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The post Dive into the Future of Digital Media with the Ops 2024 Event Summary appeared first on AdMonsters.

In many industries, collaboration between partners is key to continued success of all players, and the digital media and ad tech industry is no exception. Publishers, SSPs, and DSPs need to work together to ensure all parties get what they need from one another. However, publishers often lament the lack of transparency and the slow evolution of SSPs. 

At PubForum New Orleans, AdMonsters’ Content Director, Lynne d Johnson facilitated a panel discussion to unpack this complicated topic. Panel speakers included Samuel Youn, Vice President of Programmatic, Chegg; Nick Coté, Senior Director, Supply, Madhive; and Peter Cunha, Managing Director, Ad Management, Sovrn.

SSPs Cater to Buyers Rather Than Publishers 

Publishers have expressed a desire for more SSP transparency, differentiation, and granular reporting among other things, and Cunha noted an evolution is beginning. 

“Changes started happening around the same time we started focusing a lot on the buy side, as a shift in where a lot of our engineering focus and investment went. I think we’re starting to see a lot of differentiation now in the SSP tier, and people making some interesting bets,” he shared. 

Part of this shift is due to where the money is coming from, noted Youn. SSPs make money by taking a rev share of the media sold on a publisher’s site but don’t have a say in where the money is spent. 

This means the control they have lies solely in trying to capture more of the proverbial pie, leading SSPs to prioritize buyers over publishers, and decreasing the incentive to evolve. 

“If I put myself in an SSP’s shoes. if I could build something with a finite amount of resources to get more budget from a buyer rather than get a publisher to say, ‘I really liked working with you,’ I would focus on the buy side,” Youn added. 

Changing the SSP/Publisher Relationship 

The question, says Coté, is how to build solutions that support the buy side and offer them insight into what they are buying. Then it becomes a question of where we can drive real value. 

“There needs to be a better way to communicate what buyers are looking for, and how things are performing. This information can be fed back to publishers, so they can understand how traffic is doing and where improvements can be made,” he proposed.

For example, if a publisher knew they were consistently coming in at only $1 under the floor price during auction, they could adjust their floor to garner more traffic. This could help publishers reach a larger audience and increase their revenue. 

Cunha shared that in April Sovrn eliminated its exchange rev share across all managed services. As of November, the company released a case study revealing this change drove increased efficiency for buyers and higher yields for publishers. This, he said, is the type of partnership Sovrn is pursuing for the future. 

“This was a recommendation from the steering committee we launched late last year, in pursuit of an alternative revenue model for SSPs to something that was more of a SaaS model. We charged Ad Management publishers a SaaS fee on a per-impression basis, eliminating the rev share. We saw more spend bias toward the Sovrn exchange path, now second only to AdX within that stack of 66 different SSPs. We also saw the publishers’ share of the media dollar increase by 16 percent,” Cunha explained. 

Innovating the Industry: Moving Toward a SaaS Model

Youn agreed that a SaaS model is preferable to how auctions typically run today where an SSP’s incentive is to look like a performance platform for a DSP. For the publisher, a Saas model…

• Provides a clearer view of how much of the media budget from a DSP is actually getting to the publisher
• Allows the publisher to assess SSPs based on contractual deliverables and SLAs rather than just where they rank in the publisher’s stack
• Provides budget clarity for the publisher as they have to pay for and budget for the SSP services rather than it just coming out of revenue share

Rather than focusing on getting the cheapest inventory, SaaS models help SSPs and publishers both understand the true value of inventory. It can also allow publishers to request specific deliverables from their partner SSPs, which will consolidate the space and lead to fewer, but higher-quality, partnerships. 

“Piggybacking off of that, on the DSP side, it’s the amount of bid requests we see where the floor pass to us for the same publisher is totally different between ten to twelve different names, and being able to leverage a SaaS business model to identify, ‘What is the source of truth here? Where is the actual price point? Who is running a dynamic rev share, who’s padding by a couple bucks on top of whatever they’re intending on selling it for?’” added Coté.

There is a chance to make a difference in the space and do things a new way, Cunha shared. “The opportunity here is innovating in a space that hasn’t really had that level of innovation in a long time. We’ve been so accustomed to rev shares after rev shares. That’s table stakes, but there’s an opportunity to differentiate from the gorillas in that sense,” he said. 

For SSPs to fulfill their purpose — offering value to publishers — they need to work in conjunction with publishers to find a solution that creates true partnerships. A rising tide truly lifts all boats; if all sides (SSPs, publishers, and buyers) work together on a solution, everyone can win.

