Let's take a look at where the digital media industry is with server-to-server integrations, programmatic guaranteed, and understanding who in the publisher org sells programmatic products, inspired and informed by what we heard at PubForum in Huntington Beach.
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Throughout 2017, the discussion on the AdMonsters site, at our events and on our listserv has spun off in countless directions. A person has to wonder: Was there ever a time when it seemed the industry focused on one or two issues at a time, or do we just have…
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The idea of "supply-path optimization" has entered the ad tech dialogue fairly recently--and it can be a confusing concept, because it refers to a slew of strategies to help DSPs win bids. It's also confusing because on its surface, it can sound like simply a "DSP thing:" Supply-path optimization is…
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Exchange Bidding in Dynamic Allocation is, in a nutshell, Google’s answer to header bidding. It’s a server-side solution where exchanges and SSPs can bid on publisher inventory along with Google’s AdX in a unified auction. Now, to understand why that matters, we’re going to have to walk back a few…
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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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Before we talk about server-to-server (or S2S, or server-side bidding, or whatever you want to call it), we have to talk about header bidding. Header bidding allows publishers to solicit bids on all their inventory from a select group of demand partners in a unified auction, just by putting the…
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In an end-of-week post, AdExchanger reported this afternoon that Google had abandoned its “last-look” practice in exchange bidding. The old Google last-look advantage allows AdX the chance to outbid whichever demand source would have otherwise won in a programmatic auction, prior to sending a request to Google’s ad server. Famously,…
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“I hate the term header bidding,” a friend and industry resource told me over a cold beer. “It’s too catchy—it sounds like another piece of ad-tech buzzword BS.”I’d argue “tagless tech”—the first name I heard in reference to header-based executions—was far worse (and horribly untrue). But my friend’s dislike really…
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One of the lessons 2016 has taught us is that there's a difference between "unpredictable" and "unexpected." That's as true in digital media and ad tech as it is anywhere else. Retracing steps, you can look back and make sense of how we got here. It's just been a slightly…
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Viva la header revolution! Header tags have been a blessing for virtually every player in digital advertising. As publishers note a boom in CPMs, advertisers are finally getting better ideas of available inventory and getting smarter about valuation. Header tags have given new life to display and video private exchanges…
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