For a lot of publishers right now, the only thing better than one header bidding partner is nine or 10 header partners. If they’re getting demand, and if there’s some differentiation between demand sources, there’s no reason to stop plugging in header partners, right?
Well, there are a few reasons. One of the biggies is that each integration requires work, and every time you want to onboard another partner in the header, you’ll have to go to your dev team and ask for their help. It adds up, and for many publishers, the strain on internal resources is considerable, if not straight-up prohibitive. That’s why header wrappers are such a hot ticket right now. The promise of the wrapper is that you can onboard the one wrapper partner, which can in turn plug in any number of demand sources with no additional strain to your developers.
Not really surprising for ad tech, though—as vendors have stepped into the wrapper space, they’ve offered up different variations on the same basic product, there’s not a standard wrapper approach per se, and publishers may find they aren’t able to get all the functions they want or need from just the wrapper alone.
These are some of the issues Emry DowningHall, Chegg VP of Advertising, gets into in this video. Do you have the internal resources to handle all your header integrations, or is a third-party solution wiser? Is an open source solution right for your business, or no? Can the wrapper provide analytics, and what do you do if it can’t? A wrapper can free up a publisher’s internal resources to do other work, but it might not be a panacea, at least not for every publisher business. We’ll be addressing header wrapper issues in a breakout session at the upcoming Publisher Forum in August. For now, check out Emry’s video and the other videos in this interview series AdMonsters produced with Index Exchange at the last PubForum.