Technology is evolving faster than we can blink and it’s becoming clear that it’s time creativity and control were reclaimed. As monopolies and walled gardens dominate and limit access, the balance between innovation and content creation is more crucial than ever. In a rapidly changing ecosystem,  publishers are exploring strategies to navigate an open internet increasingly challenged by distribution obstacles and signal loss.

Once a beacon of free and open access, the open web faces an identity crisis. Media companies that once thrived on direct consumer connection are struggling with the rise of walled gardens. Marketers, for their part, acknowledge their role in building these silos as they increasingly funnel media budgets into tech giants. Reclaiming control of data, creative strategies, and audience engagement is critical to preserving the future for both sides.

Publishers should not look at these shifts as threats but as opportunities to develop new strategies that align with consumer behavior and market demands. 

From the rise of social-driven search and FAST channels to Google’s ongoing antitrust trial, ProgIO spoke to many of the challenges facing publishers today. As the industry continues to push for transparency, fairness, and a more open ecosystem, the path forward depends on innovating while maintaining trust with consumers and each other. 

Here are our top takeaways from Day 1.

Breaking Free: How Marketers Can Reclaim Creativity in a Tech-Driven World

Eoin Townsend, Chief Product Officer at Cadent, talking about convergence at programmatic IO. Photo by Donna Alberico.

Eoin Townsend, Chief Product Officer at Cadent, walked us through industry shifts driven by audience, inventory, optimality, and privacy. He says, “The technology we have today is not the technology we’ll have tomorrow.”

Let him tell it: marketers need more control to move away from monopolies and hone in on new technologies to transform their roles in the industry. Eoin emphasized that marketers spend too much time on tech rather than creative marketing. We are evolving from scale, automation, and walled gardens to a new phase focused on integration, alignment, and collaboration. 

More highlights from his talk:

• Let AI automate the hard stuff.
• Take advantage of multi-faceted solutions that integrate third-party data and work across walled gardens.
• Adopt new technology and legal frameworks to ensure compliance and consumer trust.

Eoin’s main argument is: “Let marketers be marketers” free them from technological constraints!

The Future of the Open Internet Is?

Allison Schiff, Managing Editor at AdExchanger, Ben Hovaness, CMO at OMD, Cavel Khan, Chief Growth Officer at Group Black, and Ari Paparo, CEO & Contributor of Marketecture Media discuss the future of the open internet. Photo by Donna Alberico.

What is the open web? The term has gotten lost in the mix, and AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff ensured the panelists revealed the definition from their perspectives early in the session. According to Ari Paparo, CEO & Contributor at Marketecture Media, if you can access a website for free and buy ads freely, it is part of the open web. 

Media companies are losing distribution channels and struggle to connect directly with consumers. What are the biggest challenges of the open web? Walled gardens and signal challenges. Can marketers blame consumers for this mess? Not exactly. Marketers helped create the walled gardens by continuing to invest in and work with them.

“The open internet lost the resources to create the content and do a lot of things that it did to keep the communities it had built,” revealed Cavel Khan, Chief Growth Officer at Group Black. “That’s why we are all seeing the decline over the last three years. Big publishers are going out of business or restructuring.”

More key points from this session:

• The cloudiness around Chrome’s plan for cookies makes it difficult for publishers to determine the best strategy to combat signal loss. 
• Publishers have great tools like WordPress, Beehiiv, and Ghost, along with podcasting, as new solutions for reaching people and monetizing those connections. 
• When asked what the future of the open internet was, the panelists responded bright, sleek, diverse, and changing. 

TikTok, The Latest to Step In the Search Game

AdExchanger’s Executive Editor Sarah Sluis sits down with Blake Chandlee, President of Global Business Solutions at TikTok, to talk about the platform entering the search business. Photo by Donna Alberico.

TikTok is the app beating Google as the number one search engine. With data showing significant search activity on the app, we’re learning that rich, social media-driven search results are key for connecting with consumers and influencing their discovery and purchase intent. It’s no surprise the company is investing in bringing advertising to search. 

“There are two key data points that triggered this for us. One is that independent research proves that 55% of people get their search results from social media and video,” said Blake Chandlee, President of Global Business Solutions at TikTok. “It was just a very good box of rich examples. An example might be if you’re planning to travel to Singapore when you visit a traditional search engine, you’d find links to guide you through that process. On the other hand, you go on to TikTok or some other platforms where you’ll get really rich videos of people like you going through the same decision-making with their experience. It’s a very different experience in the back end of this.”

