In Jounce Media’s annual report, ‘The State of the Open Internet,’ three influential market forces shed light on the obstacles that media companies and advertising technology platforms face: demand concentration, bidstream bloat, and bidstream blindspots.

How can we level the playing field between the dominant walled gardens and the rest of the open internet? Of course, achieving this equilibrium is no simple task. Open Internet media companies and their ad tech counterparts are caught between the short-term financial obligation to contribute to bidstream bloat and the long-term financial goal of transitioning to two-sided marketplaces that unlock privileged data access. 

Buy Side Chronicles and the Rise of the New Walled Garden

Walled gardens are experiencing a notable surge in their influence and evolving models.

“Over time, marketers pour more and more money into the walled gardens, which makes them critical business partners to bring demand to the open internet,” Chris Kane explained. “They have allocated almost 100% of their net new digital spend each year to walled gardens like YouTube, Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Tik Tok to name a few. By controlling huge pools of demand, these companies are extremely well positioned to build DSP-like offsite advertising businesses.”

In the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed the emergence of at least 12 new commerce businesses adopting the walled garden model for their advertising products. Brands like Doordash, Etsy, Instacart, Uber, and Walgreens have all ventured into this sub-sector. We all know about Netflix’s newly launched walled garden and CVS, as well as other legacy open internet media businesses are now operating as sub-scale walled gardens.

In the future, it’s looking like most media companies will succeed in the open internet while utilizing third-party advertising platforms that produce billions of dollars of demand. Obviously,the best-fit platforms for aggregating demand are the walled gardens.

Over half of the $85B deployed by advertisers to the open internet in 2023 is expected to flow through walled garden buying systems. Walled gardens aren’t sellers on the open internet; they have become the largest buyers, wielding considerable influence.

Boo to Bidstream Bloats

Publishers’ success in acquiring programmatic demand is driven by their ability to secure a significant share of the bidstream, a phenomenon called “volume bias.” This bias arises when DSPs allocate investments based on the number of auctions conducted. Now, here’s where the bloat comes in, and yes, I am referring to what your stomach looks and feels like after three slices of pizza.

Aside from the volume bias and non-exclusive monetization partnerships, publishers contribute to auction duplication in two ways:

Multi-Integrations: Publishers initiate auctions through multiple integration points with various exchanges. They may simultaneously employ Prebid, Amazon Publisher Services, and Google Open Bidding. Consequently, DSPs receive three bid requests from each ad exchange for every available impression.

Rebroadcasting: This primarily applies to mobile and CTV publishers and involves multiplying bid requests through reselling. A publisher collaborates with an ad network, enabling these networks to source DSP demand by reselling ad exchanges. Ultimately, the DSP gets five or more resold bid requests from each ad network for each impression.

Along with the bidstreams bellies getting too bloated, publishers reap all the benefits of ballooning auction volume. Still, the ad tech companies doing all the work are paying for it and only generating revenue when the impression is filled at the end of the process.

Eliminating Bidstream Blindspots and Keys to Future Successes 

Jounce Media’s State of the Internet report reveals that buyers now have greater access to information about ad placement, thanks to industry initiatives focused on transparency within the supply chain, such as ads.txt and sellers.json. 

While buyers can now verify the authenticity of available inventory, review complete payment histories, and identify the highest value of ad placements, their ability to make bidding decisions based on audience and content continues to go downhill thanks to privacy regulations, platform policies, and media buying decisions. 

“CTV content blindspots area business choice. Media companies are looking to maintain control of advertising budgets,” Kane explained. “Although it would be desirable for publishers to collaborate and establish standards while forging deep partnerships with one or possibly two exchanges, the likelihood of this occurring is quite low.”

Bidstream filtering is also getting worse. Publishers are increasingly conscious of traffic shaping and consequently required to submit duplicate requests. Kane strongly emphasizes the need for change to originate from the buy side, urging buyer behavior to evolve and DSPs to take assertive actions before it becomes too late.

You can explore the full report here to delve deeper into these findings.  

The post What Will the Ad-Supported Open Internet Look Like in 2023 and Beyond? appeared first on AdMonsters.

But, the status quo for SSP protocol is no longer working. According to a new survey from Emodo, marketers crave more innovation and keener targeting and measurement skills from SSPs. 

SSPs are beginning to reassess their practices, especially after Yahoo shut down its SSP and other major ones filed for bankruptcy. There is clear evidence that SSPs need to evolve with the times, but how do they make it happen? 

“We’ve been hearing a lot of commentary about the commoditization of supply and demand and how brands and agencies have been struggling to understand the value SSPs truly add to the supply chain,” said Damian McKenna, Chief Operating Officer at Emodo. “This survey underscores the key focus areas for SSPs to remain competitive and deliver value for buyers and sellers. While we are focused on all of the above, Emodo is doubling down on innovations around optimization, especially as it relates to targeting, innovative formats, and unique inventory.”

Innovation Over Efficiency

Andrew Byrd : Emodo recently released a study stating that 56% of marketers are demanding SSP Innovation and 53% want enhanced targeting and measurement. Why did you decide to create this study? Were the results what you expected? Did anything surprise you?

Damian McKenna: There’s a fever pitch surrounding Supply Path Optimization (SPO) to the point where it’s almost talked about too much. We agree that eliminating redundancies and focusing on quality supply is incredibly important, but marketers want more than improving efficiency and removing redundancy. Most marketers we hear from want to deliver something unique, something impactful, and something that speaks to the consumers we are trying to reach, and that’s why we did a study.

Interestingly, this study shows that marketers defined SPO as less critical to them than innovation and enhanced targeting and measurement. If you read the trades and generally talk to people at conferences, SPO always comes up. But innovation, especially related to new formats and targeting, is a place where smaller, more nimble companies like Emodo can stand out as an SSP. Efficiency is essential, but it is half as crucial as innovation to reach your audience. 

AB: I’m curious about the shift to focusing more on innovation and not efficiency, especially when it relates to how generally SSPs are doing within the industry. Evidence shows that a lot of SSPs are struggling right now and are starting to reassess their business practices. What are the issues and is the industry starting to remedy them? 

DM: It’s the battle between scaling innovation and the rapidly expanding space. If you look at the market data over the past 15 years, the expansion of the programmatic marketplace was incredible. It’s hard even to put it on a chart and quantify it. So much of the innovation in the first decade of programmatic was simply curation. The value of SSPs was the curation and connecting of the content to multiple formats.

As the market continued to expand, innovation became lost amid rapid expansion. If you think about the share of spend, publishers over the last few years probably felt a little lost and not heard. At the same time, there were so many intermediaries in the middle. Publishers wanted to find new and unique monetization opportunities, and they wanted that percentage of brands and DSPS. The SSPs and these intermediaries in the middle were trying to catch up with other mediums, over-indexed on scale and availability, and under-indexed on innovation.

Additionally, there are changes in how people listen to programmatic opportunities. There’s a focus on supply path optimization, which forces these SSPs to reevaluate how they operate, the partners they keep, and how they add value and differentiate. At  Emodo, we’re in a unique position because we have a two-sided marketplace. Our managed service team deals directly with large holding companies and marketers. We also have an SSP, and we can offer publishers unique demand and opportunity and not be lost as just a part of the value chain. We can see the whole thing, and our managed service team has helped us understand the needs of that marketer and the agency’s needs.