The post Publishers Seek Strategic Partnerships With SSPs: Is a SaaS Model the Answer? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Predictably, the economy, the growth of attention metrics, and cookie deprecation are top worries for publishers. What is surprising is just how low supply path optimization (SPO) is on their priority list. Only 30% of publishers say it’s important for them.

Despite less than a third of marketers ranking it high in priority, some see SPO as more of a concern for a buyer than a publisher. “SPO is a buy side issue and publishers are concerned about how it’s impacting them but the other issues are bigger concerns, SPO will always be there,” explained Jana Meron, the founder of Lioness Strategies and seasoned digital media monetization and data strategy leader. In other words, SPO is a persistent, but low-grade issue.

But others believe publishers have a vested interest in promoting SPO. The open programmatic markets can be convoluted at best and, for buyers keen to stay within a specific price range, they may be dissuaded from purchasing quality inventory if it has multiple intermediaries demanding a piece of the CPM paid. And all those commissions mean that publishers collect a smaller percentage of revenue for their inventory. 

What’s more, by focusing on SPO, publishers have more direct access to gaining insights into the demand for their inventory, potentially improving transparency in the bidding process.  All of this begs the question: why aren’t more publishers dedicating resources to ensuring the exchanges have direct access to their inventory?

Why Aren’t Publishers Concerned about SPO?

Another possible interpretation of the survey results is that SPO means different things for different types of publishers. Discussions of SPO tend to focus on unintended consequences, such as publishers losing access to buyers if an ad exchange opts to eliminate suppliers as part of its SPO initiative. 

But according to Scott Messer, ​​Principal and Founder of Messer Media, legitimate publishers shouldn’t worry about that as supply path optimization is a correction coming first for the most egregious of publishers.

For instance, In early April, Digiday ran a series of articles about declining prices in the open RTB markets due to ad tech vendors reducing the number of auctions they “listen to.”  At issue: low-quality publishers were initiating an excessive number of concurrent auctions for the same impression, hoping to get the best possible price. Wary of competing against themselves, advertisers flocked to the safe havens of private and curated marketplaces.

“Complicating your supply path is a tactic to drive higher yields,” said Messer. Reputable publishers with genuine value propositions have little need for ploys, which is why he believes publishers are moving towards curated marketplaces. “The average publisher on the good side isn’t worried about SPO because, if anything, it will actually drive more dollars into their pockets. Closing cluttered paths make it harder for the less worthy.”

Messer is an advocate of curated marketplaces, and deal creation as a service (DCaaS). In these scenarios, platforms create a custom marketplace for an individual buyer, one that is free of the low-quality publishers that exist for the express purpose of selling ads.  In this respect, curated marketplaces offer buyers a faster and more transparent path into SPO.

The survey data, however, was surprising when considering Messer’s perspective. The survey found, in fact, that large publishers are more than eight times more likely than small publishers to report having at least 10 monetization partners. And high CPM publishers, perhaps the best proxy for what Messner refers to as “reputable”, tend to have more monetization partners than low CPM ones.

Another theory behind why publishers may not be prioritizing SPO: they simply lack the resources to do more than acknowledge its importance. “I believe that Supply Path Optimization is one of those catchphrases like the cookieless Future.  We are all talking about it, but no one has really figured out what to do about it,” explained Terry Guyton-Bradley, a programmatic strategist who co-founded MediaZinc and spent many years working for multiple publishers running their programmatic operations.

“Unfortunately, most publishers don’t have the resources or time to truly analyze their programmatic partners in order to make meaningful changes to their programmatic stacks. As you can see from the survey results, the economy is having a significant impact on our industry and causing drastic cuts to investment in technology and personnel.” 

Guyton-Bradley warns his partners not to make any business decisions without data to support their assumptions. In his view, the benefits of SPO to publishers are still a hypothesis. Things may change once there’s real data to back up the SPO advocates claims. 

SPO is a Hot Topic for Many

Although Emodo’s survey found that only 30% of publishers consider SPO a hot topic, it’s still a top priority for companies like Emodo, which sees it as much more than simply cutting out middlemen to find the shortest path to inventory. “What it really means is eliminating redundancy by offering unique value and providing the most direct route to that value,” Damian McKenna, COO at Emodo, told Street Fight. 

Emodo also aligns with Messer’s point about curated marketplaces as an essential strategy for buyers and publishers and has a team dedicated to actively creating and optimizing Emodo Curated Deals.

