What is Amazon Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM)

Amazon is a major player in server side header bidding

Amazon TAM stands for Transparent Ad Marketplace, which is Amazon’s server side (s2s) Header Bidding Suite for Publishers. The product is managed by A9’s publisher services division with the goal of reducing latency and increasing revenue for a publisher that leans on Amazon as their header bidding mediation layer. With A9 you get Amazon’s unique demand marketplace bidding in real time against the largest media exchanges.

Some exchanges only want to integrate client side and be directly in the header of a publisher for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, Server to server integrations with 3rd party exchanges are becoming more relevant and demanded by publishers so A9 has focused on improving cooking match rates for advertisers .

“Not only are the match rates high, but the process hasn’t been like putting a brick against your head,”  According to Rubicon Project CTO Tom Kershaw.

When a publisher integrates TAM, they are able to have Amazons demand advertisers bid alongside with exchanges, SSPs and ad networks that are pre-integrated into TAM. Publishers are asking the question “Are you integrated with TAM” more frequently to their demand partners.

In the crowded space of header bidding wrappers, Amazon emerged last year as a major player in the header bidding arena. Leveraging their pristine brand name, talented ad tech team over at A9, and the integrations they already have in place with publishers, TAM was poised for success at the launch.

In fact, the marketing is receiving TAM well according to their testimonials:

After upgrading to Transparent Ad Marketplace’s multi-slot integration, we saw a 20% increase in revenue without having to compromise our user experience. – Eric Meixner: VP of Global Marketing, Whitepages

We always had a direct integration with Amazon, but because Transparent Ad Marketplace is cloud-based, we now use it to easily onboard and scale other demand partners without having to bother our development team. – Michael Shaughnessy: VP of Revenue, Bauer Xcel Media US

Best I can tell, only Amazon Publisher Services has developed third-party tech that is even close to bringing direct bidding to app. -David Jakubowski: Director of Publisher Solutions, Facebook

TAM can be widely viewed as a competitor to prebid.js, the most widely used open source client and server side header bidding wrapper on the market, Google EBDA, Google’s exchange bidding within AdX, which is currently going through beta testing and the dozens of other client and server side wrappers on the market.



How Does TAM work? 

If a publisher is working with A9 and they qualify in quality and scale to be accepted into TAM, they can work with their A9 rep, or sign up here to get started. After all of your ad units are mapped out, and the green light is given, you can go live and start adding demand partners into the bidding ecosystem by working through your A9 rep.

A9 runs a first-price auction within it’s server side auction clearing the highest bid after each demand Partner bids for every impression.

When an impression is won by a demand partner , the winner serves their creative and the auction is complete. Impression data is logged in A9 and within the 3rd party platform of the demand partner . There always is discrepancy in adtech but there is not much talk of major discrepancies with A9 in the adtech community.

Overall, Amazon is really making their mark in 2018 as a major player in adtech and we are excited to see the announcements to come in 2018!

See Also:

List of Header Bidding Companies

4 Server to Server Header Bidding Trends

Transparency in Header Bidding Should be Yesterday’s News