Ads have been part of TikTok’s monetization model for a while now, but the TikTok shop shook up the game when it came to fruition last year. Live-streaming allows creators to earn money by getting “tipped” from their audience, while the TikTok shop facilitates seamless transitions within the app. TikTok’s investment in logistics and the closed-loop shopping experience allows it to fully capitalize on the commerce generated by creators.

More interesting insights:

• The social media company’s motto: “Don’t make ads, make TikTok’s” works.
• TikTok caters to its users’ diverse interests, allowing brands to connect with highly engaged audiences.
• Ensuring that ads are native is key; don’t oversaturate because ad fatigue can be real.
• TikTok stands out because it is independent and doesn’t rely on partnerships or external links for e-commerce.

Why The Trade Desk is Winning According to Wall Street

Shweta Khajuria, Managing Director of Wolfe Research shared her predictions for the industry from an investor’s perspective. Photo by Donna Alberico.

With the ongoing regulatory scrutiny of Google and the pending cookie deprecation, scale and first-party data are both emerging as leaders in the industry.

Shweta Khajuria, Managing Director at Wolfe Research, dove deeply into The Trade Desk’s success. Partnering with agencies leads to higher retention rates. Product innovations like CTV and UID2 have kept The Trade Desk at the top of the industry. Also, their independence and omnichannel approach allow them to maintain objectivity and avoid conflicts of interest. 

“Trade Desk saw the potential of bidded programmatic and connected TV before most others in the industry,” said Shweta. “As a result, with the head start that they saw, they saw a step change in their growth rates and trajectory.”

Shweta also predicts that Google will spin off one of its ad tech businesses, which could level the playing field. 

Shweta’s other predictions:

• The Trade Desk’s Open Path and Magnite’s clear line anticipate the convergence of the demand and supply sides.
• Efficiency gains will be necessary, and pricing pressures might arise as DSPs and SSPs merge.
• Larger publishers may develop their yield management systems, leading to supply-side consolidation.
• The demand side might gain an upper hand due to its proximity to ad budgets.

Google on Trial: The Battle for Fairness, Transparency, and the Future

Allison Schiff talked to Claire Atkin, Co-founder & CEO of Check My Ads and Jason Kint CEO of Digital Content Next about the ongoing DOJ vs. Google antitrust trial. Photo by Donna Alberico.

Google’s monopolistic practices have heavily hindered the publishing industry, and we are all standing on our toes, waiting to see the outcome of this decision. Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, explained how Google is extracting value that should go to newsrooms and entertainment companies. 

Jason talked about “dynamic revenue sharing,’ where Google manipulates bid prices to maintain its margins, often behind publishers’ backs. With a press box seat at the trial in Virginia, he says Google’s defense strategy is to confuse the market and redefine it to include more competition, like TikTok or TV. Isn’t this what we’ve all been thinking? Isn’t this a weak defense?

It was great seeing Claire Atkin again doing her best: exposing the real. According to Claire, Google plays a huge role in monetizing misinformation and lacking transparency. Smaller businesses suffer since they don’t receive funds or adequate support from Google when campaign issues arise. Claire argues for log-level data transparency and know-your-customer laws to ensure fair practices. 

Other important highlights:

• Judge Leonie Brinkema is skeptical of Google due to evidence purging, which impacts the credibility of Google’s witnesses. 
• The trial is part of a broader antitrust movement against major tech companies, and breaking them up could lead to more opportunities and fairness in the industry. 
• Both speakers hope to see a future where advertisers can better track and verify their ad placements, leading to more accountability and fewer fraudulent practices.

FAST is Moving Fast

Katie Barrett, Head of Strategic Sales at LG Ad Solutions talks the future of FAST at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO Day 1. Photo by Donna Alberico.

Several factors are contributing to the rise of FAST, such as subscription fatigue and evolving audience behavior. On a daily basis, consumers are shifting their mindset from avoiding ads to accepting them if they come with free content. 

