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about the Outfit7 project
Demand-Side Platform (DSP) Development for Outfit7
Outfit7, a leading game-development company, partnered with Clearcode to design and build its proprietary demand-side platform (DSP) to power the promotion of its catalog of mobile games.
Below is an overview of our partnership with Outfit7 and details about the how we helped them replace their existing solution with a custom-built DSP.
CLIENT
App Developer
INDUSTRY
Gaming
COMPANY SIZE
400+ employees
COUNTRY
Cyprus
About Outfit7
Outfit7, one of the most well-known companies in the mobile-gaming industry, asked us to build a custom demand-side platform (DSP) designed specifically for integrating advertisements into its gaming applications.
At the time, Outfit7 was using an in-house ad serving system, but wanted to replace it with a custom-built DSP.
Outfit7 decided to transition towards a cross-promotional model, essentially aiming to promote their own games inside its existing apps. This plan was formulated to introduce its new games to its existing users.
Clearcode assisted Outfit7 in honing the focus of the MVP phase. We were involved in helping Outfit7 build a platform designed to enable the promotion of its games across its catalog of games.
Key points
Product
Outfit7, a leading game-development company, partnered with Clearcode to design and build its proprietary demand-side platform (DSP) to power the promotion of its catalog of mobile games.
Goal
Clearcode’s goal was to create a product that would allow Outfit7 to promote its own games on their existing mobile apps, enhance data visibility and transparency, align with its tech stack, and retain flexibility for future needs.
Delivered solutions
Clearcode delivered the project with a set of critical features, such as campaign management for multiple ad formats, a bidder for bidding on and purchasing ad impressions, a tracking component, and an API for sending campaign data to the bidder.
Development
We were responsible for both frontend and backend development. The development process included user interface (UI) design, API development, the creation of a bidder, tracker, and metrics exporter, and the design of a creative-selection mechanism.
The Goal
Being aware of the business potential in the promotion of game installations, Outfit7 wanted to build a DSP that would enable it to cross-promote new games on its existing mobile apps.
The business use case
Prior to starting our collaboration, Outfit7 was using an in-house ad server. However, it was dissatisfied with the platform as they had no control over the existing solution and couldn’t adapt it to their business needs.
Therefore, Outfit7 wanted to create a new product that would allow them to promote new games on its existing mobile apps, while providing it with ownership and control over the codebase, IP and product roadmap.
The most important goals for Outfit7 were to redesign the old system to adopt a bidding approach and deliver more precise ad decisioning based on performance.
Outfit7 also wanted to achieve optimal compatibility with its current tech stack and retain the flexibility to extend the platform to meet future business plans and establish new partnerships with third-party advertisers.
To achieve this, building new custom tech was the only option.
Project goals
Being aware of the business potential in the promotion of game installations, Outfit7 wanted to build a DSP that would enable it to cross-promote new games on its existing mobile apps.
In particular, Outfit7’s requirements included building a solution that would enable:
- The performance of ads to be optimized.
- Control over the bidding process.
- Easy access to the inventory through mobile SSPs with support for Prebid.
- Management of their campaigns.
- The ability to create analytics reports.
Key feature: reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning is a process of training an algorithm to make decisions based on previously collected data.
The algorithm we developed focused on selecting the highest-converting ad creatives for a given campaign.
The naive way of selecting a creative is to do it randomly. However, sometimes we know that one of the creatives is performing better and should be selected more often.
The algorithm we developed, called the Softmax Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm, identifies which creative is performing the best by analyzing the number of impressions and conversions. From there, the algorithm selects the best performing creative when the DSP receives the bid request.
This algorithm allows Outfit7 to increase the performance of the ad campaigns by selecting creatives that have the highest chances of converting (i.e. new game installations).
What we did
- Designed and developed the user interface.
- Developed the campaign management system.
- Developed the DSP API.
- Built the bidder.
- Built the tracker.
- Developed the Metrics Exporter feature.
- Developed the creative optimization mechanism using a reinforcement-learning algorithm.
- Carried out performance analysis of the Softmax Multi-Armed Bandit algorithm.
- Created technical documentation of the whole project.
The result
- We delivered a working MVP to Outfit7 that included all the required features and functionalities.
- Outfit7 is testing the DSP internally.
The technologies we used
React
Ant Design
GO
NodeJS
NestJS
TypeORM
Fast HTTP
Fiber
Express
Kubernetes
Prometheus
Redis
PostgreSQL
Google Kubernetes
Engine
Cloud SQL
Cloud CDN
Memorystore
The keys to our success
- Our positive relationship with Outfit7 and responsiveness from the Outfit7 team.
- Our knowledge and experience in designing and building AdTech platforms.