a percentage of spend; sometimes inside the media invoice
Advertiser or agency	DSP	Purchased media and use of the platform	Media cost plus a platform fee, usually a percentage of spend
DSP	Exchange / SSP	Won opportunities at the clearing price	Media money
Exchange / SSP	Publisher	Sold opportunities	Publisher payout⁴³: clearing price minus the sell-side revenue share
Advertiser	MMP	Attribution and acquisition measurement	SaaS⁴⁴ or usage fee
Advertiser	Verification provider	Evaluation of delivery conditions	Usage fee, usually by volume of measured impressions
Publisher or advertiser	Its own ad server	Selecting, delivering, and recording ads	Usage or SaaS fee
Advertiser or agency	Data provider	Audience segments or attributes	Often a data CPM⁴⁵ — a surcharge on media cost, billed through the DSP

The advertiser is the economic source of media spend, but the contractual payer on the DSP’s invoice is often the agency: the advertiser sees one consolidated invoice, while the money is then distributed across several contracts. Invoice and settlement also differ: the former is the issued claim, the latter the actual payment, and the amounts may not match because of adjustments. The deductions of intermediaries⁴⁶ at each step and the path of a hypothetical $100 are the subject of chapter 4.

Finally, the invoice path, the actual settlement path, the creative delivery path, and the HTTP/event path may have different endpoints: the creative may come from an ad server or a CDN, and a conversion event may go asynchronously to the MMP and never return through the SSP.

Why one company occupies several places on the map

Companies combine roles because of acquisitions, shared infrastructure and data, and the desire to offer a managed service, a single workflow, reporting, and contract. When one company controls several consecutive levels of the value chain, this is called vertical integration⁴⁷; in this course we also speak of combining roles.

For the customer, combining roles means fewer integrations, lower operational overhead, faster data exchange, and one UI for setup and reports. But the same properties create risks:

a conflict of incentives when one side simultaneously represents buyer and seller;
opacity of fee boundaries and internal money transfers;
an advantage for its own supply or demand in decisioning;
self-measurement, when the executor of the deal evaluates its quality itself;
difficulty exporting data and comparing external alternatives.

Imagine a hypothetical Platform X: it sells a packaged media offering, gives the media buyer DSP-style controls, delivers creatives, and shows an attribution report in one UI. Calling it merely a “DSP” is not enough. Let’s break the suite into functions:

Platform X function	Separate role card
Packages and sells access to media	Ad network-like managed offering
Selects opportunities according to campaign rules	DSP-like buying/decisioning
Delivers the creative and records delivery	Ad serving
Links touchpoints with outcomes	Attribution/measurement

A shared login and a shared invoice do not make these functions one role. This is the way to analyze an unfamiliar AdTech company: first list the roles it performs, then fill in for each one problem → customer → payer → data in/out → decision → money and ask where the fee arises and whose interests it may conflict with. Only then does it make sense to compare vendors by their labels.

Common Confusions

“A brand advertiser and a performance advertiser are different kinds of companies.” No: these are orientations of activity. One company can run both.
“Ad network is the old name for a DSP.” A network sells managed media aggregation at its own price; a DSP leaves the decision on each opportunity to the buyer’s rules. Real suites may combine both functions.
“An SSP and an exchange must be different companies” or “they are complete synonyms.” Both extremes are wrong: the sell-side workflow and the transaction function are distinguishable, but often combined in one product.
“An MMP knows the true reason for an install, and a verification provider sees the absolute truth of an impression.” Both work with available measurement points and methodologies. Attribution credit is not causality; a verification result is limited by the integration.
“Data provider, DMP, CDP, and identity provider are four names for the user base.” They respectively supply data, organize audience activation, maintain the customer record, and link identifiers.

