Chris woke us up with a bang, delivering a highly insightful session at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO. He shed light on bidstream congestion, a major issue complicating digital advertising today. Bidstream congestion occurs when the same ad impression opportunity is offered multiple times through different supply paths. 

It leads to discrepancies, increased cost, and complexity in the bidding process. Chris addressed this by walking us through the intricacies. His emphasis on “deepening the dependencies” was vital to understanding the financial flows within the supply chain, urging the audience to think beyond surface-level transactions. From the open internet share shift to the nitty-gritty of auction duplication, Chris provided a deep dive into how advertisers, publishers, and intermediaries interact in such a crowded space.

The explosive growth of the industry catalyzed an arms race among publishers competing for attention in an overly saturated market, leading to challenges for advertisers and media agencies alike.

The Big Players and Their Influence

Chris started his session with a detailed analysis of open internet ad spend over the past eight years. Over this timeframe, we saw Google’s gross ad spend take off in 2021, with them dominating the market from 2020 to 2024. Google leads open internet gross ad spend projections for 2024, with The Trade Desk and Amazon DSP right behind them.

Walled gardens like Google, Meta, and Amazon operate closed systems that significantly influence market dynamics. Google’s non-search advertising is projected to hit $35 billion, Meta commands between $100 billion and $120 billion, and Amazon is at $45 billion. In contrast, the open internet still retains a significant share of the market, valued at $70 to $75 billion, providing an alternative to these walled gardens.

What’s also interesting is how these platforms reshape how the industry allocates spending.

According to Chris, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest are rising challenger gardens. But things are shifting. While these platforms may not match the spend of the giants, they are creating their own lane. This share shift could totally reshape the competition. In his overview, Chris highlighted just how huge the Walled Gardens’ influence is over market activity. This was the central theme of his discussion as he dove into detail about the various aspects of the ad tech supply chain.

While walled gardens offer a streamlined approach with integrated services, the open internet is more flexible. Navigating between these two requires a nuanced understanding of each platform’s strengths and limitations. Enterprises must strategically balance investments to optimize their advertising reach and efficiency.

The Anatomy of Bidstream Congestion: The Bloat

Bidstream congestion happens when multiple publishers send the same ad impression through different supply paths, resulting in redundant auction entries that DSPs need to sift through.

DSPs process approximately 30 million bid requests per second, a number that grows as publishers try to ensure their inventory gets noticed by the right buyers. Each publisher competes fiercely to make its inventory attractive to DSPs, who ultimately decide which auctions are worth pursuing.

Chris emphasized how ads.txt bloat has become symptomatic of this congestion. The average number of authorized supply paths for top RTB-traded websites, mobile apps, and CTV apps has skyrocketed from January 2020 to January 2024.

This means more paths for advertisers and more complications for DSPs drowned with duplicate and redundant opportunities. Despite publishers initiating numerous auctions, DSPs often listen to the same bid requests. This disparity reveals a harsh truth: initiating more auctions doesn’t necessarily improve a publisher’s chances of being selected.

Auction Duplication: A Path to Efficiency or Chaos?

One huge contributor to bidstream congestion is auction duplication. In this process, publishers engage multiple SSPs to re-auction the ad inventory, aiming to increase the likelihood of being selected by DSPs. While this strategy may seem rational for publishers seeking higher demand, the more SSPs involved, the harder it is to trace each dollar of ad spend. 

“When it comes to rebroadcasting supply chains, four out of every ten bid requests are duplicative options that take multiple fees and expose problems in the supply chain. Today 40% of the midstream is multi-hop resale.” Chris said when illustrating rebroadcasting. In terms of direct paths and monetizing sites and apps the median across the full web, mobile app and CTV supply is 16. 

“The average total impression is presented 16 times through direct supply chains, 41% of bidding requests are rebroadcasted and 59% are direct supply chains. With each impression made available 16 times through direct supply chains, plus another 14 times through rebroadcasted supply chains there is a 30x auction duplication.”

Yet, despite the congestion and duplication, this structure is seen as a necessary evil to maximize monetization potential, raising questions about whether the duplication ultimately serves or hinders the industry’s long-term growth. While it’s a way for publishers to ensure their inventory gets more eyeballs, this duplication creates inefficiencies that the entire industry must grapple with, inflating bid streams and increasing the overall cost of ad placements. 

