Let’s admit that the majority of headaches when it comes to viewability revolve around the fact that in campaigns it’s measured ex post facto. The ad is served and then the viewability pixels start counting—but the buy and sell side pixels load at different times, causing discrepancies aplenty. Doesn’t that…
Read More
On the East Coast, the lack of sunny skies and warmer temps make it hard to tell spring has arrived. One unmistakable sign, however, is our continuous stream of new speaker announcements for Ops. Can anyone else think of a better way to announce the beginning of a season than…
Read More
It's becoming more common to hear industry folks suggest that blockchain holds certain keys for tightening up security in the ad ecosystem--providing verification and reducing fraudulent bot activity. Regardless, it's still common for other media types to respond, with at least a whiff of doubt, "What's blockchain gotta do with…
Read More
The IAB held a call this week to present its latest Internet Advertising Report, developed from a semi-annual survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And the way the numbers sorted out, it became clear that 2016 was the year of… wait for it, this might be a shock…MOBILE!Kidding aside, we all know…
Read More
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…
Read More
Read Part I of this two-parter here.If you recall from Part I of this series, we'd been talking about how arbitraged video impressions are bad. There are a number of reasons why arbitraged video impressions suck from the buy-side perspective:1. Most obviously, they make the same ads cost more than…
Read More
If you’re a marketer looking to send the right ad to the right person in the right place, programmatically buying online video ads on the open exchange is a monumentally stupid move. If you’re a brand trying to advertise that way, you’re wasting much, if not most, of your ad…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
In an end-of-week post, AdExchanger reported this afternoon that Google had abandoned its “last-look” practice in exchange bidding. The old Google last-look advantage allows AdX the chance to outbid whichever demand source would have otherwise won in a programmatic auction, prior to sending a request to Google’s ad server. Famously,…
Read More