How adtech is providing superior ad inventory optimisation to publishers

Z1 Tech’s co-founder talks to afaqs! about adtech solutions for publishers, emerging trends, and more. 

Over the past decade, adtech has become a crucial entity in the ad ecosystem. It enables brands to advertise more effectively as well as crystallise their digital strategies.

The third-party tech platforms that are at the core of adtech solutions, have also had a major impact on the way publishers and advertisers interact with each other. Publishers are now capable of building formidable supply side platforms (SSPs) to organise their ad inventory and, of course, sell it to advertisers. 

From an ad point of view, adtech has crafted robust ways for brands to reach out to their target audiences. Minimising the possibilities of ad fraud, detecting bot traffic, and generating calculable and accurate attributions, are some of the many solutions that adtech has provided to advertisers.

Z1 Tech, previously known as Z1 Media, has been around since 2012. The company operates on both the supply and demand side of digital advertising. For advertisers, the platform offers branding key performance indicators (KPIs), among other services. 

The platform started out as a publisher itself, with multiple owned and operated websites from various domains, like content, tech, health, etc. 

With time, the company transitioned into becoming an adtech platform that would go on to empower other publishers to leverage various advertising technologies, founded upon the company’s experience as a publisher. 

Arjit Sachdeva, co-founder of Z1 Tech, says that the shift happened after the company evaluated the need for advertising solutions in the marketplace. 

“The transition started in 2016-17, where we were doing a lot of R&D on what kind of advertising solutions can be embedded on a website. This would empower publishers to generate more revenue or create a new channel of content for them, like video.”

Now, with the company’s latest rebranding exercise, Z1 Tech is focussing more on technological innovation to help publishers to opitimise their ad inventory, under the aegis of its flagship brands, VDO.AI and Plunic. 

Sachdeva reveals, “With VDO.AI, we help publishers to create new venues of video content on their website. We help publishers in creating the videos and then running ads on them.”

The entire end-to-end solution is provided by the platform, which includes the video player, video bidding engine, video ad server and content, as a whole. But why’s there so much emphasis on the video? And also, how effective are these advertising avenues for publishers?

Sachdeva answers, “The question is, is video an effective way to reach consumers? The answer is, of course, yes. And, that’s evidently on traditional platforms that have been there since a long time, like Facebook, LinkedIn and, of course, new platforms like Instagram or TikTok.”

“So, videos are definitely something that people are moving on to. That’s also because people have shorter attention spans now. So, the lengthy articles that we used to read in big publications are no longer attracting the millennials.”

Within videos, Sachdeva opines, there’s a specific type of content that supersedes others. “Long-form videos are gradually fading away, or becoming less important. Short videos are emerging as an avenue to engage customers.”

Creating short-form videos can be challenging sometimes. A long-form video allows more flexibility to brands, in establishing their message. But with short videos, the messaging needs to be quick, on point, and presentable. 

“The brands will definitely have some challenges, in terms of condensing a long message into a short video. But, in fact, they’re actually already doing it, even on televisions. You watch ads that are around 10-15 seconds in length. And, I think they’ll have a lot of challenges in producing short-form content as well,” shares Sachdeva.

With Plunic, the company provides an internal demand-side platform that helps e-commerce platforms with attaining their KPIs. 

Over the years, the focus of brands towards adtech has changed noticeably. More and more marketers are partnering up with third party solution providers to smoothen their digital efforts. Sachdeva believes that some categories of brands have taken the lead in their adtech investments. 

“D2C, e-commerce are categories which are definitely high up in the space. Even the online travel agencies (OTAs) are also advertising more, especially after COVID restrictions were removed.”