Chalice’s Tool Marries RTB With Quality Media

Programmatic was supposed to use tech to match ad buyers to publishers seamlessly.

The fact that ads still regularly land on spammy clickbait, while quality publishers continue to struggle, indicates that a little extra help is needed to link buyers up to quality.

Enter new curation tech from adtech AI firm Chalice that looks to marry real-time bidding with cherry-picking quality web environments, called Chalice PMPs. The specific innovation within the curation tool is page-level bidding—using buyer data and ingesting metadata—which lets buyers get more granular with the pages they want their ads to appear on. Chalice COO and co-founder Ali Manning will be speaking at Advertising Week about the tech.

The rise of curation products this year, including those from major SSPs like Magnite and Index Exchange, and buy-side efforts to limit the sheer size of the open internet like The Trade Desk’s SP500+, acknowledge that extra intervention is required for advertisers to reach quality.

“Often the publishers are getting lost in this whole ecosystem, and we want to bring them closer to the advertiser,” said Anjlee Majmudar, vp of programmatic, North America at digital agency Brainlabs, who has seen a demo of the tech.

Dynamic lists increase audience scale

Chalice’s tech, which advertisers can access through any DSP that bids on supply from SSP Index Exchange, will in real-time create a list of publishers and more specific webpages, like article pages, for advertisers so that they can switch publishers throughout the lifetime of a campaign according to the advertisers’ goals.

Here’s how it works. A green juice brand wants to find health-minded consumers and encourage them to make a purchase on its site. Mainstream curation products usually draw up a list of relevant sites and web pages, but then the juice brand is stuck serving ads on those publishers for the whole campaign.

“You’re pigeonholed into that list and scale starts to become a problem,” said Majmudar. A static list of sites is not only likely to be smaller than a constantly changing list, but is also liable to hold the biases of the adtech firm that created it, rather than be flexible to a marketers’ changing needs, Majmudar said.