DCaaS stands for Deal Curation as a Service and implies the compilation of inventory pools with added data elements and side creative services, and offering them in a bundle for advertisers’ use in private marketplaces (PMPs).
What is DCaaS?
From a technical standpoint, the term DCaaS encompasses the so-called DCaaS providers’ (often on the sell side) creation of the curated, high-quality inventory bundles on behalf of publishers, using their first-party data, pooled with demand-side third-party data elements and extra creative services, if any, to ensure the maximum audience addressability capabilities, hence enabling advertisers to improve the effectiveness of their digital ad campaigns.
DCaaS Benefits for Publishers
From a publisher’s perspective, DCaaS enables them to:
- expand their inventory monetization capabilities;
- unlock more opportunities to increase their value proposition in curated deals with business partners on the Demand side;
- ensure the more sustainable online advertising revenue streams.
Potential Challenges
From a publisher’s standpoint, one of the visible downsides of collaborating with DCaaS providers is their significant cuts. In plain words, a publisher would need to ensure a sharp increase of their overall advertising revenue in order to maintain sufficient business outcomes.
In addition, a notable risk, potentially associated with DCaaS is the complexity of tech implementation and the ongoing coordination with multiple data partners, which inevitably requires extra operational and financial resources from publishers, only putting more pressure on their developers and biz-dev teams.
At the same time, from the advertisers’ perspective, one of the potential downsides of the deal curation on the Supply side is the lack of transparency and control over the curation process, if compared to their direct partnership with publishers.
Perspectives of Industry-wide Adoption
Quite predictably, even though the notion of DCaaS isn’t new, it hasn’t yet and can hardly become somewhat a perfect go-to solution for the majority of digital publishers on the market.
However, it may unlock extra monetization opportunities for some of them, depending on their market vertical and inventory specifics, especially in view of potential deprecation of third-party cookies sometime in future.