A little over a month ago, Vizio settled for $2.2 million with the FTC after an investigation into its data collection practices. In the settlement, the TV-maker agreed to collect future data only when users opt in. However, Vizio is still facing a class action lawsuit based on VPPA (Video Privacy…
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Call it a browser cookie, a web cookie, an HTTP cookie—it’s all the same thing, just a small text file, not even executable code. A cookie takes the form of a name-value pair (e.g. name=value). Originally designed to recall information like logins, form data and shopping cart contents, they’ve been…
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If you're in digital, you're more or less destined to be on Facebook and Google. The major platforms have unparalleled scale. But they're certainly not the be-all and end-all to digital--and publishers would love for advertisers to agree on this point. Publishers are sitting on valuable audience insights of their…
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“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…
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AdMonsters new and old have assembled for another heady three and a half days of ops education and commiseration at the 41st Publisher Forum. This time, we're in Palm Springs, CA, in palm tree-studded valley surrounded by beautiful but forbidding mountain ranges. In other words, it's a lot like ops,…
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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…
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When we split up the types of publishers out there in digital, we tend to group them broadly. You have your pubs originally from the traditional newspaper/magazine space, those that came out of broadcast media, your newer digital pure plays. We don’t tend to divide B2B pubs from B2C pubs—even…
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Publishers know advertisers always want to be on the part of the page where users are most engaged. But they also know that when you have a highly engaged user, you might want to let them enjoy what they came to your site for, and give them a little space.…
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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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