What to Remember

The AdTech map describes logical roles, not a mandatory list of companies.
The advertiser funds advertising for the sake of an outcome; the publisher creates the media environment and opportunities.
Brand and performance are orientations of goals and measurement that one advertiser may combine.
An ad network sells media at its own price; a DSP decides on each opportunity with a bid under the buyer’s rules and charges the buyer a platform fee; an SSP serves the sell-side workflow and usually retains a share of the clearing price; an exchange performs the transaction function.
Advertiser-side and publisher-side ad servers apply different sets of rules, although both roles select, deliver, and record ads.
MMP/attribution, verification, data, and identity are cross-cutting functions, not mandatory links in the commercial chain; they usually receive a fee for their function rather than a share of media money.
The data flow, the delivery path, the invoice path, and the settlement path need not coincide.
One company may perform several roles; vertical integration reduces integration friction but raises questions about incentives, fees, data boundaries, and measurement independence.

Check Yourself

Why can a subscription app simultaneously be a brand and a performance advertiser?
How does a media buyer differ from an agency and from a DSP?
Why might a publisher use an SSP and a publisher ad server in one flow without considering them one role?
A hypothetical suite offers publishers an SSP, a publisher ad server, and verification in one UI under one invoice. Which separate role cards need to be filled in, and where does such a combination create a conflict of interest?

