Call me a borrower, a copycat or even a thief. Many years ago, Adrian D’Souza led the first AdMonsters session that had a large impact on me, and the outline of his operational process at CNET became the model for building out my department at Advance Digital. To this day…
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Earlier this year, Will Spann was volunteered as a speaker on a panel I was leading about HTML5 creative and responsive site issues. We had chatted before, but as we prepped for the discussion and he described the Creative Lab at The Weather Company, I was blown away. Publisher creative offerings…
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Digital media itself may be a major disruption, but it is also an opportunity to explore new business models. Media agencies are constantly finding themselves in search of the next best media idea, strategy, or product. So how do they become better at working with digital or simply better digital…
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With the Upfronts/NewFronts raging into gear, news is spreading that many brand and agency relationships are on the rocks. Following announcements of media account reviews from L’Oreal, Coca-Cola, Visa and Unilever, P&G mentioned it would be streamlining its agency partners. As this seemed indelibly linked to his OPS keynote –…
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The promise of private marketplaces is both alluring and straightforward. For brands, there’s the opportunity to reach engaged audiences of premium publishers with the efficiency of programmatic. For those premium publishers, there’s an opportunity to move inventory via programmatic, but at significantly higher CPMs than they can net in the…
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Updated Below. One of my first questions to AdMonsters Publisher Forum Keynote Mike Smith, General Manager of Core Audience and VP of Revenue Platforms and Digital , was, “What the hell is a supply-side trading desk?”He smiled wryly, probably because what sounds like the latest industry buzzword is a pretty apt…
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Consolidation in the digital ad technology industry has started a new trend: going full stack. For some time, publishers have had to choose between one unified tech stack (ahem, DoubleClick) or piecemeal point and multi-point solutions connected by duct tape (aka, integrations). But full stacks appear to be on the rise,…
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Workflow can be the bane of ops' existence. The order’s journey from sales to ops to inventory and other stops can be a perilous one full of treacherous platform crossings and other hazards – it can make Frodo Baggins’ excursion to Mount Doom look like a walk in the park.…
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Ask someone to explain what “programmatic” is and they will invariably use the word “automation.” Makes sense, but automation for whom? For buyers, programmatic platforms certainly automate the purchasing of media across sites. For sellers, programmatic brings hundreds if not thousands of buyers their way without sales having to pick…
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Gawker co-founder and CEO Nick Denton sent the digital media world into a tizzy Wednesday by announcing he was stepping down as president and replacing himself with a group of senior managing partners to oversee the media empire. As I scrolled through the list of the anointed, I saw one…
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