So what happens to those globe-spanning bid requests, assuming they don’t drown in their trans-Atlantic undersea cable? The people listening for your presence in billions of such requests per day are known as “demand-side platforms” (DSPs), and they’re the stockbrokers of this real-time media world, working in the employ of the advertiser or agency who wants to sell you something.* The DSP quickly unpacks the bid request, and queries its data for anything it knows about you: sites you’ve browsed, shopping carts you’ve abandoned, that airfare quote you got and never acted upon. They’re all
So what happens to those globe-spanning bid requests, assuming they don’t drown in their trans-Atlantic undersea cable? The people listening for your presence in billions of such requests per day are known as “demand-side platforms” (DSPs), and they’re the stockbrokers of this real-time media world, working in the employ of the advertiser or agency who wants to sell you something.* The DSP quickly unpacks the bid request, and queries its data for anything it knows about you: sites you’ve browsed, shopping carts you’ve abandoned, that airfare quote you got and never acted upon. They’re all there and returned within milliseconds via state-of-the-art databases hyperoptimized for the purpose. Much of that data isn’t even directly observed by the advertisers in question. Companies have done deals for the right to rent a little piece of the webpage on sites of commercial interest, just enough to touch your browser and see who you are. These data brokers put you in some targeting segment—for example, “travel intenders” (i.e., people about to spend money on hotels)—and then resell you as “third-party data.” Since everyone has a pseudonym for you via your Web browser, and that browser is known to Facebook, Google, and everyone else, that data can be used to target you. This is all anonymous (in the sense of Facebook data never leaking out), but it’s everything you do online. All of it is more spice in the targeting sausage going through the advertising meat grinder, and is traffick...
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Below a good article of how Facebook Exchange works
https://techcrunch.com/2012/06/13/facebook-exchange/
Below good wiki article on how DSPs work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-side_platform
