A demand-side platform is a system that allows digital advertisers to manage multiple ad exchange

Ad exchange

Ad exchanges are technology platforms that facilitate the bidded buying and selling of online media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks. The approach is technology-driven as opposed to the historical approach of negotiating price on media inventory...

 and data exchange

Data exchange

Data exchange is the process of taking data structured under a source schema and actually transforming it into data structured under a target schema, so that the target data is an accurate representation of the source data. Data exchange is similar to the related concept of data integration except...

 accounts through one interface. Real time bidding for displaying online ads

Online advertising

Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web to deliver marketing messages to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, blogs, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, interstitial...

 takes place within the ad exchanges, and by utilizing a DSP, marketers can manage their bids for the banners and the pricing for the data that they are layering on to target their audiences. Much like Paid Search, using DSPs allow users to optimize based on set Key Performance Indicators such as Cost-per-clicks, and Cost-per-action.