Cutting Out the Middleman 

AB: You mentioned cutting out intermediaries in the supply chain and that is a sentiment I’ve heard from publishers and advertisers. Do you think cutting out the intermediaries will be hard for SSPs in the future? Will it hurt or help them?

DM: The shift in header bidding happened because publishers are running from current auction practices. They are vying for the same impressions at the same time as ad tech vendors or intermediaries, and on the buy side, ad tech is trying to reduce the number of auctions they have to sit through because the cost is too high. That puts pressure on pure-play intermediaries. Analysts say they will pressure intermediaries, but that’s a natural evolution. 

In some cases, advertisers are unknowingly bidding against themselves and subsequently driving up the prices. They pay because of too many intermediaries, and that needs to change. Continued pressure will be on any intermediary that doesn’t provide incremental added value or efficiency by having their stake on both sides or a differentiated solution.

The Automation of the Supply Chain

AB: SSPs automated the process where an ad publisher would manually assign specific ads to spaces through negotiations with human media buyers and sales teams. Do you think some of the kinks have developed because the process has become automated? 

DM: When I started in the industry in the 90s, digital media promised that technology would make buying and advertising more efficient. It’s more efficient than it was, but we’ve also had to look at programmatic buying and recognize some severe complexities now. There are inefficiencies that innovation has brought, and that’s natural in some ways. 

For example, publishers are doing publisher-initiated auctions that move through fewer ad tech pipes as intermediaries disappear. So publishers are trying to get the maximum opportunities to bid further on their inventory. So there’s a tension between efficiency and effectiveness on the buy side. 

Publishers need to maximize the opportunity and quality they can bring to their users. Simply put, there’s a need for increased simplicity and control in the buying and selling process. Sometimes we get too complex for our own good.

Stand Out From the Crowd

AB: What final advice would you give SSPs to improve the results of the service? 

DM: When we launched the survey, we expected SPO to be at the top of the list of concerns for marketers. The results showed that SPO is half as important as innovation and value. I advise you always to listen and build for your customer’s needs. You also have to understand what the buyers want and what publishers need.  

Our job is to be the intermediary, the curator, and also to provide unique, differentiated value, and we have to deliver value to both sides. It’s incumbent upon us to do that. We have to lean into innovation and differentiation. If we can’t confidently clarify where we’re innovating, bring value to both sides, and differentiate ourselves, then we must look hard at what we’re doing.

The post Emodo SSP Survey Says Marketers Crave Innovation appeared first on AdMonsters.

But from the outside, looking in, it seems she was always destined to end up right where she is today.

Ironically, her first job was interning at her uncle’s advertising business, learning the ropes, which made becoming a CBO what she calls “a natural fit.” During our discussion, she reminisced about messing around with nonexistent desktop publishing applications like PageMaker and Quark when she was a young girl.

In college, Bracegirdle experimented with various mass media majors. She eventually married, moved abroad, and changed her major to teaching, receiving a degree in Social Sciences. While this may seem far-fetched from where she is in her career today, Mediavine prides itself on teaching its publisher customers how to achieve their business goals, earn more from every session and page view, and keep their audiences engaged.

Along her career journey, influential female bosses believed in her and encouraged her in moments of self-doubt. Amber takes great pride in her empathetic leadership approach, which she greatly attributes to those strong female leaders who molded her into an executive who uplifts her employees.

Early Days

Yakira Young: After college, what was your career experience like?

Amber Bracegirdle: Shortly after college, I worked in customer service at Travelocity, which was a great lesson for how we wanted to do customer service at Mediavine. 

I got into fraud analysis and loved it. Many people would ask if fraud at Travelocity was just people getting free vacations when it was actually fighting child trafficking, drug trafficking, and human trafficking in general. It was such a fascinating, analytical job, and I adored it, and it allowed me to see the world. I got to work at our UK offices, German offices, and the San Antonio office. But the most impactful thing about working at Travelocity was my boss.

Becoming an Empathetic Leader

YY: How did this boss impact you? Was she also a woman?

AB: Her name is Sheila Korte, and she taught me how to be an empathetic leader and turn mistakes into learning opportunities. She taught me that the people who don’t make mistakes are those who don’t make any moves. Everything she taught me about management along the way boiled down to first, we must always be kind.

She is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and every day I continue to try and make her proud with how I manage my people and how we work with our customers. I grew tremendously under her leadership. Whenever I felt unsure of myself, she pushed me forward and said, “you can do this.” And that’s how I manage my people, and it’s how we talk to our customers.

Halfway through my time at Travelocity, we changed CEOs, and our CEO became a woman named Michelle Peluso. Today, she’s in the C-suite at CVS, and Michelle is a genius who, with friends, created a website called Site59 that would make deals with hotels in New York City for the inventory they hadn’t sold. She made contracts with hotels so she could sell their unsold daily inventory for less than the walk-in rate.

When Travelocity purchased Site59, Michelle was made CEO of Travelocity simultaneously. Despite dealing with thousands of employees, she was approachable and always kind. I could email her, and I’d have a response in 30 minutes full of ideas and action items for how to solve the problem at hand. That’s the kind of leader you want to be. You want to ensure you’re lifting up the people who work for you because all ships rise when you do that.

Managing Work-life Balance

YY: What is your experience managing work-life balance as a C-suite executive and mother of two? How do you prioritize your time and responsibilities, and what strategies have you found most effective for maintaining a healthy balance between work and family life?

AB: My work-life balance has gotten better over the years. We started Food Fanatic, the site I founded with Eric Hochberger, Stephen Marsi, and Matt Richenthal when I was seven months pregnant with my first son, Evan when I came to work for them full-time. Mediavine hiring me at seven months pregnant says a lot about the three of them and their willingness to buck trends. 

I was pregnant with Will when the ad management part started to take off. My work-life balance was rough for the first few months of my kids’ lives; outside of bathing and eating, I worked all day with childcare in hand. But now that we’ve got such great people and so many on the team, I’m better able to balance things. I can take a vacation and know I have nothing to worry about back at “the office” – otherwise known as Slack. My family just returned from a week-long vacation in Florida, and I didn’t stress once about the lack of internet access. I can also volunteer at my kids’ school, which I just did this morning. I have much more time for things like that. 

Over the summer, I took Fridays off completely. It’s important to claim your time. Work-life balance comes down to boundaries, and you’re the person that sets them. And it took me a long time to realize that. 

It’s hard when it’s exciting, and it’s your startup. My advice to anyone considering starting a company is to be intentional about setting boundaries for your personal life because you don’t think about it when you’re excited about what you’re doing.

It can lead you to burnout and lead to your family not feeling like they’re as important as the company. I had to step back on that because my kids thought work was more important than they were at one point, and I had to fix it. So that’s why I show up for things like field day or their field trips. They each have one a year, and I show up for those because they must know how important they are to me.

YY: The Pandemic has helped shift the work-life balance amongst many people and helped people realize that family is more important than work.

