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What Is MarTech?

The line about marketing tech over the last few years is that it’s becoming more closely aligned with ad tech, for both brands and publishers. There must be some truth to that idea, then, if so many people in the industry have trouble explaining what the difference is between ad…

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What Is GDPR?

For ages, media and tech companies in the U.S. have considered European Union data and privacy regulations to be comparatively strict, comparatively complicated, and generally someone else’s problem. But with the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect in May of 2018, U.S. companies themselves are prepping to…

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What Is Viewability?

Viewability has been one of the more contentious issues in digital advertising for several years, in spite of the fact that MS Word apparently doesn’t recognize it as a properly spelled word. That’s appropriate, in a way. Media types have found the viewability issue maddening, and most laypersons would never…

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What Are Better Ads Standards?

Better Ads Standards are an initiative for promoting “acceptable” ad experiences for users, while discouraging disruptive ads. The overall goal, as stated, has been to keep the spread of ad blocking tools at bay, by assuring the ads in the ecosystem are not so annoying they drive users to start…

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What Is EBDA?

Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation is, in a nutshell, Google’s answer to header bidding. It’s a server-side solution where exchanges and SSPs can bid on publisher inventory along with Google’s AdX in a unified auction. Now, to understand why that matters, we’re going to have to walk back a few…

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What Is Malware?

Malware is a blanket term that applies to any software planted on the user’s device with malicious intent. It’s come a long way from that old bogeyman of the rogue hacker launching “gotcha!” viruses, which captured the public imagination in the ‘90s. Now it’s a very different bogeyman, and malware…

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What Is Single-Request Architecture?

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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What Is the Intersection Observer?

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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What Are Private Marketplaces?

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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What Is Server-to-Server?

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…

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