AdLib DSP Integration for Car Dealers

Display and streaming television buying without enterprise minimums, and the honest state of the connection to your CRM.

AdLib is a demand side platform, the software layer that decides which impression to bid on and how much to pay for it across the open programmatic exchanges. What separates it from the enterprise buying stacks is its intended customer. It is positioned for smaller agencies and advertisers who want programmatic display and streaming television without the annual commitments and platform fees that the large buying platforms attach to an account.

For a dealership the practical translation is two channels in one login. Display puts banner and video units in front of a defined audience across the wider internet inside a radius you set. Streaming television, sometimes sold as connected television, puts a fifteen or thirty second spot into an ad supported streaming app on the household set. Those are very different buys with very different measurement, and the argument for each already lives on connected TV advertising for dealers and its display counterpart. This page is about whether it plugs into the CRM, which is a narrower and more useful question.

The case is that an independent store gets access to the same two channels the franchise groups buy, at a floor that does not assume a regional budget. Streaming television in particular has been effectively closed to single rooftops for years, not because the inventory was unavailable but because the platforms selling it wanted commitments no rooftop would sign. A platform built for small advertisers changes the arithmetic, and a store can run a local streaming schedule alongside display without hiring an agency to hold the seat.

The honest objection is attribution, and it is a serious one. Streaming television produces no click. Nobody taps a spot on a living room screen and lands on your vehicle detail page, so every measurement of it is inferential, and results are not reliably attributable inside a short window. A store that buys streaming and then judges it on next day form fills will conclude the channel is broken when the real problem is the measurement frame.

The second objection is creative cost. Display can run on a designer's afternoon. A television spot cannot, and a bad spot on a good screen is money spent teaching your market that your store looks cheap. Budget for the production or do not buy the channel.

Available on request. The published test for that status is that no adapter file exists in the LeadLocate ad gateway for the platform, and that is precisely the situation. Twenty networks are registered in the gateway and AdLib is not one of them. There is no stub, no half finished token exchange and no configuration block waiting to be filled in.

Access class is PARTNER. That axis is always the vendor's gate rather than ours, and here it means credentials require an application the vendor reviews before issuing them. Read the two facts as independent. Even with the adapter written, that application sits between a dealership and a working connection and it moves at the vendor's pace. Publishing them separately is deliberate, because folding a vendor's approval queue into our own status would let us blame somebody else for work we have not done.

For a store that wants display or streaming running this month, none of the above is in the way. The managed path covers both channels today. What this page is about is the other route, where the account is yours.

Written as a design, because none of it exists yet. The same four rows appear on every page in this directory so the built and the unbuilt can be read side by side.

Note what is absent from the return direction. There is no lead row, because a display and streaming buy does not produce one. Anything arriving in your CRM from a campaign like this arrives because a shopper came to your site or called, not because the network handed us a contact.

Underneath every platform in this directory sits one library, and it is worth understanding because it is what makes a request answerable rather than aspirational.

The library defines seven operations any advertising network must answer: produce an authorization URL, exchange the returned code for an access token, list the accounts the connected user controls, deploy a campaign, change its status, report spend and results, and verify on demand that the credentials still work. A network is added by writing one adapter file against those seven. Nothing else in the CRM changes, and nothing already running is disturbed.

Access tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are stored. Every action taken against a network is written to an append only event log carrying the company, the network, the user and the detail, stamped in UTC on purpose, because those tables are shared across dealerships and a local timestamp is one nobody can reconcile afterwards. Campaign objects record which credentials created them and re-resolve those same credentials later, so an account disconnected next quarter does not strand the work built under it. None of that would need reinventing for AdLib. What is missing is the adapter file, and the directory says so plainly rather than implying otherwise with a logo.

Two paths, and the difference matters more than the branding.

The managed path is the webXintel Ads Network. It is included with the platform, our team builds and manages the campaigns from what you select in Leads Manager, and the reporting comes back inside the CRM next to the activity it produced. Nothing on this page gates it and nothing on this page delays it.

