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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Since programmatic sales entered the video space a little over nine years ago, the market has continuously evolved. Originally, “programmatic” was all about the open marketplace, with scale and price efficiency the core focus.A few years later, we saw the introduction of private marketplaces—invite-only marketplaces where premium publishers offered their…
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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…
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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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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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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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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…
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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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