AB: I agree. At Mediavine, it got harder because we’ve always been remote. So for us, it was business as usual, and then everyone in the world was online, so our application volume went through the roof because we had sites that were only three months old suddenly reaching out to join because their traffic was at our threshold. We realized we were spending more time on applications that would never be approved than on the customers needing our help moving the needle on their own businesses. The quickest way to shift that focus back to the people that need us most was to raise our threshold. It was a hard decision, but ultimately one that served the people that already trust us with their livelihood the best.

I had to homeschool my kids on top of everything for longer than most people because I have a kiddo with a heart condition. So I homeschooled for two-and-a-half years and juggled everything at Mediavine. The marketing and communications team, led by Jenny Guy, started putting out roughly four times as much content, and we had, I think, four people on the team at that time. Growing that team has been a huge priority because moving everything online became a huge lift. We were used to meeting our customers at events and conferences worldwide, and suddenly that went away.

It brought home some hard truths for many of us at Mediavine about making those boundaries around work and family because suddenly, there was more work than we knew what to do with, and we couldn’t hire fast enough. It made us realize that we had to draw those boundaries, or it would never be a balance.

Mediavine’s Launch Into Ad Management

YY: Can you tell me more about how Mediavine was created by accident? I’m curious to know how a chance occurrence led to the development of your company and what steps you took to turn that accident into a successful business venture.

AB: I jokingly say accident because this all started with a single friend asking for our help with the new tech Eric had built for our four sites. Then more friends asked, and suddenly we had more friends than we knew what to do with! Once we decided that we were going to open the floodgates and work with people we didn’t know personally, we made some very intentional decisions. 

Stephen Marsi, Matt Richenthal, and Eric Hochberger founded Mediavine as an SEO shop for hire. Then he moved into making their content websites, which led them to need advertising to support those websites and the company. Creating the ad tech was purposeful because we needed it for our own four sites. So that was very purposeful, and my coming to work for them was very intentional. 

We were working on creating a food site because their ad company had told them they needed a lifestyle site. In working with me, I think I was really their first direct and continuous experience with content creators that also had their own web presence, social media, and personal websites. We hired food bloggers to create content for the site we were building together, Food Fanatic, and I introduced Eric to many food bloggers as part of that. 

I was simply consulting until I decided I wanted to leave my fraud analysis work (and work travel) behind to focus on my first baby. I asked the guys if they would consider hiring me full-time, and I’m very grateful they did. As I said before, I came on full-time when I was seven months pregnant. The guys never even questioned that as part of our conversation, something that I think is very special and unique, especially in the tech field. After I came on full-time, our ad company fell apart, and our ad income sort of cut in half overnight. And here we were, supporting four families and an army of contributors.

Great ideas are born out of desperation. Eric was researching programmatic advertising then and thought he could build something beneficial to recoup some of the ad dollars we didn’t see from our ad management company. He started making the first version of our script wrapper, but it was only for our four websites. 

He built the script wrapper focusing on SEO since that’s how we have always focused on growing traffic. Our most prominent site was founded on SEO. If you Google celebrity gossip, one of our sites is the one that owns that top search result and has for years. And it’s one of the main ways that the site got traffic. 

He started out thinking his wrapper would provide a backfill for our main ad company’s inventory, but we quickly started earning more with his header bidding auctions than we were making with them. We decided to sever ties with them and continue to do our own thing. And luckily, The Hollywood Gossip was big enough for us to have seats at the exchanges. In an offhand conversation, I told my best friend, also a food blogger, what we were doing, and she said, well, you know, my ad company sucks too. “Could you guys help me?” That question led to us recently surpassing over 10,000 active sites using Mediavine’s ad management. 

Bloggers always talk to each other, and they always talk in Facebook groups. So, five other people that wrote for Food Fanatic said, “I’d really like you to help me too.” And so, we launched six websites in June 2015. Initially, the idea was that this would be a bonus for people who write for Food Fanatic because we couldn’t pay them a ton for their content but making a little mini ad network made us stronger together. 

We looked at all our experience with different ad companies and said, what’s the 180 of that? And that drove many of our purposeful decisions after we accidentally started an ad company. 

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging at Mediavine

YY: What specific diversity and inclusion initiatives is your company implementing, and how does your role as Chief Brand Officer contribute to these efforts?

AB: From our first efforts at influencer marketing and programmatic advertising, one of the primary directives that we decided on was to make sure that we put diverse voices in front of brands whenever we were doing an influencer campaign. We also work hard to make sure that everyone in a campaign is making an equitable amount of money for their rate of engagement, including increasing their rate when it makes sense for industry trends within the budget. 

In the last few years, SSPS and DSPs came to us looking for the ability to take earmarked budgets and apply them to Black-owned, women-owned, or LGBTQIA+- owned publishers. We moved very quickly to ensure our publishers could self-identify in their dashboards if they wanted to. It provided us with key values we can pass in the ad string and grab those budgets for the publishers that can benefit from them. A huge percentage of those budgets are run through Mediavine pipes, and that’s incredibly important to us. 

You will see us talk about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEI&B) a lot more soon under the banner of our corporate responsibility arm, which we call Shine. Shine was launched in 2021, but started as an idea from a travel publisher in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. From a publisher and an ad partner perspective, we have some new initiatives you will hear about shortly. On the People Operations side of our company, we have always focused on making inclusive and diverse hires. Still, it’s been an especially large focus for our Chief People and Culture Officer, Yolanda Evans, to ensure that we are hiring in a way that provides equity to diverse communities. We post our jobs in places where someone might not normally expect us to.

We also have an employee resource group called PRISM, which our People Operations team also runs. PRISM is currently working on bringing in speakers for Women’s History Month. We had several speakers and an employee-led panel about the Black experience in the tech industry and at Mediavine in general, with even a little bit of constructive criticism, which was awesome because there’s always stuff we can do better. So are we behind some diversity efforts? The answer is a resounding yes. 

The post Leading With Empathy, Women’s History Month Q&A With Mediavine Co-founder Amber Bracegirdle appeared first on AdMonsters.

For example, in the digital advertising landscape, programmatic advertising has revolutionized how advertisements are bought and sold, using technology to automate the process and deliver targeted, data-driven campaigns. This has only been further compounded by the emergence of ‘Header Bidding,’ which offers a more streamlined and efficient way for publishers to monetize their inventory and for advertisers to reach their desired audience. 

A recent study showed that header bidding led to a 23% increase in fill rate and a 20% increase in average CPM. With these benefits and more, it’s no wonder why header bidding has become a popular and essential tool for publishers looking to maximize their monetization potential.

What Is Header Bidding and How Does It Work?

Header bidding, or pre-bid or advanced bidding, is a programmatic advertising technology. It is a real-time programmatic auction where multiple demand partners bid on a single impression. 

Header bidding allows publishers to offer their ad inventory to multiple SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms), ad networks, and ad exchanges to bid before sending the bid call to the ad server. This results in a more competitive and transparent bidding process, as demand sources compete against each other for the same inventory in real-time.