In simpler terms, rebroadcast paths mean that bid requests go through multiple hops before they reach a potential buyer. “DSPs who do not take advantage of rebroadcasting opportunities will go out of business,” Chris pointed out. The industry is evolving, and those who don’t evolve with it — whether they’re buyers, sellers, or intermediaries — could be left in the dust.

A Look to the Future: Will Duplication Save the Day?

Chris closed by exploring whether auction duplication is an efficient solution to bidstream congestion or a stopgap for masking deeper issues. On one hand, duplication is a great opportunity for publishers, providing them multiple chances to get their inventory seen, thus maximizing potential revenue. On the other hand, it adds layers of complexity that make the supply chain inefficient and opaque, driving up costs for everyone involved.

“Understanding the programmatic supply chain is no longer optional for stakeholders in the ad tech space. It requires the operational mindset of an insider — someone willing to get their hands dirty in the technical details of how inventory is auctioned, sold, and bought. You have to deepen the dependencies to really understand how money moves in the supply chain,” Chris said.

The ad tech ecosystem is changing rapidly, and bidstream congestion is but one symptom of the evolution. Whether auction duplication can effectively mitigate congestion or add more fuel to the fire is still a debate. But for those in the trenches of ad tech, understanding these dynamics is essential to navigating the future — and making sure they come out on top.

Industry leaders must innovate and adopt new practices to mitigate the detrimental effects of bidstream congestion. Auction duplication, while currently the norm, requires reevaluation.

Publishers and advertisers need to explore ways to streamline the bidding process, perhaps by improving the transparency and efficiency of SSP-DSP interactions or implementing more advanced targeting algorithms to reduce unnecessary bid requests.

The post Bidstream Congestion: Cracking the Ad Tech Supply Chain Code appeared first on AdMonsters.

In digital advertising’s evolving landscape, sustainability is often seen as a necessary yet challenging goal. Emry Downinghall, SVP of Programmatic Revenue & Strategy at Unwind Media, is at the forefront of this transformation.

Unwind Media is pioneering strategies that not only lessen the publisher’s environmental impact but also enhance their bottom line. In this exclusive Q&A, Downinghall shares insights into the innovative approaches that have enabled Unwind Media to balance economic performance with ecological responsibility, providing valuable lessons for the industry.

Let’s explore how these strategies are reshaping the future of sustainable media.

Lynne d Johnson: At the Green Media Summit, your panel explored how publishers can reduce carbon emissions without sacrificing revenue. From Unwind Media’s perspective, how do you balance these two sometimes conflicting goals, and what has been the most challenging aspect of aligning sustainability with business objectives?

Emry Downinghall: The most challenging aspect was convincing business leaders that this was possible and something worth prioritizing on our roadmap.

For publishers, the idea of reducing emissions without negatively impacting business performance does feel like a conflict. Historically the open exchange has mostly rewarded more (partners, bid requests, ads on page) with more (bid density, impressions, revenue), all of which require more energy and generate more emissions, and our initial perspective was no exception. 

However, my primary focus was improving our open exchange efficiency while also improving KPIs that matter to advertisers like viewability and CTR. It just turns out that a great way to improve your attractiveness in the open market coincides with reducing emissions.

LdJ: Unwind Media has implemented innovative traffic-shaping strategies like “no ads if idle” and “smart request.” Can you elaborate on how these tactics contribute to sustainability and potentially enhance user experience and ad viewability? What have been the measurable impacts on your ad operations and revenue?

ED: First, let’s define what these things are as simply as possible. It’s two, pretty straightforward features we integrated into our ad wrapper that require a small amount of code to monitor and manage bid requests and auctions. 

‘Smart Request’ stops calling SSPs that have failed to clear our dynamic price floor for X-number of auctions over Y-period, by user session and ad unit. ‘No Ads If Idle’ stops the programmatic auction if we detect the user is idle on-page for more than 60 seconds.

The sustainability benefits of these programs are centered around making a publisher’s programmatic auction more efficient. If you’re making fewer ad requests, you’re using less energy and becoming more sustainable. 

Smart Request leads to fewer total requests to SSPs resulting in a lowered carbon footprint, while also improving the performance and cost efficiency of the publisher to the SSP. Put simply, you’re a more attractive pipe to your partners because you send them more of what they want and less of what they don’t want. No Ads If Idle is a commonsense approach that reduces requests while improving viewability, CTR and attention scores.

We measured no negative revenue impact from these tests and cut total ad requests to SSPs by more than 50% while also improving desktop viewability by over 14%.

LdJ: When it comes to media sustainability, how do you view the division of responsibility between publishers and advertisers? Should there be a shared approach, and how can both sides collaborate more effectively to amplify their impact?

