Doing More With Small Teams: A Q&A With The Economist’s Sergei Bachtin

Sometimes, when you look behind the scenes at a big-name premium publisher, you find vitally important and complex tasks handled by a shockingly small group of people. Small ops teams aren't only the domain of fledgling young media companies--although they are certainly a hallmark of those businesses, too. Being part…

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The Native Chronicles: Creative Revival

The first banner ad is both a thing of legend and of infamy. The latter because it launched a revolution of skyscrapers, page takeovers, interstitials, animated Flash units and other interruptive contrivances that users have learned to loathe. But the first banner ad—a spot for AT&T on Wired.com in 1994—is…

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Weekly News Roundup: Google Delivers Insights to Pubs, Rupert Murdoch’s Duopoly-Fighting Precedent, More

Google Delivers Insights Engine to Pubs Google announced it’s releasing a suite of tools to give its DoubleClick publisher clients audience and performance insights. It’s called the Insights Engine Project, and it’s angled to give publishers a view of performance similar to what the company gives advertisers when they target…

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Ad Ops Decoder: What Is Ads.txt?

Ads.txt is an initiative the IAB Tech Lab launched earlier this year to ensure greater transparency in the programmatic marketplace by creating a record of who is authorized to sell or re-sell ad inventory. The top aim of Ads.txt is to crack down on domain spoofing, a widespread, wily and…

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Watch Out for the Glare of Shiny Objects: Change and Consistency in Ops

It’s been 14 years since Craig Leshen founded OAO. In digital media years, that would be… what, like 40? What we’re trying to say is, Craig has seen a heck of a lot in that time. In his role leading up OAO’s efforts to provide ad ops support to a…

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Data Clarity Will Set You Free… Eventually

Between the IAB’s OpenData initiative, the LiveRamp/AppNexus-led data consortium, and a few other long-simmering initiatives (think DigiTrust), now is a great time for anyone who’s been championing data transparency. Whether these efforts are bearing fruit—that is to say, if they’re actually translating to more utility in sharing and processing data,…

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Ad Ops Decoder: What Is Prebid.org?

Prebid.org has already been the central URL for the Prebid suite of open-source header bidding products and projects. As of Sept. 11, 2017, Prebid.org is also the name of the neutral industry organization that will offer guidelines and development support for Prebid products. AppNexus and Rubicon Project have publicly led…

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Dbrief on DMEXCO

Last week marked my return to the non-Brexiting part of Europe in several years to attend DMEXCO. My assumption is that most operations people really don’t know a lot about DMEXCO other than Germany is a funny place to go to something that sounds like it belongs in Latin America.…

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Apple’s Cookie-Blocking Policy Is a Gift to the Duopoly

First Apple came for our headphone jacks. Then they came for our first-party cookies. All right, it’s not that simple, but Apple’s updated cookie policy for its Safari browser feels like the company is twisting the knife a few more degrees, making its own rules without making any real concessions…

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Invasion of the First-Price Auctions

With all the hubbub about first-price auctions taking over the real-time bidding ecosystem, I don’t think there’s been enough talk about why the second-price auction is currently the standard bearer. That’s why I was exhilarated when Univision’s Eyal Ebel brought the point up at our recent Meetup on the current…

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