“We see that 53% of our consumers are spending at least 2 hours a day in FAST, and the average time of the session is 73 minutes,” said Katie Barrett, Head of Strategic Sales at LG Ad Solutions. “Eighty-seven percent of FAST users have free streaming channels they watch regularly. This shows high levels of habitual viewing. Eighty-one percent believe that FAST streaming channels offer high-quality content. This is important because this perception of fast being low quality is being challenged here.”

Contrary to popular belief that FAST viewers are less engaged or loyal, Katie argues they are developing strong followings due to curated content. The stereotype that FAST viewers are solely budget-conscious is false, as the data shows a diverse and affluent audience.

Other Factors of FAST:

• The median income of FAST users is $85,000, with an average of $110,000, and 43% earning over $100,000 annually. 
• FAST is popular among family units, with a high percentage of users owning homes, being married, and having children, underlining its family-friendly nature.
• FAST is a valuable platform for brands aiming to reach key demographics.

On the Horizon: A New Era for Publishers and Marketers

Publishers and marketers are standing on the brink of significant change. With walled gardens tightening their grip and signal loss challenging traditional methods, publishers are redefining their approach to audience engagement, while marketers are pushing for more autonomy in how they reach and connect with consumers. 

From publishers exploring innovative content distribution methods to marketers reclaiming creative control, the next chapter is about pushing beyond the familiar and embracing new opportunities. 

The journey doesn’t stop here. Day 2 included more revelations and strategies, so stay tuned for our Programmatic IO Day 2 wrap-up on Monday. We’ll dig deeper into the discussions, highlighting key takeaways and what lies ahead for publishers and marketers in this fast-moving space. 

The post PROGIO Day 1: The Next Chapter for the Open Internet, Google vs. DOJ Face-Off, and More appeared first on AdMonsters.

Obviously, marketers want to avoid such placements. But that’s just a start. In an ideal world, your ad will be seen by real people alongside content that makes sense for your brand.

Marketers everywhere want to know, how do we achieve these goals? Fortunately, we asked Criteo to share their best practices for getting the kind of placements that move the needle for brands.

Multiple Aspects to Quality

First and foremost, it’s important to recognize that there are multiple aspects to quality and it differs from brand to brand. Let’s break this down.

Brand safety is a broad approach to quality. The goal is to ensure that all ads meet industry standards, as well as comply with local and global regulations (e.g. don’t show cigarette ads to kids, or fail to include mandated disclosures in ads for specific products).

Brand suitability takes this concept down a level and is customized to the individual brand. It asks: what is a brand’s appetite for a variety of issues? Some brands have a low tolerance for certain types of content, while others are comfortable with topics many consider risky, e.g. COVID-19 and social justice issues.

Quality also entails ensuring that ads are seen by real people who have a genuine interest in what a brand has to offer. The fight against invalid traffic (IVT) has seen many successes, and gone are the days when campaigns saw as much as 40% IVT. IVT detection and removal are particularly important in retargeting campaigns, where high CPMs are an irresistible lure for fraudsters, and in campaigns designed to build the upper funnel.  

Finally, there’s ad safety, which seeks to ensure that the ads are safe for publishers, meaning they have no malware or other egregious content.

Best Practice #1: Work With a Partner That Has Close Relationships With Publishers and Has Built Strong Internal Quality Controls

Programmatic buying has evolved into an incredibly complex ecosystem, and it’s no surprise that the complexity has led to huge challenges. Key among them: how do buyers know what they’re really buying when they purchase inventory on the open exchanges?

The industry has worked together to address some of these challenges; ads.txt and sellers.json are good examples of these efforts. In addition, individual companies have pioneered advances in supply chain optimization. While these initiatives are critical, they alone cannot guarantee the level of quality that brands demand, which is why it’s a good idea to work with a partner that goes to great lengths to vet its supply sources and has a dedicated team and rigorous quality-assurance policies in place. It’s also a good idea to work with partners that have built a dedicated IVT-detection team. 

Specific questions to ask a potential partner:

• How do you vet direct publishers to ensure policy? For instance, Criteo requires publishers to declare their domains so that they can be properly vetted. They also have supply partner guidelines to which all publishers must adhere, such as content-related policies, regulatory policies, and best practices.
• Do you have dedicated teams for IVT detection, ad safety, traffic quality, and do they work closely together to create a cohesive and coherent approach to advertiser and publisher quality?
• What types of education and training do you provide your teams? Do all teams worldwide receive the same level of training?
• What are your inventory controls? For instance, do you have a global block list of publishers that tend to violate your supply partner guidelines? Can this be refined to your brand? 

