Brightroll has announced a new tiered partner program to help clarify its relationships with the 100-plus vendors that are integrated into its platform.
The company says it’s emulating major enterprise software platforms such as Adobe Marketing Cloud and Salesforce as it strives to position itself as a neutral platform where buyers and sellers transact.
The partner program evaluates and certifies partners based on criteria such as whether the solution uses Brightroll’s API, whether the partner has a dedicated Brightroll service technician, and whether they have 24-hour client support. Rather than simply listing its partners, Brightroll’s new partner page now certifies them as “platinum” (deeply integrated), “gold” (well-integrated) and “enabled” (superficially integrated).
Among the first platinum partners are ComScore, Exelate and Innovid.
“We’re formalizing and making public Brightroll’s manner of cooperation with a lot of companies across the ecosystem,” said Brent Horowitz, Brightroll vice-president business development.
He said that with the programmatic ecosystem becoming so complex and requiring so many separate specialized vendors, clients need a way to sort out what each of them does and how they stack up. Likewise, the vendors need a way to reach the clients through all the noise.
“We want to make it as easy as possible for our partners to reach our buyers and sellers through our platform, for their products to be best of breed and as usable and efficient as possible, and likewise for our buying and selling clients to be able to sort through all these various companies and find that solutions that best fits their needs,” he said.
The partner program will include a central database where clients can look up information on each partner and the measurement, targeting, optimization or other features they provide on the Brightroll platform. The database will assist Brightroll support staff in training clients and in providing customer service related to third-party integrations.
Horowitz said that the partner program is another step in Brightroll’s strategy of developing a software platform, rather than a product. Brightroll has attempted to differentiate its offering as neither an exchange, nor network or DSP, but as a neutral piece of infrastructure that both buyers and sellers can build their business on. According to Horowitz, a platform should provide opportunities and resources for third-parties to build solutions that help users customize their experience, the way Salesforce and Adobe Marketing Cloud support third-party applications.
Last Month, Yahoo announced it planned to acquire Brightroll for $640M. The deal has not been closed, and there’s little sign yet of any big changes to Brightroll’s business strategy.
