Using data to inform buys. Now we know the basics behind the process. Let's talk about what data is being sent and received and requested and how advertisers use that to actually decide which inventory to buy. So when it comes to the basics of data and targeting, what advertisers are always looking for are things like age, gender, location, and the content of the publisher of a running on what tech companies or publishers can get would be none any or a certain combination of the following age, gender location, publish your content, as well as add size, engagement history, device ID or IP address, along bundle ID and sometimes PII. PII is personally identifiable information. That is information that is illegal to collect unless a user opts to give it to you.

So here's an example if I am using app like Spotify, I have not given Spotify my information, I've just created a basic account. They know my name, they know my email that's about it. Based on that, they may be able to serve me an ad, Pandora, however, maybe I created a bigger account with them. And for Pandora, I've given them my home address and my phone number and other information about me. Because I've given that information to Pandora, Pandora could then use that to target me. But I didn't give that information to Spotify.

So Spotify would not be able to take that information from anyone out and use it to target me because I didn't opt in to give it to them. So now that we know what advertisers want, and what ad tech companies can get, let's figure out how it's actually shared. So here we have an example of an app, the weather bug app. And you see down on the bottom in red, there is a section where they could run an ad unit. So when the app is loaded, the first thing that happens Is that a request is sent to whatever SSP they're using, saying essentially, there is an ad unit available for purchase. This is called the bid request, as in the requesting a bid from an advertiser.

However, here's what it actually looks like. Now at first glance, this might meet look like a bunch of random code and numbers and letters. But if we start to break it down, we can find the data in it. So here, we see the banner 320 by 50. That's important. Now we know what size it is.

So we know advertisers who are looking to fill it, they can only fill it if they have this size ad unit. Further down, we see bundle ID and category so we know it's weatherbug. And we know it is categorized as IB category for weather and news. So now we know the content that we're running on. We also now know the OS or the operating system. In this situation, it's Apple that can be important to know because If we're driving to download an Android app, we don't want to serve that on an Apple device.

If it's 18 T, that could be useful as well. And we have the user ID, which can be useful for a DMP to know, have we seen this user before? Is this somebody that we want to target? continuing on, we may get information like lat long with a weather app, you're probably going to get location data, because you'd have to be sharing location data with that app in order to know what the weather is where you currently are. So we see lat long country, we know the zip code, and we know that they're in New York. This is all really, really useful information for the advertiser.

Now, that information is all sent to their SSP, who then puts a bid request out to the exchange. The exchange then sends that to any demand partners who are plugged in and says you have anyone that is interested in buying this ad space. Let's say um, On the other side, we have Geico, the demand partner is working with Geico. And they say, based on all that data that I've seen, I'm interested in buying that ad unit. So they send back what's called a bid response that goes to the exchange, which goes to the SSP. And that response says, here's the advertiser, here is a unit.

Here's what you're to display. Here is how much we're willing to pay. Here's our billing terms, everything you could need. That is sent back to the app. And then your ad is displayed. This entire process takes place in milliseconds, we're talking 300 milliseconds or less in most cases.

So fractions of a second, done millions or billions of times an hour and every single day. This is the programmatic process in action.