I can’t say I was surprised by findings from research firm L2 Marketing that Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is more likely to push Amazon Prime products on users seeking a variety of wares. There’s nothing scandalous in that—if I had an Alexa, I’d probably want it to look for Prime…
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Science fiction turns fact—the term artificial intelligence seems ubiquitous at the moment, whether it’s marketing technology firms boasting about superior processing power for campaign personalization or the coming singularity and robot apocalypse.Those of us in the trenches of the digital advertising world have become immune to the lure of buzzwords,…
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No, I didn't go to Cannes last week. Did I want to? Honestly, yachts and rosé have never been my thing (Cheap beer in a dirty rock club? Now you're talking my language), and the gladhanding awards bit makes me roll my eyes just thinking about it. Cannes used to…
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Better Ads Standards are an initiative for promoting “acceptable” ad experiences for users, while discouraging disruptive ads. The overall goal, as stated, has been to keep the spread of ad blocking tools at bay, by assuring the ads in the ecosystem are not so annoying they drive users to start…
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I came here to post photos from last week's Ops, but before that, I wanted to add one takeaway from the conference and all the conversations that led up to it. This year's Ops really hammered home something Gavin, Rob and I have been writing and talking about considerably over…
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There are few topics getting digital publishers chattering right now quite like header bidding. In a marketplace where many publishers long perceived buyers as having the upper hand, header bidding pits demand sources against each other, giving publishers a clearer idea of the true value of their inventory and how…
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“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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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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