Decoder is AdMonster’s explainer content series that makes sense of digital media and advertising’s alphabet soup. We take a deep dive into the technical aspects of ad tech but also bring clarity to challenges and strategical solutions that help to propel ad ops, rev ops, data, programmatic and marketing forward.
In 2019, there was a lot of focus on privacy as well as methods for bringing greater transparency to the supply chain and also the best path forward for accurately measuring OTT/CTV. Here’s a look back on the ad tech acronyms and specifications that caught the most attention this year.
What is Pchain?
Pchain—not to be confused with rapper 2 Chainz or the even more similar PCHAIN, the first native multichain system in the world that supports Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)—is sort of like ads.txt, but for the buy side. Read more.
What is the IAB Consent Framework?
Since the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect May 25, 2018, any company with a website visited by anyone from the E.U. must comply with the regulation or face heavy fines. To comply, companies must obtain consent when collecting personal data from visitors. The IAB GDPR Transparency and Consent Framework is the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s solution to help publishers tell visitors what data is being collected, and how they and their vendors plan to use it—and which vendors are using it. Read more.
What is CCPA?
With the passage of the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, consumers will get a lot more visibility into the information collected about them when they visit online properties, as well as what is done with that data.
Set to go into effect January 1, 2020, with enforcement coming six months later, CCPA will apply to any company with CA-based assets or customers, including Californians who visit a website and whose data you touch. To sum it up, the law will apply if you have 50,000 unique CA visitors annually. For digital media companies, this will mean rewriting privacy policies, tinkering with data management systems, and providing more transparency to consumers. Read more.
What is Edge Computing?
Privacy is fast becoming the single most important macro trend in adtech and will dominate the next decade. It can no longer be gamed. This is a huge opportunity to quite literally gain a competitive edge. Publishers can re-establish themselves by embracing their unique and valuable relationships with audiences. They own the user relationship and have the legal and technical means to process that data.
It requires building and adopting technology to both put privacy first and create an ecosystem that fairly values their contribution. It means eschewing the cloud, which by its nature stands opposed to privacy, in favor of edge computing, where data is processed on the device it’s generated on. Read more.
What Are Sellers.json and Supplychain Object?
Programmatic advertising was supposed to be the most efficient way to buy and sell advertising. And yet, since its beginning, it’s only grown increasingly inefficient, burdened with an ever-growing list of intermediaries jostling to provide value. Meanwhile, waste and fraud continue to rise.
To move the industry towards a more transparent future, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has been hard at work releasing specifications that help shed light on the programmatic buying and selling of ads. In 2017 it was ads.txt.
This year, it’s sellers.json and supplychain object. But the question is, what exactly do they do? We had a chat with Miguel Morales, CTO and Co-Founder of Lucidity, a technology company using blockchain to bring transparency to advertising to gain a better understanding. Read more.
What Are the Use Cases for Log-Level Data?
Once considered the “data exhaust” of the industry, log-level data (LLD) has been positioned more recently as a remedy for many of programmatic’s woes.
LLD contains many valuable, impression-level details like geo data, URLs, time stamps, brand safety data, and auction mechanic information that allow buyers to inform bidding practices and prune supply paths.
But that’s not all. There are a number of powerful use cases for LLD that can create value for all parts of the programmatic supply chain—not just buyers. Here are a variety of ways LLD can be used to bring greater transparency, efficacy, and fairness to programmatic advertising. Read more.
What is a CDP?
CDP might sound like another martech or adtech acronym that will make its way into obscurity, but in a post-GDPR world where first-party relationships will be vital to survival, the Consumer Data Platform (CDP) is the ultimate tool for true consumer or audience identity resolution. During his presentation, “All You Need Is CDP,” at OpsNY on Tuesday June 4, Jonathan Mendez, Partner, Products & Data at Arkle Advisors will dive into why the CDP is a groundbreaking technology and how it will shift the very fabric of advertising. But in the meantime, we’ve got you covered on the basics. Read more.
What Are the Different Kinds of Paywalls (and Do They Work?)
While digital subscriptions and paywalls are nothing new to the publishing industry, advances in application technologies and the need to consolidate and sync visitor and revenue data from across multiple sources have increased innovation on all fronts. Beyond just implementation, publishers have the ability to optimize their efforts in regards to targeting, UX, offerings, and subscriber management. Read more.
What Problems Does the IAB’s CCPA Compliance Framework Solve?
While the CCPA gives new data rights to California’s consumers, it places requirements on “businesses” and “service providers” (as defined by the CCPA) to ensure that these rights are protected, including: higher standards for data and IT security, privacy policy and consumer notices, organizational documentation, data governance, and—most concerning to many in ad ops, and the focus of the IAB’s CCPA Compliance Framework—new provisions regarding the sale of consumers’ personal information π. Read more.
What Are the Challenges in OTT Measurement?
Despite OTT’s surging popularity, ad spend on OTT was only projected to reach $2.6 billion in 2019. Compared to linear TV’s $69.2 billion, what advertisers are willing to spend on OTT might seem disproportionate. But to those in-the-know folks in the industry, it’s not entirely surprising. Read more.
Check out more stories in our Best of AdMonsters 2019 Series:
Best of AdMonsters 2019: The Digital Media and Advertising Stories You Might Have Missed
Best of AdMonsters 2019: The Top Stories in Digital Media and Advertising