Behind the Scenes:

Header bidding works by incorporating a JavaScript code snippet into the header of the publisher’s website. So, when a user visits a page, this JS code sends out an ad call to all configured demand partners to bid on the available ad units. While the header auction happens, Google Publisher Tag is paused. Once the bids are received, they are sent to the ad server for the second auction round. Based on the configuration set by the publisher, the ad server filters out the winning bid and serves the creative on the user’s page. 

What’s interesting to note here is that all these auctions happen while the page loads on the user’s browser. And as soon as the page loads, the aim is to display the ads at the required places. 

Benefits of Header Bidding

Before header bidding, publishers and advertisers relied on the ‘Waterfall or Daisy-Chaining’ method to buy and sell media. In waterfall, a series of demand partners sent ad requests, each given a priority based on their past performance and the estimated value of the ad inventory. So, if a demand partner sitting at level 1 cannot fill the ad request, the bidding call will go to the next bidding partner sitting at level 2. The bid request will keep on moving down until it is sold off. 

As the bid request trickles down the hierarchy, it often results in a slow and inefficient process, with many ad impressions going unsold. Also, as the partners are arranged based on their past performances, it might happen that a bidder who is willing to bid more but is sitting at level 2 or 3 might never get a chance to bid. The method lacks transparency and limits the ability of publishers to earn maximum revenue.

Header bidding evolved as a replacement for the waterfall method and brought great relief to the users as it allowed:

1. Increased competition: Header bidding allows multiple demand sources to bid on the same inventory simultaneously, leading to increased competition and higher CPMs for publishers.
2. Improved transparency: It provides greater visibility into the bidding process, allowing publishers to understand the value of their inventory better and make informed decisions. 
3. Faster load times: Header bidding enables publishers to load bids from multiple demand sources in parallel, reducing latency and increasing the number of impressions served. The bidding happens during a fixed timeframe. 
4. Flexibility: It allows publishers to make real-time adjustments to bidding strategies, enabling them to optimize for specific inventory and respond quickly to changes in market conditions.
5. Better targeting: Header bidding provides more advanced targeting capabilities as publishers can share relevant data with the demand sources in real-time. This, in turn, allows advertisers to reach specific audience segments and helps publishers increase revenue by providing more personalized ad experiences to the users.

How to Set up Header Bidding?

Setting up header bidding can be complex, but it’s worth the effort. The first step involves the integration of a header bidding wrapper, a piece of JavaScript code that is placed in the header of a publisher’s website. The wrapper communicates with demand sources, allowing them to bid on inventory in real-time. Once the container is in place, publishers can integrate demand partners, such as ad exchanges, SSPs, and ad networks. They will also need to configure the settings to meet their specific needs.

Owing to the technical complexity of the setup, it’s always advisable to look out for a header bidding provider. A good header bidding provider will handle the setup, bring in good demand sources, and offer complete transparency. 

Wrapping up

The benefits of header bidding are numerous, and for publishers looking to maximize their revenue, it is an essential tool in their arsenal. By partnering with a trusted header bidding provider, publishers can access the latest technology, expert support, and valuable insights to help them achieve their revenue goals. 

With the right partner, the benefits of header bidding are endless, and publishers can rest assured that they are making the most of their ad inventory and reaching their target audience with the most effective and relevant advertising. 

The post How Can Publishers Boost Their Ad Revenue with Header Bidding? appeared first on AdMonsters.

As app developers juggle an ever-increasing list of considerations — such as the user experience, revenue goals, multiple types of demand sources, and more — the importance of reliable and flexible mediation tech is more important than ever.  

 Originally, ad mediation emerged to help publishers optimize their revenue more effectively, but the first generation of mediation often left monetization teams with more questions than answers.

As the tech has advanced and publisher needs have become more complex, let’s revisit mediation: how it works, why it’s important, and what publishers should look for. Let’s dive in. 

How Mediation Works 

At its core, ad mediation seeks to optimize ad revenue. At its best, mediation finds the best result for all sides of the advertising ecosystem: the publisher, the advertiser, and the end user. It does this by assessing in real-time which ad opportunity among a set of demand sources will yield the best result at that moment for that user. This drives higher eCPMs for the publisher, more relevant and enjoyable ads for the user, and better campaign performance for the advertiser. 

Open and unbiased auctions put the publisher in the driver’s seat, providing them with the controls and transparency required to optimize across waterfalls, ad lines, and various demand sources

This optimization is managed by an auction process, which can vary from one mediation platform to another. Among these, open and unbiased auctions put the publisher in the driver’s seat, providing them with the controls and transparency required to optimize across waterfalls, ad lines, and various demand sources.  

Further optimization is achieved when the ad mediation platform provides robust tools with options for creating user cohorts, placement settings, and demand integrations.

These mechanisms empower monetization teams to choose the users who will view different types of ads, when, and from which ad partners. In so doing, apps can optimize average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) while minimizing churn or cannibalization.  

Why Mediation Is Important 

Ad mediation can deliver optimal ad revenue for app publishers while respecting all other publisher KPIs and commitments. Moreover, it can do this while saving monetization teams countless hours each week, allowing them to focus on more meaningful projects. 

Mediation offers a more dynamic approach to optimization for publishers still reliant on ad monetization waterfalls.

Depending on the mediation solution chosen —, this can work across all demand source types, creating a more competitive, and thus more lucrative, revenue ecosystem for the app. As more publishers begin to spin up their ad sales teams, the ability for demand diversity in ad mediation is more important than ever.

When mediation systems are transparent, flexible, and neutral, app publishers can truly maximize ad revenue. 

For publishers concerned about cannibalizing their users — particularly those with the highest lifetime value (LTV) — the user segmentation options within mediation tools can provide a powerful and much-needed degree of control. By dynamically cohorting users based on parameters set at the mediation layer, monetization teams can automatically optimize advertising ARPDAU without exposing high-value users to competitors’ ads. 

App publishers can maximize ad revenue when mediation systems are transparent, flexible, and neutral.

What Publishers Need 

Ad mediation is best when it empowers the app publisher and values the user experience at its core. To this end, publishers must seek several key elements from their mediation tech solution, whether they build it themselves, rely on a third-party managed solution, or leverage a customizable mediation-as-a-service solution (like InMobi’s Meson). 

First, publishers need absolute transparency in the mediation process. No auction dynamics should be obfuscated, and pricing must be upfront and clear. This allows the monetization team to make informed decisions on monetization settings and fairly assess business costs with each partner.

Moreover, without transparency, publishers cannot verify that the mediation tech is working in the publishers best interest. Thus, it’s no surprise that in a recent Advertising Perceptions study, the lack of transparency offered by many mediation companies was a top concern for 22% of publishers. 

Second, publishers need unmitigated control. Every app is unique, and maximizing monetization for many user types requires granular control mechanisms.

Indeed, 76% of publishers report that they would rather pay for greater control over their mediation than rely on a free tool with limited options. In this pursuit, publishers should ensure that their mediation solution allows for user segmentation based on user behavior, context, demographics, and other custom parameters. 

Third, publishers need flexibility. Demand sources and preferences vary by app, and mediation solutions must be able to accommodate them. To this end, publishers should verify that their mediation tech allows them to choose which demand partners and third-party vendors they work with.

