Long weekends updating inventory for a massive bookstore during my college years helpd me realize that scanning Universal Product Codes made a painful process much more tolerable. In fact, I refused to let my mind wander and consider what a tedious practice inventory management was like before UPCs and handheld…
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“This industry is literally 20 years old,” comments Michael Alania, EVP at Outsourced Ad Ops and witness to the at-times insanely rapid evolution of digital advertising and the operations role at its core. “You look at where we are now versus where we’ve come from, it’s pretty staggering. And with…
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Last week at the BrightRoll Video Summit during Advertising Week, I heard Ben Jankowski (Group Head of Global Media at MasterCard) say, "If you've figured out programmatic, you're either a genius or an idiot." I feel confident saying I haven't figured out programmatic, and I hope this improves my odds on…
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In the past, the acronym CPA had a simple connotation for publishers: low payout. Particularly in the post-bubble digital advertising world, CPA campaigns seemed a desperate alternative when CPMs had hit rock bottom. But more than a decade later, Epom Head of Sales Andrew Lebowski argues that in the age…
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For publishers, mobile is an itch spreading over greater sections of skin, tingling more ferociously every second. Scratching doesn’t make it worse, but certainly fails to relieve the symptoms. Publishers continue to struggle in their mobile monetization efforts: because there’s little incentive for direct sales to evangelize the channel (particularly when…
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Today marks the hottest day of the year here outside of Portland at the Columbia Gorge. Today also marks our first day of sessions at Publisher Forum. Coincidence? Maybe. But, we like to think the blazing ad ops leaders in the house had something to do with the record heat.…
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Improbably, this is going to be about American literature and advertising operations. Typically, most people think the only connection between these two things is that people who get a degree in the first are doomed to end up making a living at the second. But as it turns out, you…
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Though it seems fraud and the scourge of bots were high of mind at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting this week, EmpiricalMedia’s Steve Goldberg launched a few missiles via AdExchanger that I’m sure exploded in debate over in Palm Springs. One of these missiles included predicting “the end of stand…
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Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching too much “Downton Abbey,” but I can’t shake the idea that if programmatic direct was a debutante, 2013 was the year it came out.While the concept had been around for a while and people had long whispered about its prospects, last year was when…
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If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you really should pore through all of this Washington Post investigative piece on the National Security Administration’s tracking through Internet cookies and device identifiers. Namely, the agency has been using some of digital media’s favorite tools to track and target…
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