The self connect path is where a named network belongs. You connect the advertising account your store already owns, campaigns route through it, and the billing relationship, the spend history and the account itself stay yours. Most vendors will not offer that option, because it costs them the markup on your media. For AdLib DSP the option is not available, because there is no adapter to route anything through.

Across both paths one limit holds today: our team performs the push, the pause and the spend read rather than you from a dashboard inside the CRM. That is a constraint of a young connection layer rather than a permanent product decision, and it is queued work.

The order is vendor first, engineering second, store third. The vendor application comes before anything, because credentials are reviewed rather than issued on registration, and that review is not a step we can compress. Then the adapter: seven operations against their endpoints, a credential block in the gateway configuration, and a verification call that proves the connection instead of assuming it. Then your own setup, meaning an advertiser entity, billing, and the creative you intend to run.

Measurement deserves its own sentence because the two channels behave differently. Display delivery reads inside a day or two. Streaming television does not, and its own measurement conventions say results are not reliably attributable in a short window, so plan on weeks and on reading store level lift rather than a next day count. Do not let anyone put a lead number next to a streaming impression total and call it a cost per lead. Those two figures are not related in the way that arithmetic implies.

Nothing here is a promise about volume or about what any of it closes at. Nobody can promise that honestly, and a vendor offering it is telling you about their sales process rather than about the channel.

These gaps hold regardless of whether an adapter is ever written, and they are the ones a display and streaming platform makes most tempting to fudge.

We do not emit a vehicle catalog or an inventory feed. Dynamic display creative that renders a specific unit with its price and mileage runs from a product feed, and no code in our stack generates one for any advertising platform. Inventory Link merchandises your units on your own properties, which is a separate job.

We do not install or manage pixels. Retargeting pools and site conversion counts on a demand side platform both depend on a tag on your website, and placing and maintaining that tag is not something we do.

We do not run a server side conversions API, and we do not upload offline conversions. That matters most here, because offline upload is the usual way anyone attempts to connect a streaming impression to a delivered vehicle. We have no such path.

We do not export a hashed audience built from your customer list.

No campaign has ever been deployed to AdLib from LeadLocate, and no lead has ever arrived from it, because there is nothing to deploy with.

Ask for it by name, with the store attached. Requests are recorded against the platform they name and the tally decides build order, because a dealership ready to spend on a channel outranks any internal opinion about what should be built next.

Two things are worth saying in the request. The first is which of the two channels you actually want, since display and streaming are usually different problems wearing one login. The second is what you would consider proof, because a request that arrives with a measurement plan is a request we can answer with a range rather than a shrug. If the honest answer is that a registered platform already in the gateway would get you there sooner, you will be told that.

The managed path runs today and none of this delays it. Platform pricing is on the pricing page and does not vary with which networks you turn on.

Does LeadLocate integrate with AdLib DSP today?

No. The published test for available on request is that no adapter file exists in the ad gateway, and none does. AdLib is not among the twenty networks registered against the gateway contract, so there is nothing partial to describe.

Can I use my own AdLib DSP ad account?

Not through the CRM. Bringing your own advertising account requires an adapter to route through and there is none for this platform. Your account stays with the vendor and operates independently of anything LeadLocate does.

What happens if I request AdLib DSP?

The request is recorded against AdLib specifically rather than against streaming television as a category, and counted. The count is the input to build order, and you get an answer from a person that is either a range or a reason.

Can you tell me the cost per lead from a streaming television campaign?

No, and be careful with anyone who will. Streaming produces no click, results are not reliably attributable inside a short window, and dividing a lead count by a streaming impression spend produces a number that looks precise and means very little.

Would connecting this platform put leads into my CRM automatically?

No. Display and streaming buys do not hand back a contact record. Any activity you see arrives because a shopper visited your site or called the store, which is why the data table on this page has no lead row in the return direction.

Why is the access class PARTNER when nothing is built?

Because the vendor gate and our gate are tracked separately on purpose. PARTNER means credentials require an application the vendor reviews. That would remain true on the day the adapter shipped, and pretending otherwise would let us hide our own missing work behind somebody else's queue.

Tell us which channel you actually want, what your trade area looks like, and what you would accept as proof. Requests are counted against the platform they name and the count decides build order.