Connect, don’t absorb: Dept’s AI bet on orchestration over operating systems

Dept doesn’t want to sell marketers AI tools. It wants to sell them growth.

That’s the pitch, anyway, and it comes with a deliberate sacrifice: the agency won’t charge for the tech layer of its new AI system at all, only for the outcomes that come out the other end.

The system is called Deptify, but the way people interact with it is through a persistent assistant called D, where Dept’s bet on orchestration over an operating system plays out day to day. Instead of having to learn a new interface, or wait while an agency rebuilds every partner tool to fit inside one of its own, D pulls context from whatever workflow tools the client already runs, whether that’s Adobe Workfront, Asana or something else entirely, and routes a person to the right one for the task at hand.

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WTF is containerization?

Containerization is suddenly everywhere in ad tech conversations. PubMatic just launched Decision Fabric, Index Exchange has had Index Cloud in market since spring and a raft of smaller players are scrambling to position themselves around the tech. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the infrastructure overhaul that finally drags programmatic into the modern era or it’s a rebranding of tech the big players solved years ago. The truth, as ever, is somewhere in the middle. 

Here’s a primer on why that’s so important for an ad tech industry in a state of flux.

What is containerization?

Before getting into why everyone’s suddenly talking about it, it helps to understand what containerization actually is. First, the basics. A container is a self-contained package of bidding logic and the data it needs to run. Containerization is simply the practice of deploying it inside someone else’s infrastructure — typically an exchange or SSP — rather than running it remotely and passing data back and forth across the internet. Why? Because the exchange is where the impression is born and the auction is decided. Moving the logic there to where the action already is means less time in transit and less signal lost along the way. 

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