Real-time bidding based display advertising: Mechanisms and algorithms

Abstract

In display and mobile advertising, the most significant development in recent years is the Real-Time Bidding (RTB), which allows selling and buying in real-time one ad impression at a time. The ability of making impression level bid decision and targeting to an individual user in real-time has fundamentally changed the landscape of the digital media. The further demand for automation, integration and optimisation in RTB brings new research opportunities in the IR fields, including information matching with economic constraints, CTR prediction, user behaviour targeting and profiling, personalised advertising, and attribution and evaluation methodologies. In this tutorial, teamed up with presenters from both the industry and academia, we aim to bring the insightful knowledge from the real-world systems, and to provide an overview of the fundamental mechanism and algorithms with the focus on the IR context.We will also introduce to IR researchers a few datasets recently made available so that they can get hands-on quickly and enable the said research.