 Best practice #2:  Take a Holistic View to Quality

Quality is often seen primarily through the lens of the advertisers, as they’re the ones with the budget. In reality, quality is just as applicable to publishers, which is why we need to take a holistic view.

2020 was a difficult year for publishers and their ability to monetize their inventory. COVID-19 led advertisers to deploy overly broad brand-safety solutions, which devastated publisher revenues. Digital advertising isn’t possible without a strong and vibrant publisher ecosystem.

Fortunately, new granular solutions, such as contextual intelligence solutions, take a more nuanced approach to content rather than reject inventory based on broad keywords. This ensures that the advertiser’s brand-suitability needs are met while allowing publishers to monetize more of their revenue.

The ultimate goal is to produce an advertising ecosystem that will build trust and performance among all parties.

Best Practice #3: Buttress Internal Controls with Industry-Leading Partnerships

Partnering with industry-leading fraud detection and prevention vendors is not just a best practice — it’s an absolute must. You can gain a higher level of quality by working with measurement companies that are at the forefront of detecting and removing IVT automatically across all inventory types, including desktop, mobile, video, and CVT, as well as vetting publisher and app quality. 

The best providers offer contextual intelligence tools that help ensure brand suitability. These tools will provide an additional level of bid filtering to remove bid requests that are out of compliance with supply partner guidelines, automatically and at no extra costs.

Best Practice #4: When it Comes to Brand Suitability Think Granular

Granularity is the key to driving brand suitability. The more granular, the more you can protect client campaign performance, as well as safeguard monetization opportunities of your supply partners. As mentioned above, brand suitability is very specific to the brand, and you should plan on spending some time and effort with your partners so they can ensure your ads appear near content that meets your standards.

Working with an external partner that offers contextual intelligence solutions can help protect your brand-specific content categories. For instance, it’s possible to create very specific controls that help brands avoid negative news cycles and to create granular custom content segments on a brand-by-brand basis, such as avoiding content that deals with COVID-19, fast-fashion or non-vegan content. These segments can be used to assess the impact of brand-suitability requirements on campaign performance, and still ensure that campaigns don’t defund the news.

Are these solutions perfect? In truth, they’re still evolving, and scaling brand suitability to the entire internet is incredibly difficult. (Be wary of any partner that promises 100% safety or accuracy, that does not exist). Other technologies, such as sentiment analysis and the IAB taxonomy/GARM brand suitability framework are just beginning to emerge and may deliver even greater granularity in the near future.

Best practice #5: Seek Certifications or Work With Certified Partners

Working with a certified partner, or seeking certification yourself, is a great way to ensure inventory quality. For instance, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) has several certifications for reducing fraud, and campaigns that run through TAG Certified Channels have less than 1% fraud (proof positive that by industry leaders working together, tough challenges can be solved). 

TAG offers several certifications, including TAG Certified Against Fraud and TAG Brand Safety Certification. The certification process is rigorous and detailed, but it’s worth the effort, according to Criteo, which has achieved both.

Ensuring high-quality inventory and ads isn’t a static process. It’s an ever-evolving process that demands dedicated teams, technology, processes, and partnerships. This is a case of the ends justifying the means; companies that commit to quality will enjoy safe ads in brand-suitable environments.

The post Best Practices for Ensuring High-Quality Inventory & Ads appeared first on AdMonsters.

But SPO actually requires teamwork amongst all parties, especially those on the sell-side, as Criteo discovered when it decided to test various SPO strategies and measure the efficiencies that resulted. Done right, SPO offers increased transparency and accountability that is extremely beneficial to both publishers and advertisers. 

Criteo’s efforts offer critical insights and best practices that are worth emulating.

The Strategy Behind Criteo’s SPO

Prior to launching its SPO initiative, Criteo worked with more than 50 SSPs. An assumption in ad tech is that the more sell-side providers one works with, the more access one has to the best placements at scale. But within Criteo’s ranks, that assumption had come into doubt. 

Did the plethora of SSPs result in auction duplication? Was it leading to inefficiencies in its buying strategies? Was the company paying too much for inventory as a result of too many intermediaries? More strategically, were its buying strategies advancing its goals as the company prepares for a cookie-free world?

