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How tiers work

Every company in ATDb is classified on a 5-tier scale from S (most influential) to D (peripheral). The tier appears next to the company name on every profile, in search results, on the homepage, and in your watchlist.

The goal: when you're scanning a list of vendors, the tier badge tells you at a glance whether you're looking at a category-defining platform or an adjacent service provider — without having to know every company in the AdTech ecosystem already.

The tiers

S — Core Platforms

Category-defining infrastructure that ad campaigns flow through.

The handful of buy-side and sell-side platforms with industry-shaping scale: top-tier DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, and walled-garden ad platforms. Most agency briefs and publisher tech stacks include at least one S-tier vendor by name. Removal would noticeably reshape the AdTech market.

Examples: The Trade Desk · Google Ads · Meta Ads · Magnite · PubMatic

A — Ecosystem Services

Specialized vendors that every meaningful campaign relies on but that aren't the buy/sell pipe itself.

Ad verification, attribution, identity resolution, mobile measurement, contextual targeting, holdcos, premium publishers. Vendors that sit alongside the S-tier platforms and are routinely cited in RFPs and category Magic Quadrants. Strong but not category-defining standalone scale.

Examples: DoubleVerify · IAS · AppsFlyer · LiveRamp · NBCUniversal

B — Infrastructure & Data

CDPs, AI/ML, data platforms, and emerging-but-credible point solutions.

Mid-tier players with real product traction but not yet category leaders: customer data platforms, audience graphs, analytics pipelines, AI ad-creative tools, regional ad networks. Often integrate with multiple S/A vendors. Frequently acquired by S/A players over time.

Examples: Tealium · Permutive · Lotame · Smartly.io · BlueConic

C — Marketing Technology

Adjacent MarTech — CRM, marketing automation, analytics — that touches AdTech but isn't native.

Marketing-cloud building blocks that interface with ad campaigns but are sold primarily on a different value proposition (e.g., email, lead nurturing, web analytics). Important to the broader marketing stack; supporting cast for AdTech specifically.

Examples: HubSpot · Marketo Engage · Mailchimp · Iterable · Braze

D — Extended Ecosystem

Service providers, consultancies, and adjacent technologies on the periphery of AdTech.

Agencies of record, programmatic services, AdOps consultancies, niche regional players, single-feature point solutions, and entities that touch AdTech tangentially. Real businesses, but not the first names that come up in a buy-side or sell-side RFP.

Examples: Stagwell · Tinuiti · Acadia · Wpromote · Jellyfish

How tiers get assigned

Tiers are set by a combination of:

  1. AI classifier — runs on every new company during enrichment. Scores tier based on the company's overview, categories, relationship count (how many other companies reference it), and AdTech-vs-adjacent signal.
  2. Periodic re-audits — every few months a corpus-wide sweep re-tiers entities that have grown or shrunk in relevance since their original classification.
  3. Editor and admin review — community editors can suggest tier changes; admins can override the classifier directly when a vendor is clearly mis-tiered.

If you think a company's tier is wrong, you can suggest an edit on the company page or use the in-product feedback button. Tier changes are protected fields, so the request goes to admin review.

Tiers vs. categories

Tiers are a vertical ranking (importance / scale), while categories are horizontal groupings (DSP, SSP, CDP, MMP, etc.). A company has one tier and can belong to multiple categories. When you're filtering or browsing, tier is for "how important," category is for "what does it do."