Everything you need to know from SSP to DSP and the bid request. Let's start with how the two parts of supply and demand side come together to form the programmatic advertising eco market. The supply side is made up of for example publishers who have websites or apps. The SSP (supply side platform) connects thousands of publishers across the world and gives them access to the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Each publisher integrates a special SDK or code snippet into their website or application which is then used for the programmatic advertising. The demand side consists of advertiser - people who have creatives/ads but no place to show them. They will turn to a system called DSP (Demand Side Platform). Advertisers can upload their creatives into a DSP – that DSP talks to other SSPs on the market, and this will generate a stock exchange market for advertising.
It works like this: A user browses through different sites. The moment the user loads the website, the code snippet of the SSP generates a bid request and the SSP sends a bid request to the DSP. The DSP will then determine if the user is suited to receive that ad from the advertiser. And in case this is true the DSP will bid on that placement for the user. This happens for every advertiser at the same time in milliseconds. One advertiser will win and the ad will be displayed to the user.

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