While some vendors may have native integrations with the mediation tech, it’s equally important that the publisher create their own adapters and connect any other demand source of their choice. 

What’s Next in Mediation 

To attain the control, flexibility, and transparency needed for ad monetization, many publishers are revisiting their approach to mediation. Indeed, during a recent webinar on the future of monetization, predictions emphasized the importance of ad relevance, publisher control, and building trust with ad tech vendors.    

This aligns with a recent Advertiser Perceptions study of over 100 top mobile publishers, wherein a majority of publishers (55%) expressed concern about the lack of control provided by their current mediation solution, and half (50%) were frustrated by an overall lack of transparency. 

 Given the complexity of building mediation from scratch and the need for transparency and control, we expect to see the rise of mediation-as-a-service solutions like Meson. Indeed, among publishers without their own mediation platform, 73% would prefer to manage their mediation in-house, provided an outside tech company handled the infrastructure.  

No matter how monetization teams  integrate ad meditation into their tech stack, one thing is sure: publishers can make growth happen in 2023 if they allow transparency, flexibility, and control to empower them.

The post What App Publishers Need to Know About Mediation appeared first on AdMonsters.

A recent study found that the vast majority (95%) of ad buyers are currently implementing or planning to implement SPO technology, with 52% of ad buyers saying half or more of their advertising budget is transacted programmatically.

So, what is SPO and how should advertisers and agencies be thinking about it?

Defining Supply Path Optimization

Supply Path Optimization is the strategy through which buyers look to remove redundant intermediaries and streamline their access to supply. There are many reasons why agencies and advertisers are taking a close look at supply paths, but the main three would be: 1) to reduce infrastructure costs, 2) to increase performance, and 3) to maintain transparency for inventory quality.

SPO in mobile has an additional level of complexity compared to the web because ads on mobile devices are facilitated mostly through software development kits (SDKs) – and understanding the type of SDK connection can have meaningful implications to that path optimization.

Understanding the Key Players in SPO

The main players to consider for SPO analysis are the sellers, the exchanges, and the demand-side platforms (DSPs).

Starting with the seller, or app publisher in mobile, each app needs to evaluate and prioritize many sources of demand to optimize its yield. To do this, they work to integrate SDKs that represent the exchanges. Understanding the type of SDK connection each exchange has with the app publisher can have major implications for how you, as a buyer, can think about prioritizing these partners. To simplify this, there are three types of SDK partners:

Mediation SDK – The platform that acts as the central ad server and ultimate decision-maker on what ad will be shown to the end-user. Those mediation SDKs that enable unified auctions allow buyers to participate in the first and final auction. As a buyer looking to optimize your access, connecting to supply through the mediation partner gives you the most direct and full access to that publisher. 

Advanced Bidder SDK – A demand source directly integrated with the app publisher and participating in the unified auction conducted by the mediator SDK. This type of buyer participates in the real-time auction with their bidder and uses their SDK to render. They rely on the mediator SDK to host the first and final auction for their access.  

Traditional Network SDK – Or waterfall-based network is an integrated partner set up in the mediation SDK with a series of priorities or price floors and does not participate in the unified auction. If the impression is unfilled at the top priority, the same network would be called again to run an auction for the second, third, fourth, and so on until it is filled.

These networks have no way of communicating their true price in the auction, and because of this setup, the waterfall creates a tremendous amount of duplicative bid requests. A DSP buying supply through this type of exchange is likely to see up to 10 times the number of bid requests for each unique impression opportunity compared to the mediated SDK partner. Since the mediator SDK conducts the first and final auction, the waterfall priority established with these networks is translated into a first look or exclusive access, duplicating and obfuscating the actual price and scale. 

Whether mediator, bidder, or traditional, these SDK partners are direct to the publisher and can be seen in sellers.json and app-ads.txt. However, behind these direct SDK partners also exist hidden intermediaries that are not integrated directly and resell the auction to other buyers.

These resellers are exchanges or networks that add another auction to the programmatic chain, include additional tech fees, and provide zero visibility into where that impression opportunity originated from. As a DSP, you can look to identify and limit your buying through reseller channels as an immediate way to reduce inefficiencies in your SPO strategy.

Creating Efficiencies in SPO

Developing an effective SPO strategy on mobile can be a challenging initiative for DSPs and buyers. Now that we’ve outlined the different types of SDK partners above, here are three key ways in which buying through mediated SDK partners directly helps advertisers with SPO:

Infrastructure efficiency: There could be an exponential number of requests for every opportunity to serve an impression. Let’s look at an example where a publisher is working with a mediation SDK like AppLovin’s MAX and five SDK networks. Three of those networks are advanced bidders participating in the unified auction, and the other two are traditional waterfall networks.

If a DSP is integrated with all of those supply partners, they will effectively be hit with one request from the AppLovin Exchange (ALX), three requests from each advanced bidder, and up to 10-20 times the number of requests for each waterfall network. That one impression opportunity has now turned into more than 24 requests to that DSP’s server. This does not include resold or indirect sources of supply, so this duplication stands to increase further, causing a major drag on infrastructure costs as servers are becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. You can minimize these server costs by eliminating connections with traditional network SDKs and reseller connections that inflate requests without providing an added benefit to access. 

Performance efficiency: We can break down performance efficiency by looking at competition and price. As you can imagine, with the above scenario and inflated server costs, you also run the risk of self-competition as you bid into each of these supply paths without knowing they all represent the same impression opportunity.

Direct access eliminates intermediary tech fees that reduce your buying power from a pricing standpoint. It is hard to understand fee transparency with direct access as traditional networks may not disclose their auction pricing. The cleanest way to assess competition and price is to focus on the unified auction that minimizes the risk of self-competition while providing more transparency in fees.  

Premium access and scale: Each supply-side platform (SSP), whether SDK direct or reseller, differs in access, data collection, and support for measurement and verification solutions. In addition to considering infrastructure and performance efficiencies, buyers must ensure they can adequately target and measure their campaigns across the supply. For this, they need to evaluate access and support for OMSDK, key fields like sellers.json and app-ads.txt, and what invalid traffic (IVT) solutions are in place. 

For DSPs and buyers looking to jumpstart their SPO optimization, prioritizing access through the mediator SDK is key. The Applovin Exchange is powered by the largest mediation SDK in mobile and can give this edge to buyers looking for the most direct and efficient way to reach publishers and the end consumer. When buying power increases and programmatic bloat is eliminated, publishers and advertisers both benefit as we grow the advertising market with efficiency and transparency.

The post What Is Supply Path Optimization (SPO) in Mobile? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Google’s incorporation of prebid is supposed to make ad ops easier by allowing publishers to manage their header bidding relationships through “yield groups.” This will enable publishers to identify some portion of their inventory for Open Bidders to target, and prebid bidders can now do the same.

Ad servers will no longer need to be filled with line items to heighten header bidding demand. Publishers and programmatic executives over at Bustle, AccuWeather, and Cafe Media are all currently testing out this new feature and seem to be in favor. 

This Google Ad Manager prebid link-up does help to eliminate some discrepancies.