Sources and Further Reading

Advertiser — a market participant that funds advertising for a business result: installs, subscription purchases, growth in awareness. It buys not a person but the opportunity to address an audience in a specific context; it creates demand and sets goals, budget, and creative. ↩
Demand — the budgets and intent of advertisers to buy suitable advertising opportunities; the market side around which the buy side / demand side groups — the people and systems that help plan and buy media (agencies, DSPs). Demand is a market side, not a specific technology: platforms must not be confused with sides. ↩
Publisher — the owner or operator of a media environment where advertising opportunities arise: a website, a mobile app, a video service, a game. It monetizes the environment with advertising, creates supply, and decides which placements, formats, and buyers to admit, balancing revenue against user experience. ↩
Supply — the advertising opportunities available from publishers; the market side around which the sell side / supply side groups — the people and systems that help describe, sell, and deliver advertising (SSPs, publisher ad servers). Supply is the set of inventory for sale, not the name of a platform. An ad network aggregates both supply and demand, so it sits between the sides rather than inside one of them. ↩
AdTech (advertising technology) — the set of technologies that coordinate the buying, selling, selection, delivery, measurement, and payment for advertising between advertisers, publishers, and intermediaries: from the ad server and DSP/SSP to measurement and verification systems. Programmatic is only part of AdTech: direct deals, reserved buying, and closed platforms also run on AdTech. The boundary with MarTech is drawn by primary purpose: AdTech coordinates paid media, MarTech the customer lifecycle. ↩
Advertising inventory — the set of available or forecast opportunities to show advertising, bounded by the environment, the slot, the format, the time, the publisher’s rules, and the permissible audience context. Inventory is not a list of users and not a warehouse of pre-produced impressions: an opportunity arises and disappears at the moment the product is used. ↩
Payee / payer — the two sides of one payment obligation: the payer pays for the billable event, the payee receives the payment. Risk allocation in a pricing model is described through them: under CPM the payee earns the right to charge early in the funnel and the post-impression risk sits with the payer; under CPA the payee takes on all the risk up to the conversion. One company can be the payee in one contract and the payer in another. ↩
Media buyer — a person, team, or function that selects media, platforms, and buying terms, allocates spend, and sets up campaigns. It is an operational role, not an organization: a media buyer can work inside an advertiser, inside an agency, or at another buying organization. Not a synonym for an agency (a contractor organization) and not a synonym for a DSP: the person formulates and configures decisions, while the platform executes part of the buying workflow at scale. ↩
Agency — a contractor company that plans and executes marketing and media work on behalf of an advertiser: develops strategy, prepares creative, selects channels, launches a campaign, and reports on results. An advertiser can keep media buying in-house, hand it to an agency in full, or split the responsibility. An agency is an organization and a contractual role, as opposed to a media buyer — an operational function that can also work inside an advertiser. ↩
Campaign — an organized set of an advertiser’s advertising activity with a goal, a budget, delivery rules, and creatives. Before delivery, its conditions are communicated to the buying systems; objects and events are linked by identifiers such as campaign_id. ↩
Creative — the advertising material that is delivered and shown to the user: a banner, a video, a native format, a playable. Along with targeting rules it is an object of delivery and must match the format and rules of the publisher’s environment; for a campaign, several creatives are usually prepared. ↩
Brand advertising — an orientation of advertising that primarily changes the audience’s awareness, consideration, or perception: knowledge, consideration, and attitude toward the product. It is evaluated on lagging metrics, not on immediate action. This is an orientation, not a company type: one advertiser can combine brand and performance activity. ↩
Performance advertising — an orientation of advertising built around a measurable action and the cost of obtaining it: registrations, trials, installs, purchases. It is evaluated through attribution and the cost of the outcome. This is an orientation, not a company type and not a synonym for “measurable advertising”: the goal, the evaluation horizon, and the expected evidence of the result differ from brand advertising. ↩
Ad opportunity — a specific opportunity to select and show an ad that arises when a user reaches a placement. A short-lived event: in a digital environment it can vanish faster than a person can make a decision, so systems process it in milliseconds, and in programmatic it is put up for bidding as a separate unit. ↩
Placement (ad slot or selectable media scope) — an overloaded product term. On the publisher side, it is a predefined ad slot or rule for ad appearance that generates ad opportunities as the product is used. On the buy side, placement can mean an explicitly selected delivery environment — a site, app, channel, video, section, or individual slot. The entity level must be clarified from the product contract. ↩
Publisher revenue — the amount the publisher recognizes as revenue under its own accounting rules from media payments for its inventory; in the simple case it equals the publisher payout, but recognition (accrued / billed / settled) follows the publisher’s policy, not the moment of payment. It differs from advertiser spend by the sum of all fees in the chain; participants’ service and SaaS fees outside the media money do not count toward it. ↩
DSP (Demand-Side Platform) — a platform that automates the purchase of advertising opportunities for an advertiser: it aggregates access to several supply sources, evaluates each opportunity, and decides whether to bid and how much to pay. It belongs to the demand side not because it “creates demand” but because it acts in the buyer’s interest. ↩
