This year, our Decoder series covered the gamut — iOS 17 privacy updates, state privacy laws, and supply path optimization. If you missed them or want a chance to revisit them, here are the top AdMonsters’ Decoder stories from 2023.

If you see an ad tech term and are still thinking, WTF?!!! This is the place for you. 

Everything You Need To Know About the iOS 17 Update and Its Lasting Impact on Advertising

When Apple introduced its iOS 17 privacy updates, consumers awaited exciting new features, but publishers were concerned about the impact on their businesses. Marketers faced significant updates affecting link tracking, reducing the ability to track user behaviors through shared URLs in messages, email, and Safari Private Mode. 

We spoke with several industry experts who shared advice about how publishers should handle the new updates. They said publishers must prioritize transparent practices, understand third-party data usage, and embrace advanced measurement technologies. It’s crucial to pivot towards contextual advertising, leverage first-party data, and ensure privacy compliance while maintaining engaging ad experiences to uphold user trust.

What Are Made for Advertising (MFA) Sites and Why Are They a Scourge on Ad Tech and Sustainability?

Currently, MFA sites account for at least one in five online impressions, consuming 15% of global programmatic ad spend and generating 26% more carbon waste than legitimate publisher sites.

Major brands are paying for advertising on these low-quality sites, almost certainly without their knowledge. The number of these sites is likely to increase as AI-generated content continues to be more commonplace and as the industry phases out the use of third-party cookies. This is because MFA sites rely in part on outdated contextual targeting tactics to bring in clicks.

Oregon Sets the Bar: Landmark Consumer Data Privacy Bill Becomes the Strongest in the Nation

Oregon passed the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act (OCPA). Oregon stood out amongst six states to enact such laws this year, setting the bar as the strongest bill nationwide. Unlike other states’ regulations, OCPA mandates opt-in consent for 13 to 15-year-old Oregonians, adding extensive protections for sensitive data like national origin and victimization status.

OCPA’s data minimization rules could pose challenges, particularly for marketers aiming to match customer IDs for CTV outreach. This law demands businesses to disclose third-party data sharing and categorize entities involved.

“The data minimization is huge. It is one of the biggest issues the trade groups have against the draft federal privacy law. It has the potential to minimize not only data but the value of data. And it hurts creating a profile,” said Wayne Matus, Co-Founder, General Counsel, and EVP at SafeGuard Privacy. 

What Is Dynamic Flooring?

With the help of Keith Candiotti, Founder and CEO of Optimera, we explored the concept of dynamic flooring in programmatic advertising, focusing on publishers’ strategies to maintain ad inventory pricing competitiveness in the open marketplace. Flooring, the practice of setting a minimum price for ad inventory, empowers publishers to control pricing while participating in real-time bidding. Publishers using GAM leverage Unified Pricing Rules (UPRs) to ensure bids meet their minimum price requirements.

However, setting optimal CPM floors manually poses challenges, as publishers face a constant trade-off between maximizing revenue and maintaining ad fill rates. Dynamic flooring emerged as a solution, using real-time data to adjust floors intelligently for each page view. Nevertheless, not all dynamic flooring solutions are equally effective, with some favoring specific demand partners and failing to generate additional revenue.

What Is Supply Path Transparency & Optimization?

According to an IAB report, the ad tech industry is witnessing substantial growth, and they projected it will increase by 5.9% YoY. However, this growth introduces unique challenges, notably the necessity for transparency within the programmatic supply chain. Supply Path Optimization is a solution to enhance efficiency and transparency by reducing intermediaries that don’t add significant value. 

SPO benefits both supply and demand sides by providing visibility into the ecosystem, improving brand safety for advertisers, increasing revenue opportunities for publishers, reducing ad fraud, and enhancing overall efficiency.

For this explainer, Abhinav Choudhri, Director- Customer Success at AdPushup, dove into recent industry developments, such as the implementation of the OpenRTB 2.6 draft, Ads.txt 1.1, and Transparency Center, and how they have further advanced the cause of supply chain transparency and optimization.

What Is IAB Tech Lab’s ‘Green Initiative’?

The IAB Tech Lab’s Green Initiative aims to address sustainability in the programmatic supply chain. Despite the widespread commitments to carbon neutrality by major tech firms and brands in 2021, putting these commitments into action has proved challenging. 

To tackle this, IAB Tech Lab partnered with AdNetZero to establish a standardized emissions framework. Leveraging expertise and available data from contributing members, the Tech Lab plans to expedite progress in this crucial area to counteract the environmental impact while acknowledging the limited time available.

How Can Publishers Boost Their Ad Revenue with Header Bidding?

Automation has transformed business operations significantly. Consequently, companies are compelled to adapt by integrating advanced technologies. Programmatic advertising, particularly Header Bidding has revolutionized ad buying and selling, boosting efficiency for publishers and advertisers.

Header bidding refers to a real-time auction where multiple demand partners bid on an ad impression before it reaches the ad server. By integrating JavaScript code into a website’s header, this technology enables publishers to simultaneously offer ad space to multiple buyers, enhancing transparency and fostering competition among demand sources.

What is vCPM, and How Does It Relate to Viewability?

vCPM, a metric for measuring the cost of viewable impressions, aids advertisers in maximizing ROI and empowers publishers to boost ad revenue. Despite the rise of attention metrics, viewability remains pivotal for advertisers. 

