Company Overview

We are an end-to-end, full-service programmatic advertising platform primarily focused on providing advertising technology, data-driven campaign optimization and other solutions to underserved and less efficient markets on both the buy- and sell-side of the digital advertising ecosystem. Direct Digital Holdings, Inc. is the holding company for the business formed in 2018 by our acquisitions of Huddled Masses, LLC (“Huddled Masses”) and Colossus Media, LLC (“Colossus Media”). Colossus Media operates our proprietary sell-side programmatic platform operating under the trademarked banner of Colossus SSP™ (“Colossus SSP”). Huddled Masses is the platform for the buy-side of our business. In 2020, we acquired Orange142, LLC (“Orange142”) to further bolster our overall programmatic buy-side advertising platform and to enhance our offerings across multiple industry verticals such as travel, healthcare, education, financial services, consumer products, etc. with particular emphasis on small- and mid-sized businesses (which we define as companies with revenue between $5 million and $500 million) transitioning into digital with growing digital media budgets.

We believe that we have a unique competitive advantage due to our data-driven technology that allows us to provide front-end, buy-side planning for our small- and mid-sized clients, coupled with our proprietary Colossus SSP where we can curate the last-mile in the execution process to drive higher ROI. Each month, the Colossus SSP processes over 35 billion impressions and over 150 billion auction bid requests that seek to buy ad inventory from our publishers. In September 2021, Colossus SSP served over 39,386 clients. In our business and throughout this prospectus, we use the terms client and customer interchangeably.

We enable small- and mid-sized clients to leverage programmatic technology to engage their potential customers more directly, on a one-on-one basis, in any local market, with specificity to media device and footprint. Our technology leverages data to assess where our clients’ potential customers are in the decisionmaking process and manage campaign pacing and optimization based on data-driven analytics to drive the purchasing decision or encourage the call to action. The result is the mutual benefit to both our buy-side and sell-side clients, in that our buy-side clients enjoy a more even playing field compared to larger advertisers by driving more effective marketing and advertising in local markets that are compatible to their business footprint. In addition, our sell-side clients enjoy greater opportunity to monetize their ad inventory to new ad buyers that otherwise would be unavailable to them.