To answer these questions Criteo decided to launch a multi-pronged SPO initiative with three key goals in mind:

• The first was to identify and retain its most incremental supply sources, which Criteo defined as the SSPs in its ad stack that provide the most direct access to publisher inventory and cost efficiencies. 

• The second goal was to consolidate spending and to strengthen relationships with key partners in order to allow better access to inventory and to enrich its First-Party Media Network (more on that below). 

• The third goal was to increase transparency throughout the buying chain in order to ensure the inventory Criteo purchased on behalf of its clients was both legitimate and brand safe.

Let’s see how the company went about achieving these three goals. 

Best Practice #1: Identify and Prioritize Incremental Channels

The first challenge was to understand which of its 50+ channels provided the greatest benefit to Criteo and its advertisers. The company began by studying and ranking all of the channel partners against very specific criteria, including:

• Exclusivity and Access: Does this channel have exclusive contracts with publishers? Does it offer unique placements, a higher priority to the publisher, and more efficiency across the supply chain?

• Data Availability and Collaboration: Which data fields does each SSP pass along? Is it willing to develop new product features, such as transaction ID and s-chain object?

• Infrastructure Costs: How much does it cost to handle the requests in terms of data centers, user valuation computation, and other infrastructure resources?
  

• Operational Costs: How do the overhead costs (e.g. technical resources, business developers, data analysts, and so on) required to support the integration compare to those of other SSPs?
  
• Traffic Acquisition Costs: Are the SSP’s fees and intermediary costs higher than other SSPs? Is Criteo spending more than necessary to acquire quality traffic?

Once Criteo ranked all of its channel partners based on the above criteria, it then tested its lowest-ranked SSPs focusing mainly on performance. 

As a result of this exercise, Criteo was able to reduce costs by removing more than 10 SSPs without any negative impact on campaign performance.

Best Practice #2: Consolidate Spend on Direct Channels and Key Partnerships

Criteo had several goals for consolidating its media spend, including removing intermediaries wherever possible in order to boost advertiser ROAS, as well as reducing the number of duplicated requests so that it wouldn’t compete against itself in auctions.

More strategically, Criteo was keen to shift its spending towards its direct channels and preferred supply partners­­ for several important reasons. 

First, with third-party cookies going away, Criteo wanted to unify and enrich its first-party data by growing its First-Party Media Network, a proprietary solution that integrates commerce data and AI so that marketers and media owners can connect, enhance, and activate their first-party data.

Second, Criteo wanted to strengthen its partnerships with key supply partners by developing mutual collaboration agreements, such as guaranteed spend deals, improved priority or rebate deals, among other initiatives.

With these goals in mind, Criteo sought to decrease the gap between its direct channels while increasing coverage and priority for its buyers. The company also selected the key partners that could help it achieve its strategic first-party data goals.

Outcome: Increased direct Share of Voice by ~seven percentage points

Best Practice #3: Leverage Industry Standards to Promote Transparency 

Brand safety and suitability are growing priorities for all advertisers, goals that can only be achieved with full transparency into media quality. To this end, Criteo took a multi-pronged approach.

First, to guard against domain spoofing, Criteo opted to use only those channel partners that agree to deploy the IAB standards that block blind or semi-transparent traffic (i.e. ad requests that fail to fully disclose the domain).

The decision to block less-than-transparent traffic protects Criteo from malicious actors that hijack the domain of legitimate publishers in order to serve ads from unsavory ones, such as those that hawk violent or adult content. Criteo further verifies domain legitimacy by checking the ads.txt file of each publisher to certify that the ad request is coming from the declared channels. 

Ads.txt has another SPO benefit: enabling Criteo to identify instances when inventory is sold via resellers. Knowing when resellers are involved helps Criteo uncover the most optimal path to the publisher, thus reducing excess resellers and their fees. 

Supply chain object (s-chain) and source origin (OpenRTB 2.0 standard) both accomplish the same goal and help Criteo find the most direct path to publisher inventory, including instances when identify inventory is sold via Google’s Open Bidding

With a full, transparent view into its supply, Criteo can now trace the full buying chain up to the publisher, find the most optimal path and make buying decisions based on that insight. As a result, just .3% of traffic is blind or semi-transparent traffic; Criteo has full visibility into 99.7% of its traffic.