Media spend — the money an advertiser allocates and spends on buying advertising. It passes through the media sellers and ultimately forms publisher revenue, shrinking along the way by fees; it is not a synonym for publisher revenue, nor for intermediary fees — these are different amounts in one chain. ↩
Ad network — an intermediary that aggregates advertising opportunities (inventory) from many publishers and sells them to advertisers as a single packaged product: the network takes over supply selection, pricing, and delivery, while the buyer gets one manageable offering instead of a dozen separate contracts. Prices inside the network are usually opaque to the buyer. Historically, many ad networks added auction mechanics and rebuilt themselves as ad exchanges, so both functions are often combined under one brand. ↩
Programmatic — automated buying and selling of advertising: decisions about each opportunity are made by systems, not people. RTB is only one of its mechanisms; programmatic also includes automated reserved and direct mechanics without an auction. Programmatic is part of AdTech, but not all of AdTech. ↩
Bid — a buyer’s offer to pay a certain price for a specific ad opportunity, usually expressed as a CPM. A bid is a pre-event decision: it is neither the final price (clearing price) nor the billable amount; in programmatic, the DSP forms a bid for each bid request separately. ↩
Auction — the mechanism for choosing a winner among several bids for one ad opportunity and for determining the price (clearing price) under the auction’s rules — first-price, second-price, and their variants. An auction win is the event of choosing a winner; it is not an impression and does not by itself make the impression billable. ↩
SSP (Supply-Side Platform) — a platform that helps publishers manage the sale of inventory: it sets buyer access rules, connects programmatic demand (DSPs, exchanges), and runs or forwards the auction. SSP and exchange functions are often combined in a single product. ↩
Settlement — the actual movement of money between participants for a period, as distinct from the invoice (the issued claim) and from accrual. One amount passes through three states: accrued — recorded from events, billed — issued in an invoice or statement, settled — paid; at each step the amount may change because of adjustments, fraud filtering, credits, and FX. For one side it is a receivable (expected inflow), for the other a payable. ↩
Ad exchange — the transaction layer that connects buyers and sellers in an automated deal, usually through a real-time auction (RTB). The difference from an ad network is transparency: the buyer sees the description of an individual opportunity and decides for themselves how much to pay for it, and the price is set by the auction rather than by the network’s price list. An exchange is not necessarily a separate company between the DSP and SSP: exchange and SSP functions are often combined in a single product. ↩
Ad server — a system that selects, delivers, and logs advertising under given rules. There are publisher-side ad servers (matching direct campaigns, networks, and programmatic demand, managing delivery) and advertiser-side ones (storing creatives, counting impressions and clicks); the term denotes a function, not a market side. ↩
Principal / agent — the accounting assessment of the reporting entity’s role with respect to a specific promised specified good/service: the principal controls it before transferring it to the customer and presents the payment gross; the agent arranges for its provision by another party and presents the net fee/commission. Control is the ability to direct the use and obtain significant benefits before transfer; primary responsibility, inventory risk, and pricing discretion are evidence, not a mechanical score; one company can be a principal in one flow and an agent in another. ↩
Revenue share — the contractual distribution of a named revenue or proceeds base between the parties in a specified share. Without disclosure of the base it is undefined: you need to know whose proceeds, on which ledger boundary, for which period, before or after which agreed adjustments, and who performs the calculation; a share of one boundary does not equal a share of the original advertiser spend. ↩
Measurement — the function of recording and aggregating advertising events (impressions, clicks, outcomes) for reporting and optimization. Measurement providers give an independent point of observation; different participants have different timestamps and counting rules, so reports do not have to match perfectly. In mobile, the dedicated category is the MMP. ↩
Attribution — the rules by which the available advertising touchpoints (impression, click) are matched to outcomes (install, registration, purchase) and receive credit for the conversion. Attribution answers the question “which source was credited with the action under the chosen rules,” not “whether the ad was the true cause”: credit does not prove causality. Attribution providers are a separate cross-cutting category; in mobile, the MMP. ↩
Impression — a delivery or display event for the selected ad, recorded by a system under a specific rule; a counting unit, not a fact of human perception. Served, rendered, and viewable are different delivery states, so the counters of different participants in the same deal may not match. ↩
Click — a qualifying user-initiated interaction with an ad, recorded under a specific system’s rule. Even a single action has several measurement points: initiated, measured (click tracker), received (destination), and resolved (landing page) clicks need not match due to dropped connections, redirect chains, and filters. ↩
Conversion — a valuable action or outcome that the advertiser has defined as significant (install, trial, first payment, renewal, purchase) and that a system has counted under its measurement and attribution rules. Conversions cannot be summed without an explicit counting rule: one click can lead to several conversions. An observed conversion is a recorded event; an attributed conversion is an event to which an attribution rule assigned credit; neither proves causality. ↩