ED: I think meaningful change will come from a combination of education (what this is, why it matters) and business-focused outcomes.

I haven’t spoken to a publisher that isn’t supportive of becoming more sustainable. They just want to better understand what this means for their business and how it can realistically tie into their goals.

ShareThrough’s Green Media Summit was an example of cross-industry education and shared best practices. Scope3’s carbon measurement tool is a good place to get a sense of where you stand vs. the rest of the industry and the IAB Tech Lab’s Sustainability Playbook is a great resource as well. 

LdJ: Looking forward, what emerging strategies do you see as key to further reducing the carbon footprint of digital advertising? 

ED: I’d like to see more clearly defined benefits for publishers that choose to make responsible decisions around things like ads-to-content ratio, bid request duplication, and ads.txt entries. 

Scope3’s GMP+ along with SSPs that curate “Green PMP” deals for publishers are two examples of ways to benefit directly from being more sustainable. Let’s make that approach more pervasive across the industry.

LdJ: For publishers looking to reduce their environmental impact without hurting their bottom line, what key lessons or practices from Unwind Media’s experience would you recommend they consider? 

ED: Focus on internal measurement first. If you can easily understand what’s happening at the bidstream level you’ll be more willing to test and more capable of determining outcomes with confidence.

Don’t try to do everything at once. This is an iterative process that we’ve been working on since July of 2022. At no point did we run two tests at the same time. 

Think of these changes as foundational improvements to your ad stack and don’t conflate them with short term yield tests.

Internally, take advantage of opportunities to tie outcomes to product goals around user experience. As you work towards being a more efficient publisher your user experience will also improve and you’ll be popular internally !

I’ll close with a list of 5 things we’ve done to become a more efficient and sustainable publisher.  If you’re able to test into any of these changes you will not only holistically improve your inventory profile but long term its value as well.

5 Ways to Become a More Efficient and Sustainable Publisher

The post Balancing Act: Unwind Media’s Journey to Sustainability 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.

At PubForum Nashville, Lior Shvo, VP Marketing, Primis discussed this very thing.

In her session, “Doing Some Good: Purpose as a Business Strategy” she uses her company Primis as an example to highlight how defining a greater purpose for your brand is an essential component of creating and sustaining a successful business. 

“Deloitte research shows that brands who prioritize workers across all their businesses go higher or better than other brands,” said Shvo. “because it also affects the business messaging and employee decision making — not only the brand’s consumers.” 

No Purpose = No Long-Term Future

Shvo first encountered purpose as a business strategy back in 2013 when Dove created a campaign centered around women’s empowerment. 

“That purposeful agenda was all about making women feel comfortable in the skin they’re in and to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence and not anxiety,” she said. 

At that time, Shvo was Vice President, Client Relations at UM Worldwide, and one of the brands she worked with was Unilever. She was inspired by a woman she met on the B2C side who led with a product strategy that was quite unconventional at the time. She decided to focus on the consumer instead of the product and really determine how to find a purpose for the product in the consumer’s lives.

This led to the launch of the Dove Real Beauty Campaign. Utilizing the insight that only 2% of women find themselves beautiful, Dove wanted to portray the realistic body type examples of women rather than portraying real women as models.

In 2013, the campaign asked women to describe themselves to a forensic sketch artist who did not see them before drawing them. Those images were compared to sketches where other women described those women to the artist. The images described by other women were more flattering than the ones in which the women described themselves. A video featuring these comparisons shared the message: You are more beautiful than you think. The campaign went on to have great success. Similar Dove campaigns run to this day and have inspired many others to follow suit. 

In fact, that business strategy was so successful that in 2019, Alan Jopa, CEO of Unilever, declared that “brands without purpose have no long-term future.” 

Purpose-Driven Strategies in Ad Tech

In addition, statistics show that purposeful strategies are profitable for every aspect of the business. That includes revenue, employee satisfaction, and brand equity. “High-growth brands prioritize purpose across the organization,” shared Shvo. 

Brands using this strategy saw 42% positive growth for brand messaging, 58% positive growth for guiding employee decision-making, 58% positive growth for driving corporate social responsibility investment strategy, and 66% positive growth for product and service delivery. 

There are companies in ad tech who are capitalizing on this message: 

Scope3 measures end-to-end emissions from across the media and advertising supply chain. Businesses from every side of the industry – both buyers and sellers – use them to help facilitate their data use to reduce their carbon footprint. 