Criteo’s Testing Process

The first step in designing its test is to define what success looks like. Are these efforts serving advertisers’ interest in the long run? 

Success, to Criteo, focused on yield, which was composed of two components:

• The first is the value that Criteo generates for its advertisers, which is calculated using several variables, including the advertiser’s budget, Criteo’s margin, and the probability that users will interact with the ads.

• The second is the cost of traffic acquisition inclusive of all transactional/SSP fees.

Criteo optimizes this yield metric for SPO, which accounts for both short and long-term impact for its clients.

As the goal of these tests is to reduce the number of channel partners without losing yield, the decision to keep or drop a channel partner is made based on whether or not yield was gained or lost.

When several intermediaries sell the same inventory, buyers may receive multiple requests for the same ad opportunity. If undetected, this leads to side-by-side bidding, or buyers bidding against themselves.

While matching Transaction IDs (tid) should, in theory, help Criteo detect such scenarios, low adoption and high inconsistency in reporting remain an issue. To bypass that limitation, Criteo built internal proxies that leverage fields available across all supply partners (a combination of timestamp window, placements IDs, matched user identifiers, and others) to detect side-by-side bidding (tests show that these proxies capture up to 90% of side-by-side bidding).

The SSPs identified as potential culprits were deactivated for a subset of randomized users (test group) within our AB testing platform, and will remain so unless they prove incremental.

Tool Adoption

Criteo adopted an SPO tool (an analytics managed AB testing/inventory management tool) that follows a four-step process: 

• A dry run, which is an offline estimate of the maximum loss of an SPO strategy in case there is no spend transfer.
• AB testing, incrementality testing of the SPO strategy.
• Traffic shut down: if traffic is not incremental, Criteo will stop processing those requests.
• Feedback-loop: Criteo allowed 5% of the cut traffic through to monitor whether traffic becomes profitable again

This tool has improved Criteo’s overall SPO process on several fronts. First, it has eliminated complex development work so that Criteo’s local analytics teams can run the tests themselves, allowing for the faster implementation of tests. 

Second, Criteo can build any combination of the tool’s dimensions to identify an SSP to shut down. Third, exclusion lists now come before requests are processed, lowering infrastructure costs.

Criteo is onto something big here: SPO benefits a lot of players in the ecosystem, especially publishers who want to earn the highest CPMS for their inventory. The more direct the path to the buyer, the less money that’s lost on intermediaries.  

On a higher level, the industry progresses when it works together to solve challenges. Often this begins when an individual player, like Criteo, undertakes the systematic stuff of an issue and shares their insights so that others can implement them. 

Clients have complained for a long time about too high intermediary costs; Criteo has found a way to optimize the supply chain in order to lower them.

The post A Publisher’s Guide to Supply Path Optimizations: A Case Study appeared first on AdMonsters.

That would be a big mistake. 

There’s actually no time like the present for all of the cookieless alternatives to start stepping up to the plate and showing what they’re really made of, and for pubs to get to testing right away. 

Single Sign-On solutions are one such open web tool that’s gaining massive ad tech support. But one of the major barriers to any of these solutions reaching scale is consumer consent fatigue. 

In that vein, Criteo, Prebid, and other industry leaders have set out to help solve this issue through Prebid’s Project Management Committee (PMC) which is responsible for establishing, prioritizing, and building industry roadmap items.

The goal of this PMC is to align with industry leaders and create an open-source and interoperable single sign-on (SSO) solution, helping to reduce the friction between consumers and publishers in the cookieless future, while supporting logged-in and logged out scenarios. 

We spoke with Jordan Cauley, Director of Product at Mediavine, who co-chairs the SSO PMC (alongside Criteo Chief Product Officer, Todd Parsons) within Prebid about opportunities for pubs over the next year and a half and why Prebid is central to the open web’s future.

Lynne d Johnson: Mediavine has O&O sites and also helps thousands of publishers successfully monetize their sites as well. What opportunities are you seeing for publishers over the next 18 months and what do you think some of their biggest challenges will be?

Jordan Cauley: The next 18 months are going to be crucial for publishers. First, the great news: Demand has rebounded from lows during the pandemic and programmatic ad prices are surpassing pre-pandemic comparisons.

