“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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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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Late last year, tales of Methbot illegitimately gobbling up $3 million to $5 million in ad spend daily horrified the industry. While advertisers are the obvious victims of fraud based on bot traffic, the spectre still haunts premium publishers—not only is that spend that should have been relegated to their…
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The other day, a publisher friend of mine tapped my shoulder about a release the Electronic Frontier Foundation put out fairly recently. This was a release calling for a radical tightening of security around user data.The sense of urgency, as EFF’s argument goes, is that we’re in an increasingly charged…
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In the relatively brief amount of time since digital publishers have adopted header bidding en masse, the header has become jam-packed with demand partners. With new header solutions being built each day, publishers are now wondering how to manage—from who to let into their header to what criteria is available…
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Last June, a major revenue guy from Medium spoke at AdMonsters’ Ops conference, laying out a fascinating native advertising model transacted on a time-spent basis. It was a bold plan that sparked a great deal of conversation throughout the event.So you can imagine I was disheartened when reading Ev Williams’…
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In this addendum to his three-part series on private marketplaces (read parts I, II and III), Will Rand explains the quirky workings of GroupM's PMP deals that require 100% viewable inventory.First, someone from GroupM says they want to set up a PMP. The PMP will be a non-guaranteed preferred deal,…
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Read Part I here and Part II here.So you want to set up a PMP. The conversation typically goes like this:1. The Advertiser reaches out to a supply partner and says it wants to set up a PMP. Advertisers find supply partners in a variety of different ways—some use comScore,…
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Read Part I of this series here.There's an old saying: If you take someone's money, you have to do what they say.The big five agency holding companies control a significant portion of the world's media spend, and if someone on the sell side wants to make money in the ad…
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The fact that publisher revenues are under siege from a number of sources isn’t exactly news. Users are abandoning desktop in droves, continuing the progression from print dollars to digital dimes to mobile pennies. Remaining desktop users are blocking ads with increasing regularity. Companies like Facebook, the dominant source of publisher…
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