“Currently, prebid rounds all the prices before submitting them to GAM, but in the new setup, GAM is reading the price from prebid before prebid has done any rounding,” said Patrick McCann, SVP of Research at CafeMedia and Chair Prebid.js. “You won’t see the rounding errors. You end up with a better auction outcome when people are bidding closely to each other thanks to the rounding effect in prebid.”

Will This Interrupt Pre Existing Header Bidding Set Ups?

It’s looking like it just might. Yesterday on LinkedIn, we saw ad tech vendors questioning CafeMedia’s CSO, Paul Bannister, after he posted about the “bridge to prebid.” 

“There is an existing setup with the orders and line items which publishers are efficiently running and is a proven model,” said Dikshant Joshi, Director of Publisher Development at AdPushup. “While this seems to be a promising tool introduced by Google, there is no proof the performance would be at par or better or less. Google mentions the setup of yield groups (an additional and different setup). Still, the experts in the industry would want to benchmark the performance of the header bidding yield groups before they make a complete move or stick with what they currently have.” 

Google also mentions an offering of a “NetworkMinimumBidToWin” metric that publishers can access via Data Transfer Files. Nonetheless, this is a paid feature with recurring costs, so you know what that means; many won’t be able to access it if they do not wish to pay. 

If “NetworkMinimumBidToWin” were a tool to help publishers and the ecosystem, we would have seen this as a part of standard metrics accessible through APIs and the query/reporting tool.

What Is the Future of Google Ad Manager and Header Bidding?

I have asked the Universe tons of times to provide me with a crystal ball, but until then, we will have to ride the wave to see how this pans out. When we spoke to Dikshant, he mentioned that ad tech is an ever-evolving space, and with this promising change, it will be interesting to see “the actual value it brings against the current set up.”

Although many publishers will have to change their ways of using GAM’s services, others can see the benefits.

“The timeline is easy to criticize since header bidding has had such widespread publisher adoption for so long, but this still feels like a step forward,” said Emry Downinghall, SVP Programmatic Revenue, and Strategy at Unwind Media. “Google publicly acknowledges that +90% of publishers use header bidding, and they are working to support that. If this provides mediation transparency and simplifies setup in GAM, publishers win.”

The post Will Google Ad Manager’s Link-up With Prebid Reinvent the Wheel? appeared first on AdMonsters.

The more personalized and relevant to the end-user, the more time spent on site — leading to better performance and even higher yield for publishers. With advances in AI-based content paired with header bidding mechanisms, publishers can offer their audiences the right ads at the right time in a highly engaging and seamless experience that will bring in greater returns.

To learn whether when the concept of right ads, right time, right person — whent it comes to video — is just pie in the sky thinking, I recently caught up with Johanna Bergqvist, VP of Strategic Partnerships, Ex.co, to recap some of what we talked about at Ops 2021 on our panel Experience Comes First: Why Capitalizing on User Experience Is Key to a Sustainable Video & Revenue Growth Strategy with Amanda Gomez, VP, Revenue Operations, New York Post and Ryan Simone, Senior Director, Global Audience Insights, Vice Media.

Lynne d Johnson: What are some actions publishers should take to ensure that video ad units on their site won’t compromise the user experience? Is there a risk for publishers who are pursuing viewability for their partners?

Johanna Bergqvist: There are definitely actions that publishers can take to make sure a video player will not compromise the user experience. Having an ultralight video player to speed up loading times is crucial as well as placement on the page but there are many more factors that impact UX beyond the player technology itself.

Today’s audiences want (and expect) to have a personalized experience when visiting a website. The person sitting to my left may have different interests than myself and depending on what we each see on the page, we will be more – or less – willing to stay on site, click around to other pages, and even subscribe to a newsletter.

At EX.CO, we are always thinking about the user experience and how we can best help publishers grow.

Viewability has always been incredibly important for advertisers and to maximize yield. However, in the last year, we’ve seen buyers become more strict with achieving 70% viewability across their campaigns and spend. For video, the best way to achieve this metric and unlock premium demand is to adopt an adhesion unit. However, there is some tension between UX and achieving ad viewability when it comes to video.

We've found that the best approach to maximizing ad viewability as part of your video strategy is to adopt an adhesion unit; however, these can sometimes be viewed as intrusive to the user and product.

We’ve found that the best approach to maximizing ad viewability as part of your video strategy is to adopt an adhesion unit; however, these can sometimes be viewed as intrusive to the user and product. At EX.CO, we have therefore developed a native and truly customizable top sticky unit that has proven to reduce negative interaction rates by 16% and drive RPMs up to 20% higher, on average. The product looks completely native to the publisher’s site and does not interfere with UX.

LdJ: What are some of the engagement drivers to reach the sweet spot of great video content, great user experience, and highly engaged users?

JB: It’s important to first take a step back and look at the entire user experience for your digital property. From there, you can identify the touchpoints that you have with your audience and determine the most efficient and seamless ways to push them down the funnel.

Interact with your audience, ask them questions, get to really know your website visitors. Then use that information to create an appropriate value exchange. According to a recent report by Accenture, 83% of respondents said they are willing to give away personal information in exchange for offers and content. Video is inherently engaging so leveraging it as a means to enhance audience engagement rather than looking at it as an Achilles’ heel is key.

LdJ: How can first-party and contextual data be better leveraged and optimized by publishers to create better user experiences?

JB: This is a great question because many publishers are sitting on first- or third-party data but are not sure how to necessarily put this data into action, or how to effectively capture it. The more you learn about your audience, the more you can personalize the user experience.

Introducing interactivity on a site can help publishers collect valuable data about their audience which they can then use to surface a relevant piece of content, and personalize what page that user lands on when they return to the site next time. Of course, all of this leads to more engagement and ultimately, more revenue.

LdJ: Are there any benefits to using contextual vs. behavioral targeting to ensure that the right ads are finding the right people at the right time?

JB: With the cookie disappearing, contextual and behavioral targeting are top of mind for both publishers and advertisers. There are pros and cons for each of these strategies.

Contextual targeting can be very effective for publishers where the vertical naturally lends itself to certain types of advertisers, however, this type of approach can sometimes limit reach for advertisers. It really depends on the vertical, and whether or not the advertiser is endemic or non-endemic.

Contextual becomes hard when you are trying to target a very specific audience because it will limit your reach.

Contextual becomes hard when you are trying to target a very specific audience because it will limit your reach. For example, if you are an expensive hotel brand, advertising on a high-end news site may not make sense contextually, however, that audience has a high net worth and therefore, money to spend so it’s actually the perfect fit.

This is where having first-party data can complement your targeting strategies immensely, and you can easily run an interactive poll or survey to collect even more data about your audience which will help inform future campaigns you may run.

This is also where behavioral targeting becomes more effective because you can look at a user’s general browser history. In both types of targeting, data becomes extremely important because you can cater the entire experience around each user. This not only translates into higher CPMs and inventory value but builds credibility and trust with your audience who will be more inclined to subscribe to your paywall or newsletter because they recognize the value of consuming more relevant content.

The post Experience Comes First: Why Capitalizing on User Experience Is Key to a Sustainable Video & Revenue Growth Strategy appeared first on AdMonsters.