Also on the opportunistic side, we’re seeing advertisers begin to trust video from the Open Exchange almost as much as they’ve historically trusted deal IDs. Outstream video is becoming as trusted as instream. Mediavine is continuing to prioritize innovation of video products, which is why we’ve built our own instream and outstream video players. The SSO committee is working to build an open solution that will enable buyers to have enough scale to purchase open video inventory and empower publishers to tap into that demand through a more direct and consolidated way.

The biggest challenges publishers can expect over the next 18 months are the same, in my opinion, as the whole advertising ecosystem: addressability, frequency capping, and attribution. With the deprecation of the third-party cookie, we must provide alternatives to help publishers and advertisers better understand and serve their audiences. Solutions like contextual and first-party data will be key to addressing audiences accurately.

LdJ: Speaking of identity, you co-chair the Single Sign-On PMC within Prebid where stakeholders from all across the advertising ecosystem are working to bring an open-source SSO technology to market. Can you share why you see Prebid.Org as a valuable community and why you wanted to invest in taking a leadership role?

JC: The ad tech ecosystem contains unique stakeholders and pressures, so it’s important that ad tech companies at every corner of the market work cohesively through the complexities that come with the territory. A group like Prebid has a low barrier to entry and allows for vital industry collaboration. 

My goal for joining the SSO committee was to share the knowledge gained from Mediavine’s unique position in the industry. Because Mediavine operates across eight thousand domains, we have a valuable perspective of the problems facing the industry and are motivated to offer a seamless SSO solution to publishers.

More than two years ago we began developing our own SSO/proprietary toolkit, Grow.me, to help address the evolving industry landscape. In turn, I can use the feedback from our internal efforts to help guide the Prebid SSO project into a product supported by large and small publishers, owned-and-operated publishers, and publishers who have an outside company managing their identity solutions.

LdJ: As a global leader of Prebid.org you’re starting to test this new SSO, what are the greatest challenges you expect the SSO working group to solve?

JC: I think the greatest challenge the committee is helping address is to encourage collaboration. Traditionally, advertisers, DSPs, SSPs, publishers, and other players in the ecosystem have operated relatively independently. 

There’s a push toward vertical integration in this evolutionary time for the web. Groups like the SSO Committee and Prebid as a whole have to bring the disconnected parts of the ecosystem closer together and view the space more holistically.

The end solution aims to bring the entire ecosystem together to deliver better relationships between users, publishers, and advertisers with opt-in-based experiences for both content and advertising.

LdJ: There’s been a lot of interest developing around both authenticated and unauthenticated traffic for publishers. But initially, it seemed, the industry was primarily focused on authenticated traffic, where the user shared their email directly with the publisher. What are the key differences between the two experiences for users and their use cases?

JC: Authenticated traffic is traffic that the publisher has been able to verify by a reader logging into their site. A reader understands they have provided their email address and then verifies that email address in exchange for access to an exclusive feature or service. The partially anonymous ID or unauthenticated traffic asks less of readers and users. 

In this case, readers accept an agreement that doesn’t require them to supply their full email address or another piece of personally identifiable information (PII). Instead, it provides a cross-domain common identifier that can be used for many of the same cases as a third-party cookie, but with clearer controls in the hands of the users. 

A user with a semi-anonymous ID can manage some preferences for privacy, can be frequency capped as needed, or even retargeted in some cases. This creates opportunities to build trust in the relationship with a publisher, an advertiser, and ultimately with the proposed entity that is managing an SSO.

I believe the key is developing both options together and in doing so, creating a “good, better, best” mentality. “Good” being contextual signals, “better” being semi-anonymous traffic and “best” being fully authenticated traffic stemming from relationships with the users. This mentality can improve efficiency for advertisers and revenue for publishers without being dogmatic about an all-in strategy that is being actively combated by browser vendors and a public concerned with privacy on the web.

LdJ: And do you see a flow between authenticated and unauthenticated traffic? How will it work?

JC: I think the flow between fully authenticated and semi-anonymous traffic is going to depend very much on publishers and in many ways, advertisers. The committee is still working through the options on the table, but if a semi-anonymous ID user develops the trust to elevate to a fully authenticated relationship? There is a great deal of value in this flow, potentially improving things for all parties.

The post Can SSO Bring the Advertising Ecosystem Together? A Q&A With Mediavine’s Jordan Cauley appeared first on AdMonsters.