I undertook research which included speaking to internal stakeholders, desk research and pro-active user outreach, recruitment and interviews.

There are two main types of users 
There is a split between the types of uses for DSPs, the programmatic traders who are technically-minded and experienced with optimising campaigns via DSPs, and the media buyers who lack the in-depth knowledge of optimising campaigns and require more assistance from the DSP provider; ie an on-boarding process and tips for how to use them effectively.

Client relationships are key & the goal is to secure more campaigns
The main objective to achieve successful campaigns is to secure more future business from their clients. Therefore the traders need to trust the tools and service providers that they use. This includes brand safety; i.e. making sure there are no fraud clicks, and that their content is being displayed on the ‘right’ websites and not damaging the brand.

Using DSPs is labour intensive & reporting is a burden on time
Different clients require different frequency of reporting, and manually pulling together a report, especially when the campaign data is run over several DSPs, can be laborious & time consuming. Traders have no central dashboard, report builder or place to aggregate data on a campaign that has been placed on several different DSPs, and have to pull all data together manually themselves on Excel. 

Campaigns are often fragmented over different tools
Programmatic traders and media buyers use several different DSPs on a daily basis within their job role for running multiple client campaigns simultaneously, due to the need to access different kinds of inventory, greater targeting capabilities and wider variety of unique data sources. This increases the time & energy dedicated to learning how to use the tools & running the campaigns. 

Platform transparency & customer service are key
A transparent service is very important to the clients as they want to know how much a bid actually costs and where their ads are running so as not to damage their brand, as some tools try to hide this information. They also favour products with prompt and helpful customer service, including on-boarding and campaign suggestions, this is so that they ‘feel confident there are experts supporting me and catching things I miss.”