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…
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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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With Oracle’s recent purchase of Moat, one of the more widely-integrated third-party measurement companies out there, the term "Intersection Observer" has been thrown around a lot lately. To some, the Intersection Observer has been put forward as the possible driver of the next generation of viewability measurement, and as the…
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For years, we’ve joked that brands don’t care how the digital advertising sausage is made. Their modus operandi seemed along the lines of: Let the agencies and publishers deal with the frustrating minutiae involved in making digital media transactions work.Funny how quickly things change. As increased spend hits digital channels…
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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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The latest eMarketer estimates on US digital advertising are out and, yeah, there’s some stuff to grimace about. The infamous duopoly is expected to rake in more than 50% of US display spend (desktop and mobile) in 2017.According to eMarketer, Facebook will grab 39.1% of the display market in 2017,…
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Blockchain is commonly referred to as a ledger—a shared, decentralized database, made up of so-called “blocks,” which are just hashed records of transactions. In each block, which is permanent and can’t be altered after it’s logged, you have a timestamp and a link to an earlier block. That gives participants…
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Page speed is never too far from the main stage of the ongoing show that is ad ops, and it’s enjoying another spotlight moment right now. On one side, publishers have Google and Facebook calling for compliance with their platform publishing guidelines--and with massive mobile traffic coming to them through…
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Call it a browser cookie, a web cookie, an HTTP cookie—it’s all the same thing, just a small text file, not even executable code. A cookie takes the form of a name-value pair (e.g. name=value). Originally designed to recall information like logins, form data and shopping cart contents, they’ve been…
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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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