As an SSP, we have a panoramic view of the open internet. Spikes in digital traffic reflect where consumer attention lies—from global news events to the biggest cultural moments like live sports and entertainment.
Earlier this year, we saw one clear example of this in the Olympics. There were points where event coverage represented nearly 20% of all traffic on our exchange. Absorbing that kind of scale is challenging, and it tests how efficient programmatic advertising really is.
As more live events are transacted programmatically, these bursts of traffic and concurrent demand will only increase. Yet, every impression must still be evaluated within milliseconds, which puts increasing pressure on ad tech to evaluate more opportunities—with richer signals and more sophisticated intelligence—within the same window and without driving up costs.
Adapting to that challenge requires making better use of both available time and investment, so more of marketers’ dollars can go toward working media and not the infrastructure powering it.
The distance between opportunity and decisioning
Today, most programmatic traffic runs through public clouds. A media owner’s inventory becomes available, a bid opportunity fires, and it travels the full loop—from media owner, to SSP, to DSP, and back—before tracking, measurement, and attribution calls close it out. That’s an incredibly long and costly trip for what it usually returns.
The vast scale of the open internet means it’s too expensive for a DSP or optimization partner to evaluate every opportunity. The solution to date has been to cap the queries per second (QPS) a DSP receives and decision on only a fraction of what’s available. In many cases, DSPs bid on fewer than 5% of all opportunities that reach them, and most of that round trip never even becomes an impression.
But what if we took a different approach?
Index Cloud moves decisioning to the sell side, with partner logic running directly at the source of impressions, inside the auction itself, instead of on public cloud infrastructure. Partners deploy their own models, data, and applications using containers, which are cryptographically signed and run in strict isolation, to make decisions at the moment an impression exists. Partners bring the intelligence, and we provide the environment.
What Index Cloud delivers for programmatic partners
By eliminating unnecessary distance between intelligence and the impression, Index Cloud gives partners more of the auction window to make better decisions. Deploying a container on Index Cloud means every available millisecond can go toward decisioning instead of the round trip—fueling richer signals, providing more room for models to run at full scale, and delivering a fuller read on impressions before they go downstream.
Today, a dozen partners, from AI decisioning companies and agencies to verification vendors and data providers, are seeing firsthand how bringing their own intelligence to the exchange drives real efficiency and stronger outcomes.
In a recent campaign for a global hotel brand, dentsu ran Chalice AI’s custom decisioning inside Index Cloud to score media quality before each bid, evaluating half a billion webpages across more than 35 signals. That resulted in a 41% lower cost per booking and 14% increase in hotel room bookings.
The value DSPs gain from Index Cloud
Index Cloud also drives real efficiency gains for DSPs that deploy a containerized bidder.
Depending on the DSP, a typical bid response over the public cloud could take up to 250 milliseconds. In a live test of a containerized bidder inside Index Cloud, that response came back in about four milliseconds, a 98% reduction in bid response time.
That speed adds up fast. Even a conservative estimate of 1 million bids a day means 246 milliseconds saved per bid, or 68 hours of decisioning time freed up, which is crucial time a DSP can put toward more advanced decisioning instead.
Running a bidder inside Index Cloud also opens up once-limiting QPS caps substantially. Because bidders run right where impressions happen, faster decisioning means hosted DSPs can evaluate more bids without additional compute.
Bedrock Platform is the first containerized DSP running inside an exchange, and the value is clear.
“By collapsing the distance between our decisioning layer and the impression, Index Cloud lets us focus on making the best decision for the best performance. At the same time, we retain full independence of how we decision on an ad, with our code remaining private and under our control.”
Shane Shevlin, Co-Founder and CEO
Bedrock Platform
This type of efficiency is helping DSPs save time, differentiate, and ultimately demonstrate their value to buyers.
Index Cloud is purpose-built for programmatic
As advertising on the open internet continues to scale, the infrastructure behind it must keep pace. Index Cloud is designed to support a more efficient programmatic ecosystem while enabling more scale and stronger outcomes.
This means allowing our partners to see more of the exchange, make better decisions with the time that’s freed up inside the auction, and reduce both the cost and waste that comes from evaluating impressions from a distance.
By applying intelligence closer to the source of impressions, DSPs, marketers, and programmatic partners can make every millisecond count, providing them with cost savings and better outcomes.
Index Cloud is currently in closed beta with select partners. If your intelligence needs more room to run efficiently, we want to hear from you.
