Singapore Media Exchange simplifies campaigns to cut maintenance time by 70%

Singapore Media Exchange (SMX) is a premium advertising exchange that helps publishers manage and monetize their digital inventory across a wide range of demand partners. As its network grew, organizing inventory across partners took more time.

Each advertiser required its own setup tied to specific placements. This resulted in hundreds of separate setups that took days to configure and maintain. It was also difficult to see which ones were prioritized in auctions, making performance more challenging to track.

SMX set out to reduce manual effort, bring more structure to how demand is handled, and create a system that the team could run more efficiently.

SMX used Microsoft Advertising’s Prebid Server Premium (PSP) to reorganize how inventory is structured and shared with partners. Here’s how they did it...

• Demand-based targeting profiles: The team defined inventory using shared signals like formats and audiences, reducing the need to manage each placement separately.
• Streamlined inventory and partner grouping: They consolidated placements into a small set of standard groups per publisher, with multiple demand partners brought into each group to create a single auction environment.
• Copilot guidance: SMX used Copilot for two things.
  1. Understanding implementation of flexi configuration: Copilot was able to share clear, step-by-step guidance on how flexi configurations work and how the client can create and edit their demand partner configurations.
  2. Troubleshooting flexi configurations: The flexi configurations initially created by the client were not performing as expected or generating any bid response. SMX used Copilot to review these configurations, identify overlapping setup issues, resolve prioritization issues, and drive improvements.

SMX reduced its total number of partner configurations by 80% from 422 to 85, which also reduced the operational overhead for SMX’s AdOps team for managing these configurations in future. By moving away from legacy configurations to new flexi configurations in PSP, SMX was able to streamline inventory mapping to demand partner. Each publisher now requires only four defined setups: web display, web outstream, Android display, and iOS display.

Time spent maintaining these configurations dropped by more than 70%, allowing the team to focus on performance instead of manual upkeep. With a more structured approach, auctions now run more consistently, supporting better use of available demand.