“Digital Is Dead” read the first slide of Larry Allen’s keynote for Programmania on June 5, 2017. I don’t know if it elicited the gasps Larry was hoping for, but I could detect a certain sense of puzzlement flowing throughout the room of 200-plus programmatic specialists. Wait—isn’t this supposed to be…
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Through header bidding, publishers aren’t just seeing more revenue from their demand partners--they’re also seeing seeing huge amounts of data. The problem is, that data isn’t always clearly understandable, and isn’t always easy to take action on it. At times, it’s not even clear where pubs should look to find…
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Earlier in 2017, savvy publishers and platforms started noticing a gnarly new breed of mobile redirects, one that’s particularly evasive to common-practice malware prevention methods. It’s a new page in the standard playbook malvertisers long ago developed to skirt around the watchdogs in the ad ecosystem, one that allows them…
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It's becoming more common to hear industry folks suggest that blockchain holds certain keys for tightening up security in the ad ecosystem--providing verification and reducing fraudulent bot activity. Regardless, it's still common for other media types to respond, with at least a whiff of doubt, "What's blockchain gotta do with…
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Since programmatic sales entered the video space a little over nine years ago, the market has continuously evolved. Originally, “programmatic” was all about the open marketplace, with scale and price efficiency the core focus.A few years later, we saw the introduction of private marketplaces—invite-only marketplaces where premium publishers offered their…
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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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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…
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AdMonsters NYC Meetup - Reining in the Data FloodThanks to header bidding and other programmatic advances, the number of demand sources a typical publisher employs has skyrocketed. This means a lot more data coming back from a great deal of sources. Managing this inundation of data is only the beginning—getting…
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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…
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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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