The post Why Aren’t Publishers Concerned about Supply Path Optimization (SPO)? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Transparency in the programmatic supply chain is one such challenge prevailing in the industry. With so many parties involved in the supply chain, it has become even more difficult to keep track of ad spend and quality. That is why the industry needs Supply Path Optimization (SPO). 

Supply Chain Optimization is a process of increasing transparency and efficiency in the programmatic supply chain by cutting down the number of intermediaries that are not adding significant value. 

Why Is Transparency Needed?

Transparency in the supply chain involves a lot more than just making information available to all parties. It involves creating an environment of trust where all stakeholders feel confident that they are receiving fair and honest information.

This includes details about ad placements, ad inventory, and pricing. Ensuring transparency is important because it promotes better communication and helps build strong working relationships between publishers and advertisers.

Benefits of SPO

It is often perceived that SPO only benefits advertisers, but that is simply not true. Both the supply side and demand side can greatly benefit by optimizing supply path efficiencies:

• • Increased Transparency: SPO provides better visibility and insights about the ecosystem — the intermediaries involved, exact ad spend on impressions, etc. It enables advertisers to tackle the issue of bid duplication and enables publishers as well as advertisers to identify and eliminate unnecessary or fraudulent players. 
• • Brand Safety for Advertisers: With SPO, advertisers feel more confident about their brand image and safety. They can eliminate the SSPs who do not follow their brand safety guidelines. 
• • Increased Revenue Opportunities: Streamlining SPO can ensure that publishers receive the highest bids possible for their ad inventory ultimately increasing ad revenue.
• • Reduced ad fraud: SPO can help publishers reduce ad fraud by ensuring that their ads are only displayed on legitimate websites.
• • Increased Efficiency: SPO can help publishers and advertisers improve the efficiency of their programmatic advertising inventory and ad campaigns by reducing latency and improving transparency.

How does SPO work?

To make sure that SPO works in the most optimum way, advertisers need to come up with certain strategies to apply. One of the ways advertisers could reclaim control and optimize the path is by limiting the number of SSPs and ad exchanges they work with and work with a select number of partners. They would also need to focus on cutting off resellers from the market and opt for bids that offer them the best chance of winning. It is always important to make sure that every bid must bring a unique value attached to it in an auction-themed environment.

Implementation

One of the best ways to implement SPO is to make sure that multiple routes are being avoided to buy or sell inventory. The lesser the paths, the less the chances of duplication.

According to recent studies more than 60% of buyers currently think that SPO has reduced the chances of fraud while the buying power has also been enhanced for at least 30% of the buyers in the landscape, along with this roughly 20% of them have seen a more transparent Fee structure due to the same.

SPO Implementation steps include:

• Assessment:

Developing a thorough grasp of your programmatic supply chain is the first step in deploying SPO. This includes the process of figuring out all the intermediaries who are buying and selling your ad inventory. 

• Evaluating and consolidating intermediaries: 

Once all the intermediaries have been identified, evaluate the ones which are unnecessary or ‘bad actors’, the ones adding costs and latency to the page load time.

Based on the evaluation, consolidate the significant ones and eliminate the ones not adding value to the supply chain. 

• Monitoring the results: 

SPO is an ongoing process and it needs to be measured regularly. This will help in analyzing the efforts if the goals are being achieved or not. Based on the analysis, those efforts can be streamlined and optimized. 

This can be a complex process at times and can be achieved by having the right resources in place. Also, working with an SSP or DSP partner can be considered to simplify the process. 

What Are the Best Practices for Buyers and Sellers to Facilitate Supply Path Optimization

There are several best practices for buyers and sellers to facilitate supply path optimization. These include the use of ads.txt, sellers.json, a lesser number of SSPs, and adherence to industry standards including brand safety and relevance. 

Ads.txt and sellers.json are text files that are placed on a publisher’s website, which allows buyers to verify the identity of the seller and ensure that they are buying ad inventory from authorized sources. Reducing the number of SSPs can help optimize the supply path by reducing the complexity of the supply chain, which can lead to better efficiency and transparency.

Uses of AI for SPO

The use of AI for SPO is becoming increasingly common in the ad tech industry. AI algorithms can help automate the process of analyzing data, identifying inefficiencies, and optimizing the supply path. This can help buyers and sellers make better decisions, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.

With the growing changes in the current landscape, it is expected that AI tools will also be able to help in the execution of policies to optimize the supply path and can also aid inventory management issues.

Measurement and Enhancement of SPO Efforts

Measurement and enhancement of SPO efforts are essential for ensuring that the supply chain remains transparent and efficient. Regular monitoring and analysis of data can help identify areas for improvement and enable stakeholders to make data-driven decisions. 

