Xandr and Yahoo DSP as Access Seats, Not Retainers

Neither of these is anybody's primary DSP and we will not sell you one as though it were. Microsoft Invest and Yahoo DSP are access seats. You open one when a named inventory package cannot be bought at the same price through the seat you already run, and you close it when that stops being true. Every engagement here starts with a written inventory case: the exact placements, the deal identifiers, the negotiated floors, and the alternative route with its cost. If the alternative wins, the case says so and there is no build. How the decision gets made: We request test deals from the publishers in question and read delivery before committing anything. A curated package that a sales team describes as exclusive frequently turns out to be available through your existing exchange integrations at a lower clearing price. Roughly as often, it does not, and the difference is worth several points of working media. Either answer is a result. The case takes two weeks and it is the only part of this engagement we insist on. Microsoft Invest: The reason to be here is Microsoft-owned placement — MSN, Outlook.com, Microsoft Start, Xbox surfaces — plus the European publisher supply that carried over from the AppNexus relationships and is still deeper on certain Irish, UK and German titles than the alternatives. Curation is the useful mechanic: packaging a defined publisher set into a deal with terms you can hold a seller to. Weekday professional audiences in a mail and news environment behave very differently from social inventory, and the creative has to acknowledge it. Yahoo DSP: The case here is usually Yahoo's owned properties — Finance, Mail, Sports, AOL — and its consented identity route, which functions where third-party cookies are gone and where a login-based signal is the only durable one available. Yahoo native placements need their own creative and their own benchmark; judging them on a display CTR produces a number that means nothing and a decision that costs money. What the engagement is: A fixed project. Negotiate, build, run for eight to twelve weeks, then either hand the seat to your team with a written playbook or shut it down. We put the closing decision in the contract because open-ended retainers on access seats are how a two-line inventory rationale becomes a permanent cost centre nobody reviews. Not included: We will not run either seat as a standing retainer alongside your primary DSP in order to bill more. No creative production, no measurement platform build, no ad server work. We do not accept rebates or trading agreements from either platform, which is worth stating because on both of these seats such agreements are routine and rarely disclosed to the advertiser. Decline this if: You have no primary DSP yet — build that first, and these seats become an easier decision later. You are expecting scale: this is targeted supply access with a ceiling, and the plan should assume the ceiling rather than discover it in week six. Your buy is CTV-led, where neither seat is the strongest route from Ireland. Or you want a permanent multi-DSP arrangement, in which case somebody will sell you one, and it will not be us.