I found it bizarre that the same day that the IAB released digital advertising revenue numbers for 2016 that point to Google and Facebook—the Duopoly!—vacuuming up about half of ad spend and almost all of growth, ESPN conducted layoffs of 100 mainly editorial employees. As several sites noted, most of those…
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Single-request architecture is a setup where, in a header bidding framework, the bidder sends one call to the ad server for multiple ad slots, and the server returns bids for all of those ad slots at the same time. To explain why single-request might be advantageous to the publisher, and…
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Is true programmatic reporting a pipe dream, or is it within reach? Tough question--we can lay out a road map to a programmatic reporting ideal, but it's easy to see how there might be a lot of twists and turns along that road. For a publisher, getting all the data…
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A private marketplace is an invite-only programmatic auction. A publisher sets aside certain inventory, or a group of publishers pool inventory they’ve set aside, and grants approval to certain buyers who can bid on it. In theory, PMPs were created to combine the most appealing elements of direct sales and…
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Before we talk about server-to-server (or S2S, or server-side bidding, or whatever you want to call it), we have to talk about header bidding. Header bidding allows publishers to solicit bids on all their inventory from a select group of demand partners in a unified auction, just by putting the…
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There’s a new report out from FreeWheel called "Advancing the Ad Experience," where the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video and study partner Advertiser Perceptions surveyed brand and agency execs about the ad experience in digital video, and the challenges to it. The report concluded—surprise!—that “the process and responsibility starts with…
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U.S. publishers find themselves wrestling with unfamiliar issues due to the coming implementation of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Under GDPR, E.U. citizens are given the right to protect and control the way their data is collected and how it might be used anywhere in the world. This global reach…
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If you're in digital, you're more or less destined to be on Facebook and Google. The major platforms have unparalleled scale. But they're certainly not the be-all and end-all to digital--and publishers would love for advertisers to agree on this point. Publishers are sitting on valuable audience insights of their…
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“I hate the term header bidding,” a friend and industry resource told me over a cold beer. “It’s too catchy—it sounds like another piece of ad-tech buzzword BS.”I’d argue “tagless tech”—the first name I heard in reference to header-based executions—was far worse (and horribly untrue). But my friend’s dislike really…
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AdMonsters new and old have assembled for another heady three and a half days of ops education and commiseration at the 41st Publisher Forum. This time, we're in Palm Springs, CA, in palm tree-studded valley surrounded by beautiful but forbidding mountain ranges. In other words, it's a lot like ops,…
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