By enhancing SPO efforts, buyers and sellers can optimize their supply chain, reduce costs, and improve their ROI.

Recent Industry Developments

Recent industry developments, such as the implementation of the OpenRTB 2.6 draft, Ads.txt 1.1, and Transparency Center, have further advanced the cause of supply chain transparency and optimization. 

The OpenRTB 2.6 draft includes new features that make it easier to detect and prevent fraud. Ads.txt 1.1 includes a new field that allows publishers to specify their direct relationships with advertisers, making it easier for buyers to identify authorized sellers. The Transparency Center provides a centralized location for buyers to view information about ad inventory and verify the identity of sellers.

Next Steps for Buyers and Sellers

Supply chain transparency and optimization are essential for the ad tech industry to thrive. Buyers and sellers must work together to create a transparent and efficient supply chain that benefits all stakeholders. By following best practices, utilizing AI, and embracing recent industry developments, the ad tech industry can continue to evolve and drive growth in the digital advertising space.

The post What Is Supply Path Transparency & Optimization? appeared first on AdMonsters.

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.

Consumers made the choice to remove ads from their online content consumption and publishers paid the price in billions of dollars of lost ad revenue annually. 

Admiral realized that to solve the issue, we had to convince consumers to make another conscious decision: support the content and creators they enjoyed, valued, and respected by selectively turning off their adblockers. 

The Start of Visitor Relationship Management

When Admiral launched in 2015, the company focused on providing online publishers with a gold standard solution to recover revenue losses due to the rapidly increasing use of adblockers. 

With the vast majority of publishers unable to monetize double-digit percentages of their audiences due to adblockers, we felt this was a problem that wasn’t going to go away, was only going to increase in magnitude, and was certainly one worth solving. 

Unlike early solutions that forced ads to serve by disabling or circumventing the adblocker, Admiral decided to take a different approach. 

Identify, Target & Engage

The methodology we employed was simple: detect the adblock user on-site, engage them with a customized message that explained why ads were important in supporting the continued operation of the site they were visiting, and offer them the chance to allow-list the site. 

Focusing on enabling publishers to successfully convince users to allow ads unlocks their full ad-stack, and with increasing importance, their zero/1st party data collection efforts. 

The simple act of making the appeal and asking for permission, humanized the value exchange and demonstrated the publisher’s respect for the visitor, and highlighted the symbiotic relationship between the publisher, visitor, and advertiser. 

Helping Publishers Build Relationships

Fast forward to 2022, we became really good at helping publishers get their visitors to agree to things. Now used by thousands of premium publishers and networks worldwide, the very same methodology employed by Admiral’s adblock recovery product expanded to solve additional challenges faced by publishers including:

• Privacy & Consent Management 
• Paid subscriptions, memberships, paywalls, donations, micro-payment programs
• Email acquisition 
• Growing social media channels
• Site registration to build 1st-party relationships

Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) at its core leverages key principles from the eCommerce (CRM) and marketing automation industries to effectively build relationships with site visitors to maximize ARPV (Average Revenue Per Visitor). 

Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) at its core leverages key principles from the eCommerce (CRM) and marketing automation industries to effectively build relationships with site visitors to maximize ARPV (Average Revenue Per Visitor). 

Through machine learning driven targeting and segmentation, VRM is designed to identify and profile various cohorts of visitors by putting the right offer in front of the right user at the right time with the intention of optimizing conversion rates across a litany of KPIs. 

Getting adblock users to allow ads on your site, obtaining their consent, having them sign up for an email newsletter, follow your brand across various social networks, and even paying for your content all positively affect a publisher’s ability to monetize that user. 

We Make It Easy: One tag, One Dashboard, One Data Set, One Vendor, One UX.

It wasn’t enough for Admiral to create a single platform that accomplished so many things, we had to make it extraordinarily easy to use. 

We fully understand that publishing teams are stretched thin, and sometimes the most valuable resource is time and manpower. With virtually zero dev-lift, Admiral can be implemented by simply installing a single line of JS to the <head> of your site, or if you prefer, you could drop our tag in your tag manager or use our WordPress plugin or Cloudflare app. Once the tag is on-site, publishers can access their revenue analytics, and turn on, set up, and manage any of our modules from a single dashboard. 

How each of the modules (and data sets) are able to interact with each other through this universal dash is the key to VRM. To maximize conversions within a single user journey, the various events used as optimization signals need to be able to communicate with each other. For example, someone who decides to allow-list your site has indicated a level of brand affinity that may qualify them as a stronger candidate to sign up for a paid subscription (vs. a user that has yet to allow-list). If you’re using different vendors for adblock recovery and subscriptions, you’d better hope they both have APIs that play well with others.

