For years people would shoot me skeptical glances when I suggested that in the near future the majority of display inventory would be transacted programmatically—whether that meant RTB or another automated channel. But these days when I express this sentiment, more people nod their heads and scowl only because we…
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The Spring 2018 Publisher Forum is a wrap, but the lively discussion goes on. We take a look at how some of those discussions--specifically, how to talk with the buy side about brand safety, and how to take action to avoid the GDPR-empowered wrath of E.U. regulators--have played out this…
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Ad tech is an awfully cyclical industry. Ghosts of the past come back to haunt us all the time, whether they be ad fraud or brand safety. A Daily Beast story detailing how apps leveraging the Facebook Audience Network found themselves knee-deep in complaints about offensive ads thanks to an e-commerce…
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DSPs Hidden Fees Dragged Into the Light AdExchanger published a lengthy explanation of the infamous hidden fees DSPs sometimes charge. It's common knowledge in the industry that DSPs are often inclined to take a cut off of the transactions they enable, and then add extra fees on top of that.…
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Ads.txt landed in the digital media world circled by a lot more confusion than you'd expect from a text file. Although the goals of rendering domain spoofing worthless and cutting down on arbitrage were quite noble, the approach was almost too simple for an industry that revels in complexity. Fortunately, the folks at…
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Last week a lot of my industry connections passed around the Buzzfeed story, “Attack of the Zombie Websites,” about a programmatic, bot-driven web of lies that may have shorted advertisers tens of millions of dollars. Although it was meticulously reported, I had a hard time reading the full article not…
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Last week marked my return to the non-Brexiting part of Europe in several years to attend DMEXCO. My assumption is that most operations people really don’t know a lot about DMEXCO other than Germany is a funny place to go to something that sounds like it belongs in Latin America.…
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With all the hubbub about first-price auctions taking over the real-time bidding ecosystem, I don’t think there’s been enough talk about why the second-price auction is currently the standard bearer. That’s why I was exhilarated when Univision’s Eyal Ebel brought the point up at our recent Meetup on the current…
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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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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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