MMP (Mobile Measurement Partner) — a specialized category of measurement providers for mobile: it measures installs and in-app events, performs attribution, and provides independent data to the parties in the deal. Not a synonym for just any measurement system. ↩
Verification — an independent assessment of the quality and conditions of delivery: viewability, environment, fraud, compliance with the rules. Verification providers plug in across the chain and take no part in the commercial decision about the deal. ↩
Audience segment — an addressable set of entities whose membership is defined by a named rule, data source/provenance, observation window, and platform matching/activation contract; an entity can be a user, account, device, browser, household, or modeled profile, so a segment is not necessarily a list of known people. ↩
Activation — handing data or an audience segment to a system that can use it for targeting, suppression, personalization, or measurement: from a CDP/DMP to a DSP, from the advertiser’s CRM to a walled garden, from an identity graph to an SSP. Before activation, data is a record in storage; after it, a rule that affects real impressions. Activation requires matching identifiers between the source and the receiving platform and a permitted legal basis. ↩
Targeting — the campaign’s rules about to whom and where an ad may be shown: hard controls (eligibility rules — geo, device, context, audience/keyword criteria, exclusions) that restrict the set of permitted opportunities, and signals/hints that in algorithmic products only steer delivery without narrowing the eligible set. Targeting answers the question “for which opportunities/users/contexts is showing possible,” as opposed to placement (“where exactly”) and optimization (“which of the permitted impressions to choose”); even if the API stores them in one object, these are different axes. ↩
Data provider — a provider that sells or supplies datasets, attributes, or ready-made audience segments for targeting, measurement, and enrichment. It works in parallel to the buying chain, not “between” two mandatory neighbors; third-party segments are usually paid for by the buyer — often as a data CPM charged through the buying platform on top of the media cost. Not to be confused with an identity provider, which does not supply data but establishes correspondence between identifiers. ↩
DMP (Data Management Platform) — an advertising-oriented system for managing, segmenting, and activating audience data: it collects campaign signals and external datasets, builds audience profiles and segments, and activates them through advertising integrations. It does not have to be the system of record for the full customer lifecycle. The historical rule “a DMP is only cookies and anonymous data” is unreliable; the working boundary with the CDP runs along the primary task — advertising audience activation versus a durable customer record. ↩
CDP (Customer Data Platform) — a system that collects first-party events and customer data from the product, CRM, and other systems into a persistent unified customer record and makes profiles, events, and segments available to downstream systems. It does not buy media and does not assign attribution credit; it belongs to customer lifecycle management, which makes it part of MarTech. ↩
Identity provider — a provider that links or translates identifiers from permitted sources for activation, measurement, and related use cases: for example, matching an advertiser’s customer ID with a platform-specific ID. It does not create consent and does not prove the identity of a real person: matching within one solution is not legal permission. It differs from a data provider in its task — it does not supply datasets but establishes correspondence between identifiers. ↩
Publisher payout — the amount that, under the seller’s contract, must be transferred to the publisher after revenue share, fees, and adjustments; for the SSP or the network it is a payable, for the publisher a receivable. The payout is a contractual and payment quantity; which part of it, and in which period, the publisher recognizes as revenue is determined by its accounting policy (see publisher revenue). ↩
SaaS pricing — the payment model for a software platform: subscription, seats, usage tiers, or processed volume for access to the product. It forms a separate software/service flow: the platform’s usage event does not automatically become a media event, and a SaaS charge does not turn the relationship into a purchase of inventory. ↩
CPM (Cost per Mille) — the cost of a thousand counted impressions for the buyer: CPM = advertiser cost or spend / counted impressions × 1,000. The term is ambiguous without a contract: it can mean a pricing basis, a rate, a bid, or a post-fact observed average CPM; the observed CPM answers the question “how much did the buyer spend per thousand counted impressions.” ↩
Intermediary — a participant that connects market sides or performs a specialized function: agencies, DSPs, ad networks, exchanges, SSPs, ad servers, measurement, verification, and data providers. It is justified when the value of its function (reach, aggregation, interoperability, speed, measurement, risk control) exceeds the cost and complexity; it need not be present in every deal and does not necessarily retain a share of the media money — some intermediaries receive a separate service or SaaS fee. ↩
Vertical integration — the situation in which one company occupies several roles in the chain (for example, DSP, exchange, and SSP, or ad network and MMP) and combines them in one product or brand. It gives the customer convenience and a single invoice but creates conflicts of interest: the company represents the buyer and the seller at once, measures itself, or runs the auction it takes part in. The industry term for what the course also calls role bundling. ↩

AdTech Ecosystem Participants

AdTech Ecosystem Participants

The Core Idea: roles, not boxes

Who sets the goal and who executes the purchase

Who connects demand and supply

Who measures and verifies

Who supplies, organizes, and connects data

One campaign: data and money kept separate

Data flow

Money flow

Why one company occupies several places on the map

Common Confusions

What to Remember

Check Yourself

Sources and Further Reading

Footnotes