We’ve had successive announcements from platforms like Apple and Google, ever-growing regulatory headwinds, and a rising tide of consumer backlash against centralized data & intelligence fuelled in part by the rise of blockchain and Web3.0. Given the scale and pace of today’s emergent challenges, you’d be forgiven for burying your head in the sand.

But as the old adage goes “with change comes opportunity”, and large media companies like Disney and NBC Universal are doing just the opposite, launching new, privacy-first, and decentralized audience and data solutions powered by data clean room technology. In fact, data clean rooms are quickly becoming our industry’s newest buzzword(s).

What Is a Data Clean Room?

A data clean room is a secure, protected environment that enables two or more parties to bring data together for joint analysis with privacy, security, and governance rules in place.

Data clean rooms are the future of data collaboration, but they’re not a new idea. Historically, clean rooms were used in a variety of use cases, but almost always involved data owners shipping their data to the clean room.

Today, it is secure, privacy and governance-protecting software which enables companies to do three things:

1. Join distributed datasets securely, without moving or exposing the underlying data
2. Provision appropriate data access and privacy/governance measures
3. Leverage the power of joint datasets to power end-to-end marketing applications including Measurement, Segmentation, Activation, Incrementality Experimentation, Overlap Analysis, Reach and Frequency Analytics & Management, Consumer Journey Analysis, Propensity Scoring, Machine Learning, & more

Why Do Data Clean Rooms Exist?

According to Gartner, 73% of marketers fear that privacy concerns will negatively affect their analytics and the organizations that promote data sharing are the ones that will outperform their peers on most business value metrics by 2023. With less data available to marketers and agencies “off the shelf”, data clean rooms offer a way for data owners (such as publishers and retailers) to provide privacy-first data offerings that strike the right balance of access, aggregation and advantage to their partners.

When evaluating why data clean rooms have emerged and are being readily adopted, three main themes emerge: privacy and control, unifying disparate data, and the constant desire for higher quality data.

1. Privacy and control

With third-party cookies on the way out and the industry embracing a privacy-first mindset, data will remain distributed under lock and key. This shift in the consumer data landscape has created uncertainty for marketers as tactics such as targeting and measurement are becoming increasingly more complex and difficult. While these changes create many challenges, they also open the door to new opportunities and ways for companies to reimagine their data strategy in preparation for the future.

Data clean rooms are the vehicle for media companies to securely share data with key advertising partners while maintaining full control over how, for how long, and where that data can be used. As privacy regulations continue to evolve, clean rooms are built to adapt to work within the framework of new privacy laws. Privacy-preserving techniques ensure that no source data is ever exposed in its raw form and no personally identifiable data is ever shared with anyone.

2. Unifying disparate data

No single view of the customer is possible without understanding media exposure, yet data lives in multiple silos, both within a single organization and across potential partners who have similar interests. Modern marketing is interconnected. But it’s not realistic to believe that consumer data can ever be fully unified in one platform. Moving data is a huge security risk. It needs to be protected where it lives, when in transit, and wherever it lands. Co-mingling data in a single platform is an antiquated approach to collaboration and smart companies are not moving their data. Data clean rooms enable safe, secure analysis of data wherever it lives.

3. Accessing higher quality data

As restrictions become tighter and tighter, brands are starving for more high quality data to make better business decisions and make their marketing more effective. Media companies have that data but may have been hesitant to share it in the past due to privacy concerns and lack of control. A clean room enables both parties to have transparency and control over what and how data is accessed and used, while ensuring that consumer privacy and consent is protected in line with all external regulations and internal policies. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities and mutually beneficial business growth for media companies and their advertising partners alike.

What Are the Types of Data Clean Rooms?

There are three main types of data clean rooms: walled gardens, pure players, and multi-platform. Some larger companies have also taken on the challenge of developing their own in-house data clean rooms.

Walled Garden Clean Rooms

The most common media clean rooms today are those within the Walled Gardens, which are closed platforms that enable privacy-safe analysis within that single environment. Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), Facebook Advanced Analytics (FAA), and Google Ads Data Hub (ADH) are the three big players, but more walled gardens are mooted to have clean room offerings in the pipeline.

They support first-party data set enrichment with their own event-level data, but they can be inflexible and often difficult for the everyday business person to use; requiring a data scientist to extract the insights available. They are also isolated in their design, and not interoperable with one another.

Neutral Clean Room Vendors

Pure players are companies that are developing data clean room software solutions for media companies and brands to use. Some of the players in this space include Habu, InfoSum and LiveRamp. They offer more flexibility, allow for collaboration, offer a more unified view, and can be easier to use without a data scientist present. Some require third-party infrastructure for data ingestion and are limited in first-party data granularity. Some also have narrow downstream integration options.

Clean Rooms Within Other Platforms / Ecosystems

Some businesses that operate in adjacent industries like cloud data storage or have specific marketing applications have announced their own data clean room solutions. This group includes providers such as Snowflake, BlueConic, Epsilon, and Merkle.

The warehouse-level offerings from the likes of Snowflake offer architectural flexibility and governance controls but are technical solutions. Those embedded within marketing applications may offer ease of access, but typically have limited access to partner data outside of their ecosystem, as well as no connections into walled garden data clean rooms that matter to brands.

What Are the Common Use Cases for Data Clean Rooms?

Media companies and brands use data clean rooms to compete with walled gardens; the media company is not only a place to run ads, but it also can offer a deeper level of insight with rich data assets along with media.

Data clean rooms enable companies to privately and securely share disparate data, either among their own brands (consider a company like Hearst that has more than 360 brands with their own portfolio) or with partner companies, like CPG, automotive, entertainment, and retail.

Here are some examples of common use cases:

• Accelerate ROI across the Campaign Lifecycle: A media empire with a large portfolio of brands is offering a unique and differentiated offering to their advertising partners. Through privacy-safe clean rooms, they are empowering advertisers to connect their own first-party data to impression logs, audience segments and user attributes to deliver richer, more actionable consumer insights while being able to address and adapt to a changing data and privacy landscape.
• Reimagine the Customer Journey: A luxury automotive company is closing gaps in the customer journey by leveraging a data clean room to safely tap into signals from a large auto classifieds site to reflect the most recent behaviors, intent signals, and additional attributes that make up a complete consumer profile. By synthesizing comprehensive and accurate data about their consumer’s interests and behaviors, while not revealing personally identifiable information, the publisher enables its advertising partners to deliver better experiences for consumers and more effective campaign performance.
• Improve Media Measurement: A global beauty brand is driving increased efficiency and effectiveness across their entire portfolio of brands by leveraging the user- and impression-level campaign data that is uniquely available in the Amazon Marketing Cloud clean room and expanding the scope of campaign insights.

How Do You Get Started with Data Clean Rooms?

First movers will definitely have an advantage and media companies have a head start with using data clean rooms for collaboration because they already have some of the key advertising relationships in place. Other types of businesses, including CPGs, retailers, and agencies, might need to do a little legwork to identify and establish partnerships, but now is the time for companies to set the foundation for their future.

