I'm used to the eye rolls whenever I ask ad tech veterans their feelings on the potential of blockchain. I'll be the first to admit the term is sullied following an audacious hype cycle (even for ad tech!) and some scam-tastic initial coin offerings (ICOs). But the technology does seem…
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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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We’ve written a bit in 2016 about visual monetization, and how much the marketplace has matured through smarter technology and growing interest and attention from publishers. There are factors we can discern anecdotally, or by looking at the broader digital market and extrapolating. But it’s more valuable to have fresh…
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Match every impression with the channel likely to garner the most revenue – seems like the stuff of operational daydreams, but I’m not going to tell you to snap out of it. Such dynamic inventory allocation is real, oh-so-real, and it’s referred to as holistic yield management. I know that…
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First-party data is oil of the digital media landscape. While all kinds of publishers can claim it, the refinement process, not the drilling, makes the big bucks. Fortunately, technology has improved publishers’ refining abilities, not just in driving revenue from first-party data through on-site advertising as well as selling data to…
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It’s hard enough overseeing the ad operations tech stack and processes of one publisher; imagine juggling multiple publishers. But that’s exactly the mission companies like Outsourced Ad Ops (OAO) have taken on – and they have to do it well enough to be profitable and grow as a company. While…
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“We think standards should be dead; standards have held back the industry for years,” says ReactX CEO Chip Meyers. “Thank goodness the leaderboard and skyscraper are finally going to the grave – there’s no money in them; the brands don’t want to use them; and publishers are getting rid of…
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At its San Francisco summit earlier this year, AppNexus used a slide chock full of poker chips to announce the technology platform was going "all in" on mobile. A gambling reference was an interesting choice – in the hazy world of mobile monetization is programmatic (namely RTB-driven) trading a good…
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It’s a weird time for the cookie. Villainized by privacy advocates and the media, the itty bitty sticky bits of data seem to be more popular than ever when it comes to digital ad targeting and tracking.Publishers are increasingly meeting cookie-obsessed advertisers on the programmatic playing field via private exchanges,…
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