Good-Loop serves adverts for brands while raising money for charity. Brands that work with them choose which charity partner to support, offering an opportunity to be philanthropic while executing a great ad performance. 

Ad For Good is a community of brands and media agencies that want to use advertising as a force for good. Similarly to Good-Loop, advertisers can choose a cause or charity of their choice and donate to them through the ad-selling process. They also have a focus on environmental sustainability. 

Sellers.guide and Sustainable Stream

Primis also focuses on doing social good.

For example, with Sellers.guide, the ad tech company saw a need to improve what they called the “injustice of transparency.” Remember the mysteriously missing 15% uncovered in the ISBA Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study two years ago? Beyond how that data highlighted the lack of transparency in the programmatic supply chain, Primis also realized that many publishers do not know how to properly manage their ads.txt files. 

With Sellers.guide, the company’s mission is to “help publishers and buyers gain insight into the authenticity of the parties who mediate between them. By doing so, we hope to promote transparency as well as curb ad fraud and other malpractices casting a shadow over the AdTech ecosystem,” said Shvo.

The results speak for themselves. Primis has helped 31,640 domains in 183 countries. 

There’s also Sustainable Stream, launched in partnership with Magnite, which is a video marketplace connecting environmentally conscious content creators, with publishers and brands. The initiative will generate funding for the production and distribution of content related to combating climate change and provide publishers and advertisers with high-quality content on this topic.

“As a video platform company, we already know that content, video content especially, is a key factor in driving change,” said Shvo. “We know that awareness, education, and emotion shape consciousness and behavior.” 

Already, in only four months since launching, Sustainable Stream brought in $1.4 million in ad spend and accrued 690 million views. This is proof that purpose-driven campaigns are not only beneficial for the larger society but are also profitable for brands.

“So I urge you not to ask yourself to be the change which is something that is kind of privileged and I think maybe works best for nonprofit organizations,” says Shvo. “But just ask yourself, How can you be the profitable change?”

The post Purpose is Profit: Create a Sustainable Strategy appeared first on AdMonsters.

Now we are seeing ad tech companies do the unthinkable, going from being competitors to becoming frenemies but for the greater good.

Aniview and diDNA, an end-to-end video advertising company and an SSP, have collaborated to bring more revenue opportunities to publishers, and the partnership is flourishing so far. 

“I think there is a bigger need for more collaboration than competition,” Gwen Wiscount, CRO of diDNA, explained. “The increase of knowledge share and overall brainpower is more beneficial to both our publishers and Aniview’s publishers alike.”

The two-sided partnership between Aniview and diDNA is one where both companies help to service one another’s publisher partners to retain more revenue. The collaboration started a little over a year ago and speaks to the constant evolution both companies are looking to make. 

The Power of Partnerships

At this point, both companies are fully embedded within each other and communicate regularly. This ongoing partnership allows both companies to provide insight and collaborate to determine the best strategies for addressing new shifts in the industry and product releases in the market. 

Aniview and diDNA cover a large part of the publisher ecosystem, and at the end of the day, working together allows both ad tech companies to stay ahead of the curve. Even more impressive is that their frenemy relationship with one another doesn’t just stop there. diDNA is a top Google MCM partner, and Aniview is welcome to take advantage of this aspect of its business.

“It’s all about the strength of partnerships and the strength of working together versus against each other. Because of the opportunities that both Aniview and diDNA have based upon our different standings with Google and other entities, we’re able to hear new happenings in the ecosystem before things come about,” Wiscount explained. “So with that, we can work on the forefront to prepare for what’s next, which has been extremely helpful.”

The reality is that ad tech companies are equally important to one another, but in some cases, there can be a substantial benefit because of the technical mindsets. diDNA’s partnership with Google allows them to have some of the highest-quality video inventory. Because of that standing and the quality, they also have unique opportunities to beta test various features, functionalities, and tools that are not yet released to the market. This beta testing happens through Aniview. 

When beta testing, both companies keep in mind that it’s for the shared interest in collaborating for the betterment of publishers. This enables them to approach testing from several sides. Transparency is crucial to the success of this relationship.

Should We Expect to See More Frenemies in the Future?

As the ecosystem evolves, we can expect to see more partnerships like these in ad tech. Hopefully, ad tech companies will realize the power of bringing their forces together as a win for publishers and the entire ecosystem. Partnerships like Aniview’s and diDNA’s benefit publishers because it allows them to see the most revenue they can from their inventory. And the two ad tech companies benefit because of their collaboration and the integration of each other’s technologies. 