3 Ways for Companies to Get Started Today:

1. Identify the types of insights from shared data that would most benefit their business
2. Determine their potential data collaboration partners, either internally or externally
3. Explore and select the data clean room solution(s) that best fits their needs

Data clean rooms offer companies of all types to unlock collaboration opportunities not imaginable before. Media companies and retailers can offer unique and differentiated solutions to their advertising partners. CPG, automotive, and other companies can now access new and rich data signals from strategic partners to enrich consumer profiles and improve targeting and measurement.

With the rise of clean rooms and data collaboration, agencies will be relied on heavily for strategy and execution. As measurement and other tried and true marketing tactics become increasingly difficult and data continues to remain distributed, innovative brands are seizing the moment to revamp their strategy and explore and test new solutions that will not only evolve but thrive amidst these changes.

The post What Is a Data Clean Room? appeared first on AdMonsters.

From Chrome’s on-again, off-again cookie cutoff to Apple’s privacy updates to mass confusion surrounding developing solid first-party data and identity strategies to the rise of CTV, ad ops and ad tech people proved resilient. Many pubs and ad tech companies were able to rebound after the great ad spend slump, while others found that banding together was the best path forward.

Here in the Best of AdMonsters 2021, we feature 10 best practices, explainers, op-eds, and feature stories that kept our audience clicking and reading all year.

Privacy Sandbox & Universal IDs: Like Oil & Water?

Simon Harris, Director of DPG Media‘s Trade Desk took a deep dive into Google’s Privacy Sandbox: While the technology behind Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals is complex and constantly evolving, the premise (as we know it today) is simple: move targeting from a third-party cookie to a group (or cohort) of browsers. For much of 2020 these cohort-based approaches appeared to be the future of advertising in Google’s platforms, but in 2021 is that still the case? Read more…

What Are Publisher Cohorts?

David Reischer, Product Manager at Permutive, broke down the differences between publisher cohorts and Google’s FLoC: Losing cross-domain identifiers only strengthens publishers’ first-party data, as a viable option for advertisers to continue reaching consumers. And this first-party data can be made targetable as a cohort, rather than the current model which reaches people with sometimes ‘creepy’ one-to-one hyper-targeted marketing. But what exactly are Publisher Cohorts? Read more…

Facebook Ads & iOS 14: What Can You Do to Overcome Data Loss?

Elliot Gensemer, Senior Director, Account Services at Metric Theory explained how to avoid data loss in Facebook in spite of Apple’s ATT: How do we (marketers and publishers who leverage Facebook ads for content distribution) cope with the erosion of this data that’s been so central to performance management for the better part of the last decade? In the midst of this change, it will be necessary to focus on three core truths:

1. Channel data was never fully comprehensive
2. Savvy digital marketing decision-making does not change
3. Engaging creative and user experience still rule

Read more…

Newsweek Sees Huge CPM Lifts With LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution

AdMonsters Senior Editor, Lynne d Johnson, spoke with Dev Pragad, CEO, Newsweek, about how the publisher is building better relationships with their audience toward the goal of zero-party data exchange, as well as how they’re using LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS)  to drive CPMs. She also spoke with Scott Howe, CEO, LiveRamp, to learn more about ATS, how Newsweek drove a total eCPM as high as 224%, with an average lift of 52% across all web browsers using it, as well as how publishers should evaluate partners to survive and thrive in the cookieless future. Read more…

6 Steps To Make The Cookie Crumble Your Way

Michael Neveu, Director of Data, North America at Media.Monks looks at why the delayed third-party cookie deprecation isn’t a time for vacation: Few advertisers were truly ready for a cookieless web. Like a math test in school, where almost no one is really ready, moving the deprecation of cookies to mid-2023 has been met with an industry-wide sign of relief. Unfortunately, like with the postponed test, this has been followed but the same response we all often had in school; a belief that there is now extra time to waste. But this is a decade-level change. There isn’t actually extra time: now there is enough time. Read more…

Reach and Message Frequency in CTV and OTT Part 2—and What Ad Tech Can Do About It

Industry vet John Osborn assessed the rapid rise of CTV: Now, with the rapid migration of audiences to CTV platforms just as CTV paid and ad-supported channels have exploded on the scene in 2020, both viewers and advertisers are further challenged. Consumers can see the same ad over and over again—or not at all. Advertising buyers encounter powerlessness in managing frequency, creating a mix of overexposure to some and severe under-delivery of ads to large chunks of viewers. Here are some of the latest developments with reach and message frequency in CTV and OTT, as well as some insight into what ad tech could be doing to solve these challenges. Read more…

Crumbling Cookies and a Rotten Apple: A Rock and a Hard Place for Pubs

Tameka Kee, Head of Content Strategy, AdMonsters uncovers the real (regulatory) reasons behind Chrome staving off cutting third-party cookies another year: Google’s shift away from deprecating the 3P cookie is coming in the midst of regulatory battles around whether the company has undue influence over content monetization and distribution on multiple continents. While there’s definitely brand and media agency influence, might the timeline extension be part of a broader, long-term strategy to appease (or, potentially quash) some of the looming antitrust claims? Read more…

Third-party Tracking Got Advertisers Deep Into Debt; Now It’s Time to Repay

Myles Younger, Senior Director, Data Practice, MightyHive on why the time is now for the digital advertising ecosystem to clean up its act: Ad platforms spent the 2010’s rapidly innovating new ways to target, personalize, and measure advertising, largely based on third-party (3P) tracking. Money poured in from advertisers and agencies looking to shed the waste and uncertainty of traditional media and optimize campaigns right down to the user level.

However, during this exuberant period, advertisers, agencies, and tech platforms were unknowingly digging themselves into a debt that will take years to repay. And this debt can’t be settled by signing a check and swapping out for new tech.

Finding ways to manage the complexity of digital advertising without 3P tracking is putting urgent emphasis on people and process over tech, resetting the tech/agency/client relationship, and generally acting as a forcing function for the industry to clean up long-ignored problems. Read more…

Publishers Navigate the Weight of Heavy Ad Intervention (HAI)

Rob Beeler, Founder & CEO, Beeler.Tech and AdMonsters Advisory Board Chairman wrote about the impact of heavy ads on load times, as well as Google Chrome’s move to block these heavy ads: Conversations about the impact of heavy ads on load times and the end-user experience are nothing new to the digital publishing industry. Still, many in the business were caught off guard in Fall 2020 when Google Chrome launched Heavy Ad Intervention (HAI) to identify and block ads from the Chrome (versions 85+) browsers that they deemed “heavy.” Read more…

The Ad Ops Guide to Outsourcing

Melissa Chapman,Founder of Part Two Consulting and Collaborator at Beeler.Tech, in collaboration with Pilar Prassas, Global Head of Revenue Operations, Thomson Reuters, and Brittany Warren, Associate Director, Client Services – SMB, SiriusXM put together a comprehensive best practices guide to outsourcing for ad ops: The topic of outsourcing gets added to the agenda as either a breakout or workshop session and is always well attended. We cover all the bases, and as people share their experiences we also identify the potential benefits of outsourcing like enabling your staff to focus on higher-value activities, extending your team’s capabilities and support hours, supporting peaks in your business, benefitting from an outsourcing partners’ breadth of knowledge across tools and processes, and most importantly, lowering costs. Read the guide…

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