Marketing Automation for Publishers.

We help publishers build relationships, and relationships are the starting point to getting to know your customer. The more you know about your customer, the more you foster positive communication and interaction with your customer, the greater the likelihood that customer will purchase your product. Sound familiar? These are the defining principles of CRM, which drives the eCommerce and retail markets. 

Admiral’s VRM Platform is the first of its kind to help publishers collect and leverage behavioral data to help determine a positive outcome for a multitude of KPIs that affect revenue.

For example, one of our publishers started using our adblock recovery module to engage their users to ask them to allow-list the site. Upon seeing the ask to allow-list, a number of their visitors sent our support team messages asking if they could pay the publisher instead of disabling their blockers. Now imagine having the ability to identify this segment at scale, and then being able to target that cohort of visitors with a subscription offer. Admiral VRM does exactly that.

A better understanding of your site visitors isn’t enough unless you have the ability to act on that data, which is what Admiral does using machine learning and automation.

Using our Engage module, publishers can build a Visitor Journey of various Engagements and communicate multiple CTAs to activate users based on where they are in the journey. It’s implementing the same strategy sales teams, retailers, and product managers leverage to usher target consumers through their respective pipelines. 

Your Visitor, Your Data

With 3rd party cookies going away, and new privacy regulations on the horizon, collecting zero/1st party data is becoming absolutely essential towards creating revenue in the new norm. 

For decades publishers relied on (and paid) 3rd parties to establish the relationships that fuel everything from advertising (Google) to even communicating with their customers (Facebook). Whether it’s collecting emails for UID purposes, conducting surveys to amplify targeting capabilities for ads, or having users register for an account so you can access users in a logged-in state, there’s an opportunity right now to bring some of that functionality back in-house. 

We can also tell you that an adblock user who’s agreed to allow-list your site consumes 4x more pages than the average user, and drives higher CPMs in a RTB setting. 

We all know that the more data you have on a user, the more valuable that user is. Add consent to that equation and they become even more so.

Every pubtech player with a CMP (including Admiral) will tell you that a consented user is xx% more valuable in a live auction setting than a non-consented user. We can also tell you that an adblock user who’s agreed to allow-list your site consumes 4x more pages than the average user, and drives higher CPMs in a RTB setting. 

Admiral believes that the future of online monetization lies in consent-based, 1st-party visitor relationships between publishers and their visitors. Relationships matter. Relationships drive revenue growth and are the foundations to solving a myriad of challenges publishers face today.

The stronger the relationship with your visitors, the more value flows from each visit.

Come check out our session — Digital Media SMACKDOWN! Rob Beeler & Admiral CEO Dan Rua Talk Data, Blockers & Relationships — at PubForum St. Petersburg on Tuesday, March, 08.

The post What is VRM and Why Does Every Publisher Need It? appeared first on AdMonsters.

But do you really understand the mechanics behind the file and what you as a publisher should be doing to maintain the quality of advertising on your site?

Ads.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers (yup it’s an acronym) and it is supposed to be a simple, flexible, and secure method that publishers and distributors can use to publicly declare the companies they authorize to sell their digital inventory.

Here are the basics:

1. Ads.txt is a publicly accessible record of authorized digital sellers for publisher inventory that programmatic buyers can index and reference.
2. Participating publishers must post their list of authorized sellers to their domain. 
3. Programmatic buyers can then crawl the web for publisher ads.txt files to create a list of authorized sellers for each participating publisher. 
4. Then programmatic buyers can create a filter to match their ads.txt list against the data provided in the OpenRTB bid request.

But if you don’t understand how it works, you allow yourself to be bullied by buyers who demand additions to your ads.txt file, and if you don’t maintain your file, your ads.txt may not be doing the job it was designed to do.

In their recent Spotlight Session at PubForum San Diego, Lior Shvo, Managing Director at Sellers.guide by Primis, took some time to educate us on the current challenges publishers face with ads.txt and how Sellers.guide, a free tool, from Primis can help.

Publishers that don’t truly understand, how it works, don’t evaluate addition requests by buyers, and/or don’t take the time to maintain the file, could be facing invalid ads.txt entries. Invalid entries can be caused by being inaccurate or they were once, but are now no longer active. Invalid entries can result in:

• Site latency
• Clickjacking
• Unsuitable ads
• Domain spoofing
• Mobile redirects
• Throttling
• Inefficient supply paths
• And ultimately the loss of revenue.

