Header integrations have made publishers think anew about what role the traditional ad server will have, going forward–if there’ll even be a role for it to play at all. Whatever happens, it seems the dynamic of the ad marketplace is pushing for a substantial change. (Gavin Dunaway published an article last week that goes hard with a lot of questions about how to rethink the third-party ad server in a header-integrated world.)
Jordan Woods, Product Marketer at FullStory, had some additional thoughts about how header bidding will affect ad serving, in the video below. For publishers that have integrated multiple header partners without a wrapper, using an ad server can be “cumbersome” and heavily manual, he said. There’s a demand, as he’s suggested, for an optimization of the ad server as we know it. The ad server we know and… well, maybe not necessarily love, but at least know how to deal with, is in certain ways a relic of an earlier time, a less mature programmatic landscape, one where widespread header bidding wasn’t in the picture. While publishers can learn what they have to do work with an ad server and multiple header bidders, it’s not ideal, and an overhaul of the server might be preferable to just implementing a bunch of work-arounds.
Check out this and all the other videos from the What’s In Your Header? series AdMonsters made in conjunction with Index Exchange at the PubForum in Newport Beach, CA, earlier this year.