“A couple of years ago, it was very common to have so many people involved in one transaction, and then there came ads.txt and Sellers json, where they tried to get the least amount of partners possible in that same transaction,” Yael Schuster, VP of marketing at Aniview, explained. “We’ve learned over time that the number of partners is not a matter, but the quality of those partnerships. We don’t see the evolution as just direct relations, but the right relations.”

The post Two Heads Better Than One: Aniview & diDNA Join Forces to Drive Pub Revenue appeared first on AdMonsters.

And even though ads.txt was created to thwart bad actors from performing arbitrage, domain spoofing, clickjacking and ultimately messing with legit publishers’ revenue, Independent Ad Fraud Researcher, Dr. Augustine Fou says. “The usefulness of ads.txt to reducing ad fraud depends entirely on fraud detection actually checking for this mismatch and ad exchanges actually not transacting on the ads when they detect it. Evidence shows fraud detection is not catching it and exchanges are not enforcing it.”

As well, publishers need a clear understanding of how their ads.txt file will be used by the buy side. As well, buyers should understand the proper uses of ads.txt  and its complement sellers.json. Besides domain spoofing and clickjacking, invalid entries in ads.txt can result in site latency, unsuitable ads, redirects, throttling, and inefficient supply paths.

That’s why ads.txt maintenance is so important.

Charles Eggleston, Director, Yield & Operations, 33Across, shares why it’s important to keep Ads.txt files up-to-date and how to keep them clean.

Why Publishers Need to Keep Their Ads.txt Files up to Date

Lynne d Johnson: At the end of the day, the main incentive for publishers to keep their Ads.txt files up to date is that not keeping them up to date could result in lost revenue. What else should publishers know about keeping their Ads.txt files up to date?

Charles Eggleston: There are some important steps publishers should take to ensure they’re optimizing their ads.txt file capabilities. First, let’s talk about the top reasons they should keep those files up to date, and then we can talk about the steps they should take to get the most out of their ads.txt file.

• Receive more advertiser spend — Platforms are always updating default buyer settings, so updating your ads.txt files ensures you are eligible for all platform ad campaigns. If more advertisers have the capability to bid for ad space, this results in more revenue. Sometimes, DSP and SSP partners sunset or update their ads.txt lines, so you always want the most up-to-date lines to prevent any loss in revenue. A regular cadence of updating your ads.txt will ensure you know who is authorized to sell your inventory and guarantee you are not leaving ad dollars on the table.
• Buyer verification — If your ads.txt files are up to date, buyers can confirm they’re buying from a reliable source. You should remove any seller or reseller that you no longer work with so that they’re not being represented in your inventory to buyers.
• Earn more cookieless revenue — Unlike highly-competitive cookied reseller lines, cookieless reseller lines drive competition to your under-monetized inventory. Don’t miss out on demand from over 10 DSPs that target your unaddressable inventory.

Steps Publishers Should Take to Keep Their Ads.txt Files up to Date

LdJ: What tips do you have for publishers to keep their ads.txt files updated?

CE: There are three main steps publishers should take to keep their Ads.txt files in check.

• Conduct regular monitoring — You should Check if any partners are missing or if there are mistyped numbers, symbols, etc. These seemingly small issues could, quite literally, cost you. Errors or missing ads.txt lines could lead to consistently low buyer bid rates. Low bid rates lead to fewer ad impressions or low fill rates which then leads to lower revenue.
• Maintain ongoing vendor communication — Check in with your most valued SSP partners on an ongoing basis; schedule quarterly business reviews, to learn what’s new, what’s bringing you value, and what’s potentially not working.
• Cookieless reseller lines — I’d like to reiterate that unlike resellers for cookies, cookieless reseller lines increase competition for your undervalued supply.

Remember, ads.txt provides transparency in the ecosystem to highlight who is a legitimate partner authorized to sell your inventory. If your file is improperly setup and not maintained, you risk blocking potential advertising partners from running on your site.

The post Why Publishers Need to Keep Their Ads.txt Files up to Date appeared first on AdMonsters.

This week, we were presented with a major IAB Tech Lab ads.txt update as they announced two new values for publishers to add to their ads.txt files, and both have the power to impact the adtech game in a big way.

“Ownerdomain” and “managerdomain” have two separate functions within ads.txt, yet both present visibility in understanding seller relationships through sellers.json. This IAB Tech Lab ads.txt update also contributes to ads.text’s ability to reduce fraud in buying and selling advertisements across websites, mobile apps, and connected TV.

