As Global Ad Spend Falls, GumGum Uses Simplaex’s AI, Rivr, to Make More With Less

BERLIN — GumGum, a contextual ad exchange, has partnered with Simplaex’s Rivr, an AI-powered traffic shaping tool to improve its Supply Side Platform’s (SSP) programmatic auction performance. Rivr aided GumGum in responding to recent global events that have led to a surge in supply and steadily declining demand by adjusting ad operations to increase efficiency and performance.

The glut of ad inventory left by the Coronavirus’ economic impact has further highlighted the potential of @rivr_ai in the tech stacks of SSPs, Exchanges and Publishers. Innovation is more important than ever.

The Coronavirus continues to threaten economic stability. As a result, spending on advertising has been slashed, while time spent online has skyrocketed, leaving the supply side with a surge in available inventory. Rivr quickly adjusts the models to respond to this glut, assisting GumGum in mitigating the gap for its SSP and DSP partners.

“By incorporating Rivr into our auction process, our SSP has been able to deliver higher quality traffic to each of its demand partners––driving better performance at lower cost,” said GumGum’s CTO, Ken Weiner, adding, “using Rivr’s machine learning to tackle more mundane tasks, we’ve been able to direct more of our own machine learning efforts toward our core business priorities.”

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The relationship, which began at the start of 2020, has helped GumGum streamline operations. Cutting the amount of bid requests sent out by over 30%, while maintaining 99.5% of existing revenue and facilitating a revenue uplift of 35% per 1M requests. Rivr provides an out-of-the-box traffic shaping solution that adapts to the server it is working on. By analyzing the data from GumGum’s completed auctions on an audience level, Rivr determines which DSPs are most relevant to the inventory. This information is used to train AI-models and dynamically provide actionable suggestions to the servers that run the auctions. This ensures demand partners are getting the right traffic, and performance continues to improve across the board.

“From years of working on both sides of the programmatic ecosystem it became clear that improvements needed to be made. Traffic shaping, with the ability to understand audience targeting, has the power to decrease infrastructure costs and increase performance while at the same time improving the DSP-SSP relationship. This has become especially important as we navigate tumultuous times where there’s been an unpredictable increase in supply and decrease in demand.” said Moti Tal, Simplaex CTO.

The current realities facing the programmatic ecosystem have further highlighted Rivr’s potential in the tech stacks of SSPs, Exchanges and Publishers alike.

Rivr, a product of Simplaex GmbH

Simplaex is an artificial intelligence company with the mission of solving hard problems across the digital landscape. This is done by teaching machines to see and understand the complex web of relationships between the demand and supply side and extracting value from the varying paths and touchpoints of the advertising industry.