Before the global crisis, the intro of header bidding and publishers’ multi-wrapper setup put DSPs under pressure due to the increased costs in processing bid requests.
FYI: a multi-wrapper setup happen when pubs integrate one exchange multiple times (once per wrapper). Here, a single exchange issue multiple bid requests for the same ad impression, introducing highly unwanted inefficiency for the industry.
Here, buyers that buy ads programmatically can take different routes to win an impression, which often leads to duplicate auctions creating multiple bids for the same single impression on a pub’s site – simply put, in terms of traffic a single user is represented as two separate users.
From the sell-side, auction duplication drives up operating costs for AdTech and introduces complexity for buyers, but it makes pubs more money.
From the buy-side, advertisers unknowingly bid against themselves, driving up the price they pay.
This unfair manipulation of auction dynamics has been widely rejected by programmatic buyers: for eg. DSPs such as The Trade Desk and MediaMath started to block the SSPs that are found to be sending more than one bid request for a single imp.