Primis saw this problem happening with their clients and set out to solve this problem. Out of that initiative Sellers.guide was born.

Sellers.guide using its domain analysis tool cross-references your ads.txt file to sellers.json files. The tool provides you with an overall score and an analysis of your score in twelve different categories. From there it provides a wizard to help walk you through each of the areas, providing benchmark data and recommendations to improve your score, but more importantly the quality of your ads.txt file. 

These are steps that a publisher can take on their own, but it is a manual time-intensive process. Sellers.guide also provides The Wizard, a free tool that helps publishers take their analysis into action, and in a few steps, create a new, clean ads.txt file that will be sent to their email. This automates the updating process, taking it from days to minutes.

How it works:

• The clean-up process is organized according to various flags identified during the domain’s analysis.
• If the publisher chooses to clean up their files, the Wizard will take them through a step-by-step process that enables them to simply click on the lines that need to be fixed.
• After cleaning up, the publisher enters an email address, where the updated ads.txt file will be sent.
• Publishers will be able to upload the new ads.txt file as is to the root domain.

Publishers who clean their ads.txt files will automatically regain control over who has access to their inventory, ensuring that they are represented correctly to buyers while preventing ad fraud.

The Sellers.guide Analysis Tool and The Wizard are free to use for all publishers! Check it out at Sellers.guide.

The post PubForum Spotlight: The Truth About Ads.txt appeared first on AdMonsters.

Guess what? Preparing for privacy regulations, along with the death of the third-party cookie (and other identifiers used to target individuals and measure advertising) is still a colossal challenge.

So, what’s coming to the data and privacy landscape in 2022? Expect more state-led privacy legislation coming to the table, GDPR to kick it up a notch while privacy spans global, privacy ad tech to get a lot of shine, cookieless solutions to face the music, and global privacy controls to gain traction. Real-time bidding they’re coming for you.

5 Data Privacy Trends for 2022

The State Privacy Party Will Continue

There will be no federal privacy law this year. Instead, the “patchwork” of state privacy laws will continue. In addition to Colorado, Virginia, and California, I expect two-three more states to pass privacy laws this session. It’s not clear which states will go, but there will be more states to contend with by the end of 2022.

This is going to require companies to create (if they haven’t already) comprehensive privacy programs that allow them to understand what data they collect, where it sits, how they use it, who they share it with, and the value of that data.  This is not a one-time exercise, it will require ongoing maintenance.

This is the foundation that will help companies layer on additional privacy requirements as they come in, instead of scrambling and starting from old information each time there is a new law/obligation.  This exercise impacts legal, IT, procurement/sourcing, and the sales and marketing teams. The days when privacy was a problem for legal or compliance to deal with are over.

Privacy Goes Global

There is a lot of conversation about state privacy laws and the lack of federal privacy legislation, but outside of the U.S., we are seeing privacy go global. In the EU, I expect to see the enforcement of the GDPR and e-Privacy continue to escalate. After a few “quiet” years with a small number of fines, the cases filed with the various data protection authorities have worked their way through the system and the increase in fines reported in 2021 will likely continue. I expect there to be a focus on the use of cookies and the practice of programmatic advertising and real-time bidding.

Both the ICO in the UK and CNIL in France investigated this practice in 2019 and 2022 may be the year that they start to enforce the warnings previously given. Outside of the EU, Canada and Australia are updating their privacy laws, India is considering a new privacy law, China will be enforcing the law it passed last year, and Saudi Arabia (among other countries) passed a privacy law last year.

I expect to see the trend of increased privacy regulation and enforcement around the globe continue.  Companies will need to navigate much more than the U.S. privacy landscape if they really want to work on a global scale (see prediction #1 about the need for a privacy program).

Privacy Tech Will Take Center Stage

As regulators, consumers, and the big platforms continue to put pressure on business models that rely on the sharing of personal information, companies will turn to technology to help them achieve their business goals.  In 2021 we saw the rise of privacy-enhancing technologies – in 2022 they will take center stage.

Techniques like differential privacy and homomorphic encryption, along with solutions that involve synthetic data, will gain in popularity as sharing personal information continues to be stymied by privacy-related restrictions. Clean rooms will stay in the mix as a privacy-forward solution. Companies should expect to see more of these solutions being marketed in their inboxes and will need to understand the technology and its implications as they decide which to add to their tech stack.

Post-cookie Solutions Will Be Put to the Test

At the top of 2022, we are still anxiously awaiting news on the proposed regulations under the CPRA. The head of the CPPA, the agency writing those rules, has signaled some skepticism about e-mail based identifiers. That doesn’t mean they won’t survive, but they may be subject to the same restrictions currently placed on cookie IDs and similar identifiers.

