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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Let’s admit that the majority of headaches when it comes to viewability revolve around the fact that in campaigns it’s measured ex post facto. The ad is served and then the viewability pixels start counting—but the buy and sell side pixels load at different times, causing discrepancies aplenty. Doesn’t that…
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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.…
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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…
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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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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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With Oracle’s recent purchase of Moat, one of the more widely-integrated third-party measurement companies out there, the term "Intersection Observer" has been thrown around a lot lately. To some, the Intersection Observer has been put forward as the possible driver of the next generation of viewability measurement, and as the…
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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…
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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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