Today’s digital advertising is rapidly becoming a very complex & diverse ecosystem. Underneath the “good old ad banner” an entire universe of servers handles a multitude of interactions & decisions, eventually selecting which campaign gets the right to serve its creative for our viewing pleasure (?). The key to evaluating & finalizing all those decisions is Data, Data and more Data, trying to build the profile of the prospective ad viewer – hence the “Big Data” frenzy that permeates the Advertising & Marketing domain lately…

This process is the birthplace for a lot of the latest digital advertising jargon such as RTB (Real Time Bidding a.k.a Programmatic Selling & Buying), DSP (Demand Side Platform), DMP (Data Management Platform), SSP (Supply Side Platform) and more…

This hidden world is beautifully captured in a recent visualization entitled “Behind the Banner”. You can view it (HINT: give it some time to load) at the following URL:

http://cmsummit.com/behindthebanner/

If you’re interested and would like to know more about the author and the story behind it take a look at:

http://battellemedia.com/archives/2013/05/behind-the-banner-a-visualization-of-the-adtech-ecosystem.php