Global Privacy Controls Will Gain Traction

I am using the lowercase here because I don’t know if uppercase GPC is the final word on what a global control looks like and I think there are still too many open questions about its implementation. That said, I think there is a real concern with how consumer choice is provided – regulators don’t like the idea that consumers have to navigate the privacy practices of each website they visit in order to exercise those choices (and neither do consumers).

My hope is that we have more dialogue on how a “gpc” should function and some standard setting for the signals sent.  First, we need to understand what exactly are consumers opting out of?

Each state has a different definition and slightly different approaches to what activities a consumer should be able to opt-out of – how can there be a “global” tool when there aren’t global definitions?

Second, there hasn’t been enough alignment on the logistics — how will platforms receive the opt-out signal, what is the impact on offline activities, how should browsers communicate the potential limitations, and how can we allow consumers to make individual choices for companies they have a relationship with.  I hope to see some of these questions answered before we see significant enforcement of unclear expectations.

The post 5 Data Privacy Trends to Watch in 2022 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.

Of course, the advertising supply and demand ecosystem isn’t quite so simple. Under the surface, advertisers and publishers rely on the delicate relationship between DSPs and SSPs to make sure the right ad gets to the right audience at the right time—ensuring publishers maximize ad revenue and advertisers maximize ROI. Yet, despite record ad spend and a booming ad tech market, the advertising ecosystem is increasingly showing signs of its age.

The Problem: Ad Opportunities and Bid Requests Are No Longer Synonymous

Across the advertising supply chain, rusty ad tech pipes and a lack of transparency continue to breed distrust from both publishers and advertisers. For example, one 2020 report by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and PwC found that a large, and growing, ad tech black hole is causing ad spend to dry up before it ever makes it to the publisher. Publishers currently receive only 51% of advertiser spend and one-third of supply chain costs go unattributed, according to the study.

While there are multiple reasons for the growing inefficiencies in the ad buying process, one of the fundamental reasons can be traced to the widespread adoption of header bidding. When publishers first began using header bidding strategies in the mid-2010s, it immediately led to rapid growth in the number and frequency of bid requests.

Header bidding suddenly allowed these publishers to create simultaneous auctions for the same inventory across multiple SSPs and exchanges at the same time. But this new header-bidding approach harbored one key inefficiency: 

It created widespread duplication of bid requests, as multiple SSPs and exchanges peppered DSPs with the same ad opportunities over and over again. 

Fast forward to the current header bidding climate and more than 90% of bid requests now result in wasted traffic that does not receive a single bid from DSPs and their advertisers.

As if that wasn’t enough, the ad tech consolidation arms race has intensified in recent years—driven by an overcrowded market and rising tech infrastructure costs—which has led to fewer DSPs and an even more strained relationship between SSPs and the DSPs that remain.

DSPs have responded to the bid request explosion with queries per second (QPS) limits designed to streamline the bid request process and reduce the high costs associated with trillions of requests. But this is far from a perfect solution, and it introduces new problems—namely, who should really be in control of filtering bid requests: the supply side or demand side?

Getting Back to the Basics: Delivering the Right Ad, at the Right Time, to the Right Audience

Ultimately, what both DSPs and SSPs were looking for was greater bid request relevance. For the SSPs, this meant finding a way to limit bid requests to the inventory that a specific DSP would actually bid on. While, for the DSPs, it meant reducing the overall bidstream and filtering out costly bid request duplication.

DSPs sought to solve this problem first by developing supply path optimization solutions that would help them to identify bids that were more likely to win an auction. However, these solutions sometimes made it difficult for SSPs and their publisher partners to understand how and why their bid requests were performing.

Enter traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is an automated process in which programmatic auctions are filtered to expose the relevance of each auction. Traffic shaping seeks to solve the wasted traffic problem by selecting a subset of bid requests that are more likely to result in bids when passed on to DSP partners.

“It’s simply acknowledging that exchanges cannot send 100% of ad opportunities to DSP buyers,” said Chris Kane, Founder and President at Jounce Media, a programmatic advertising consultancy. “And so, the shaping part is: Well, if I’m not going to send every part, what am I going to send?”

The theory behind traffic shaping strategies is that by sending only the most relevant advertising opportunities to each DSP, the infrastructure costs associated with waste can be greatly reduced without having a noticeable impact on SSP and publisher revenue.

