From the identity disruption to the CTV explosion to the ongoing shifts in mobile privacy, rev ops teams have so much chaos to navigate. But behind the scenes, Prebid brings a level of balance to that chaos. And in a recent AdMonsters Revenue Strategy Session, we pulled Prebid out from behind the curtain and made it the star of the show.
Tom Levesque, VP, Product at OpenX, and Emry Downinghall, VP, Advertising at Chegg, sat with us to talk about Prebid as a unifying, open-source solution for Publishers and SSPs and why some companies are still reluctant to make the shift.
In the earlier days of ad monetization, many publishers chose to overlook the page latency issues created by dropping ad code on the page because it drove significant yield for the business.
But as the demand for header bidding grew, many publishers were faced with a tough choice on how to manage it: Continue down their existing, proven (but sometimes flawed) path or find a new, more efficient solution that would continue to drive revenue.
From that need, PreBid was born solely to manage desktop display ads offering technology that was good, albeit somewhat limited.
For Chegg, Prebid was simply a better option than their home-grown solution.
But unlike Chegg, many organizations that are part of the programmatic ecosystem are still reluctant to get on board with Prebid. According to Downinghall, the disconnect may be due in part to the belief that it’s too difficult to implement.
“As every publisher knows here, there’s a big cost of switching technology,” Downinghall said. “You have to test into it. You have to relearn from an engineering perspective – like how it fits, how it doesn’t fit.”
With Prebid offering access to people who Downinghall describes as “the savviest publishers” across the open exchange for driving monetization solutions centered around what’s best for the publisher, however, “difficult to implement” can be removed as an excuse not to use Prebid solutions.
Organizations that are already on board may also not be taking advantage of the full breadth of services that Prebid offers them. That’s because Prebid has now grown from display ad management to something far greater, including:
- Prebid Mobile for iOS and Android
- Prebid Server which plugs into pretty much anything if you want server-side options
- Video and native accelerated mobile pages.
- Access to insights from thought leaders and the overall roadmap of the Prebid community.
The development plans don’t end there. The evolution of Prebid continues with the goal of expanding the breadth and depth of open-source monetization tools to include:
- UID2
- Standardizing taxonomy
- Helping publishers with single-sign-on technology
- Testing standards established by IV Tech Lab
“We’ve been increasingly fielding requests for Prebid,” said Levesque, “If you have a tool that you’re building for publishers that helps them in one way or another with their monetization and you think it’s important for that tool to be open source and community-driven, we have committees and working groups for [those initiatives].”