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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You may hear a lot these days (particularly on a header-cheerleading site like this one) about the ad-server waterfall being vanquished like some fairy-tale villain. Well, it’s not entirely gone, and similar to many foes in children’s stories, it wasn’t always such a bad thing—it was simply exploited. In the…
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Yield management is a slippery topic to explain, and even more complicated in practice. Rather than explain how it works, it’s probably more helpful to explain what it does. Well… what it’s supposed to do, in theory. First, the problem that yield management aims to solve for publishers: The total…
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We’ve written a bit in 2016 about visual monetization, and how much the marketplace has matured through smarter technology and growing interest and attention from publishers. There are factors we can discern anecdotally, or by looking at the broader digital market and extrapolating. But it’s more valuable to have fresh…
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Match every impression with the channel likely to garner the most revenue – seems like the stuff of operational daydreams, but I’m not going to tell you to snap out of it. Such dynamic inventory allocation is real, oh-so-real, and it’s referred to as holistic yield management. I know that…
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When I last spoke with Craig Leshen, President of OAO, he was helping explain that programmatic isn’t automatic – there’s still a lot of manual work that goes into these new systems. While they have helped to simplify certain functions, in many ways these systems have added to the complexity…
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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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First-party data is oil of the digital media landscape. While all kinds of publishers can claim it, the refinement process, not the drilling, makes the big bucks. Fortunately, technology has improved publishers’ refining abilities, not just in driving revenue from first-party data through on-site advertising as well as selling data to…
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The conversation is inevitable. While the phrasing always varies, it starts along these lines:“We have some extra space in the footer, do you think we could squeeze another 728x90 in there?” or maybe, “Most of our article pages extend beyond 1400 pixels, that means we can fit another 160x600 on…
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It’s hard enough overseeing the ad operations tech stack and processes of one publisher; imagine juggling multiple publishers. But that’s exactly the mission companies like Outsourced Ad Ops (OAO) have taken on – and they have to do it well enough to be profitable and grow as a company. While…
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