According to research executed by Rivr—a traffic shaping solutions provider—traffic shaping can result in a reduction of bid requests by 30-60%, while still maintaining nearly 100% of existing revenue for SSPs and their publisher partners. Additionally, the infrastructure savings from this type of reduction in bid requests can drive massive profit gains for SSPs and their DSP partners.

So, What’s Holding Traffic Shaping Back?

Given the clear benefits, it would be easy to assume traffic shaping is a solution publishers, SSPs, exchanges, and DSPs should all be able to get behind. But that simply hasn’t been the case—as pent-up distrust across the advertising ecosystem harbors lingering concerns about the goals and use cases for traffic shaping. Not to mention, SSPs continue to view traffic shaping as a low priority initiative—far below their focus on consumer privacy and identity resolution. 

In order to effectively move past these concerns, it’s time for the industry to address them head-on—and turn greater issue transparency into mutually beneficial solutions. Let’s take a look at three of the primary concerns holding the ad tech industry back from realizing its traffic shaping future:

Concern #1: Traffic Shaping Will Damage Publisher Revenue Streams

It stands to reason that when you start selectively sending bid requests to just a few demand sources, publisher revenue might be the first thing to suffer. After all, publishers have been conditioned from years of header bidding success to believe that the more SSP plug-ins they use, the higher their revenue will climb.

By shutting off supply from SSPs and publishers that generate high QPS with low returns, DSPs have changed this balance. In this emerging environment, publishers may find that peppering the buy-side with bid requests could get them blocked from critical sources of advertiser spend.

It’s a well-documented fact that modest bid requests and high margins are two things DSPs love—and they love them, even more, when they come together. At its core, traffic shaping seeks to optimize for both of these things. Traffic shaping results continue to suggest that traffic shaping can preserve nearly all existing publisher revenue.

Even better—once QPS limits become less of a guiding factor—publishers will be free to build competitive differentiation in powerful new ways.

“It’s exciting to us, [publishers], that we might be able to compete with other publishers on the quality of the ad experience and other aspects rather than QPS,” said Patrick McCann, Senior Vice President of Product/Data at CafeMedia. 

Concern #2: Traffic Shaping Is Not a High-priority Investment

In a complex industry that also has evolving brand safety, identity, and ad fraud challenges to contend with on a daily basis, it’s often the same DevOps team responsible for tackling all of these issues. As a result, traffic shaping tends to quickly fall down the to-do list.

“Traffic shaping is not a high priority for an SSP, because—let’s face it—they don’t view it as an existential crisis,” said Benjamin Hansz, Vice President of Strategy at Rivr. “If an SSP doesn’t have the best traffic shaping, a DSP will still buy from them. But the moment an SSP fails to account for a growing fraud or brand safety concern? Revenues will dry up within 24 hours.”

However, this is a risky approach. Why? Because it risks devaluing bids over time, which could quickly lead to a fallout with publishers who wish to maximize the return on their available inventory. For this reason, waiting until traffic shaping becomes a bigger issue may mean waiting until it’s too late—when publishers have already moved on to someone else.

Concern #3: Traffic Shaping Is a Product Challenge for SSPs

This final concern stems from the previous one. If an SSP doesn’t have the bandwidth to tackle traffic shaping challenges right now, but also can’t afford not to, what can they do?

When the team at GumGum encountered this very problem, they didn’t like the options. Skipping out on traffic shaping altogether seemed like a good way to anger their DSP partners, but finding the internal staff hours to solve this complicated challenge wasn’t an option either. In their case, finding the expertise and bandwidth they needed to get traffic shaping right required turning to a third-party solution.

“A product like Rivr, even though we could spend a lot of time internally building a traffic shaping solution—as a lot of other SSPs have done—we didn’t feel like that should be our core competency,” said GumGum CTO Ken Weiner. “We could have built it if there wasn’t an option, but this seemed like a more efficient use of our time and capabilities.”

Pushback to a third-party traffic shaping solution tends to revolve around the belief that SSPs should prioritize investment in proprietary competitive advantages. But traffic shaping’s role in the ad tech ecosystem is too fundamental to the ecosystem’s future success to continue to ignore. As the industry hurtles toward its brave, new, less cookie-dependent future, the nature of programmatic trading and auction dynamics will only grow more complex.

 Traffic shaping is an investment in a more productive and profitable future for the advertising ecosystem—one that meets DSP needs for reduced bid requests and maximizes publisher revenue. For that reason, it’s also a challenge that is perfectly tailored for a third-party solution that benefits publishers, DSPs—and every step in between.

The post The Future—and Present—of Bidstream Efficiency Lies with Traffic Shaping appeared first on AdMonsters.