Marketers must ensure ads are not just seen but viewable. Unlike before, ads generated revenue regardless of visibility; advertisers now prioritize viewable impressions. Publishers must understand how to gauge impression costs to monetize their digital ad space effectively.

An ad must fulfill specific criteria to be viewable, typically with at least 50% of its pixels visible on a user’s screen for at least one second. Unlike traditional CPM, which accounts for all impressions, vCPM zeroes in on viewable impressions, allowing advertisers to allocate budgets more wisely and enhance their return on investment.

The post Explain This to Me…Best of AdMonsters Decoder 2023 appeared first on AdMonsters.

When consumers see an iOS update on their phone, they anticipate with excitement the new features they will experiment with. Publishers, on the other hand, worry how the privacy updates will affect their business practices. How will publishers thrive with iOS 17? 

The upgrade was released on September 18 and includes essential updates for marketers, specifically, Apple’s New Link Tracking Protection in messages, mail, and Safari’s private browsing feature. This removes tracking parameters from URLs when users share them in mail, messages, and Safari Private Mode, thus eliminating the option to track consumer behaviors through links. 

While this will be an adjustment,  in the grand scheme of things, all of the news isn’t grim, as updates won’t cut your whole baseline off. For email marketers, the Apple gods rained down some good news for you. Firstly, UTM parameters remain intact in the three cases above, and the impact of the New Link Tracking Protection is relatively tiny. 

Apple’s privacy updates ensure consumers know how a third-party SDK shares their data. Aligning with Apple’s ATT, their new privacy manifests restrict campaign tracking methods on major social brands such as Facebook, Instagram, Google ads, and Twitter. Of course, the restrictions seem vast, but the advertising industry is always up for a challenge, and they are preparing to go with the punches.  We spoke with some industry veterans to see how they are preparing for the update. 

Joey Stern, Ad Systems Manager, TuneIn

We will continue to see privacy strategies that impact the revenue opportunities in our industry thus making honest, good publisher practices more critical than ever. It will be harder for 3rd party companies to track ad campaigns, and this will cause an increased reliance on publishers who can provide a clear understanding of their users.

We’ll see continued growth opportunities on Android, but the iPhone audience isn’t going anywhere. Trust is going to be a key factor. 

How can publishers navigate the changes brought about by iOS 17 to optimize their campaigns and ensure successful advertising outcomes while respecting user privacy?

Precise internal measurement is essential, as is asking the tough questions about user experience vs short-term revenue growth.  

Katie Madding, Chief Product Officer at Adjust

In general, the direction of the mobile app advertising and marketing industry increasingly puts user privacy center stage. The key privacy-related updates rolled out as part of iOS 17 (Privacy Manifests, SDK signatures, API required reasons, etc.) can best be understood and contextualized as a continuation of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework and its dedication to building a privacy-centric ecosystem for app developers and end users on iOS.

With this in mind, the updates, which will be fully enforced in Spring 2024, shouldn’t have a more resounding impact on the industry than privacy changes already have; they’re a continuation. The goal of the updates, primarily, is to help users better understand how third parties use their data. It requires publishers and developers to provide enhanced transparency around their data collection practices and the practices of any third parties they work with (as these third parties may also have access to the data collected). 

How can publishers navigate the changes brought about by iOS 17 to optimize their campaigns and ensure successful advertising outcomes while respecting user privacy?

Adjust enthusiastically encourages publishers and marketers to embrace next-generation measurement technologies for campaign optimization in line with the industry movement away from device-ID-based measurement and toward gaining insights from aggregated data sets. The principles around iOS 17 are identical to all privacy-related industry updates. 

Optimizing consent for more traditional methods of advertising and attribution while investing in measurement technologies that enable analysis from aggregated data sets is the perfect balance to strike. While the latter approach is more holistic and is the direction to move in broadly speaking, any consented, device-level data that marketers obtain can help to inform predictive methodologies that enable aggregated analysis. Consider investing in solutions for media mix modeling or incrementality, for example.

All in all, publishers now need to be more transparent about their practices and more thorough in understanding and reporting on the practices of their third-party partners. These updates have no specific changes to measurement capabilities — just around communication and declaration. 

Uri Lichter, CEO of Intango

The iOS 17 updates emphasize user privacy and data tracking restrictions, which will change the advertising industry. These changes will limit access to user data, making it harder to target ads precisely.

The industry must pivot towards contextual advertising, invest in privacy compliance, and deliver non-intrusive and engaging ad experiences. The iOS 17 updates will challenge how advertisers and publishers measure ad campaign performance. Attribution will become more complex, data accuracy may decrease, and privacy-centric reporting will be crucial to maintaining user trust and brand image.

How can publishers navigate the changes brought about by iOS 17 to optimize their campaigns and ensure successful advertising outcomes while respecting user privacy?

Publishers should embrace contextual advertising, leverage first-party data, implement consent management solutions, diversify revenue streams, and prioritize ad quality and relevance. Adapting to iOS 17 is an opportunity for publishers to differentiate themselves through user-centric and privacy-compliant advertising.

Mateusz Jedrocha, VP, Branding Solutions, Adlook

With the introduction of features like Link Tracking Protection and their fingerprinting approach, Apple is aligning with the ongoing industry trend of limiting user-level tracking across browsers and systems. This shift isn’t isolated to just one company; it indicates a broader movement towards a more privacy-centric digital landscape. At Adlook, we’ve been keenly observing these changes, understanding the evolving dynamics and the collective push for enhanced user control and security.

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