The prominence of revenue operations as a critical function within the digital media world has had its ups and downs. While programmatic and other indirect channels have proven ops as a serious revenue center, it’s also forced the department into highly unfamiliar territory such as creative development and user experience.…
Read More
Malware is a blanket term that applies to any software planted on the user’s device with malicious intent. It’s come a long way from that old bogeyman of the rogue hacker launching “gotcha!” viruses, which captured the public imagination in the ‘90s. Now it’s a very different bogeyman, and malware…
Read More
Is true programmatic reporting a pipe dream, or is it within reach? Tough question--we can lay out a road map to a programmatic reporting ideal, but it's easy to see how there might be a lot of twists and turns along that road. For a publisher, getting all the data…
Read More
For years, we’ve joked that brands don’t care how the digital advertising sausage is made. Their modus operandi seemed along the lines of: Let the agencies and publishers deal with the frustrating minutiae involved in making digital media transactions work.Funny how quickly things change. As increased spend hits digital channels…
Read More
Read Part I of this two-parter here.If you recall from Part I of this series, we'd been talking about how arbitraged video impressions are bad. There are a number of reasons why arbitraged video impressions suck from the buy-side perspective:1. Most obviously, they make the same ads cost more than…
Read More
If you’re a marketer looking to send the right ad to the right person in the right place, programmatically buying online video ads on the open exchange is a monumentally stupid move. If you’re a brand trying to advertise that way, you’re wasting much, if not most, of your ad…
Read More
There’s a new report out from FreeWheel called "Advancing the Ad Experience," where the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video and study partner Advertiser Perceptions surveyed brand and agency execs about the ad experience in digital video, and the challenges to it. The report concluded—surprise!—that “the process and responsibility starts with…
Read More
“I hate the term header bidding,” a friend and industry resource told me over a cold beer. “It’s too catchy—it sounds like another piece of ad-tech buzzword BS.”I’d argue “tagless tech”—the first name I heard in reference to header-based executions—was far worse (and horribly untrue). But my friend’s dislike really…
Read More
Header bidding is a way for publishers to solicit real-time bids from a multitude of programmatic partners on each and every piece of inventory by using the page header within a site's source code. Basically, it’s a convoluted way to bypass the ad server waterfall and ensure inventory is valued…
Read More
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…
Read More