The ownerdomain function specifies the domain of the publisher that owns the website that the ad is being served on. This helps connect the seller domain for publisher entries in sellers.json files. Previously it was hard to track programmatically leading to mismatched seller domains, especially when a business owns a few publisher properties.

Managerdomain, on the other hand, can help smaller and medium publishers function like tech giants by helping the publisher determine the primary or exclusive monetization partner of a site’s inventory, giving them a greater chance of retaining better supply path optimization (SPO) results.

Why does this happen? Because publishers that outsource yield management, and operate via manager’s seller ids can sometimes have to go through many hops to access their inventory, making it tough when SPOs seek to only buy from the least amount of hops possible.

With managerdomain in ads.txs buyers can be confident in knowing that if there are multiple hops, you may have to cross those bridges to access the publisher’s inventory.

We spoke with Shailley Singh, Vice President of Product and Global Programs over at IAB Tech Lab about how these new additions will not only provide increased benefits to publishers but also help to take some items off of their plates.

Yakira Young: While the pros of “ownerdomain” and “managerdomain” ads.txt values are more than evident, are there any cons or bumps in the road that publishers should be aware of when utilizing these updates? 

Shailley Singh: For both these domain declarations, publishers should ensure that the domain listed in sellers.json file matches ads.txt entries, that’s the primary diligence they need to do with their sellers.

For managerdomain, publishers should note the geographic/ country vs global manager domain declaration.

YY: Even with Google’s sellers.json, 53% of seller accounts are listed confidential. How can these updates help rectify the “unmapped sellers” dilemma pertaining to sellers.json?

SS: This does not rectify unmapped sellers dilemma. We strongly appeal that all SSPs and exchanges fully publish all seller accounts without exceptions.

YY: What makes the “managerdomain” extension so beneficial for smaller and medium-sized publishers? 

SS: Managerdomain is a declaration where the site is primarily or exclusively monetized by another entity. Example, A.com allows SSP.com to manage all its inventory. Today there is no way to declare that, and it causes two issues — the seller id may belong to ssp.com and results in domain mismatch and although ssp.com is the direct path to buy A.com, it is not clear unless you are aware of this relationship. By adding managerdomain a website will be able to transparently declare this relationship.

YY: Why is it important for buyers to have a clear understanding of the supply path?

SS: All buyers implement supply path optimization. The new value of owner and manager domains gives them the information that this seller is the most optimal way to buy from a publisher. Also, they help buyers identify corporate owners of the publishers and sellers.

YY: What are the benefits of these new updates for publishers?

SS: It helps quality small and medium publishers who do not manage their monetization but designate exclusive sellers. Their buying paths are typically longer than the publishers who manage their own monetization. This will help them signal direct paths to their inventory through manager domain sellers and help likely increase inventory sales to scrupulous buyers.

The post IAB Tech Lab’s Ads.txt Update Illuminates the Supply Path: Q&A With VP, Product Shailley Singh 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.

In late 2017 and early 2018, the buy-side made huge inroads against domain spoofing with widespread adoption of ads.txt. No longer is not knowing if a traditional display bid request is misrepresenting its domain a widespread concern, and sellers have begun to focus on transparency of the intermediaries in a transaction with the sellers.json standard and extending this transparency into the mobile application and connected television markets.

Unfortunately, sell-side participants—publishers—often have difficulty obtaining basic levels of transparency in reverse when using header bidding tools to extend demand.

Transparency Is Pubs’ Partner

Transparency is critical to sellers for several reasons. Top of mind for many sellers is not scaring away their audience or decreasing their engagement. This can happen if brands and content do not align—for example, a meat advertiser on a vegetarian recipe site or an online gaming advertiser appearing on a competitor’s site. It can also happen if malvertising is redirecting users to another site, or with invasive advertising for untrustworthy e-commerce platforms.

Transparency is also key in relationship management: perhaps the seller has a deal with an endemic advertiser and wants to make sure all buying from that advertiser goes through that channel. Sometimes sellers are looking to discover which advertisers prefer their inventory so they can pitch custom ad products.

Ad operations teams are particularly interested in transparency. Certain creatives may drive discrepancies between an SSP and a publisher’s transaction counts. Another reporting dimension would be very helpful for teams tracking down these discrepancy sources.

Often a wayward mis-categorized ad that sneaks through existing protections is reported by a reader and the ad operations team has difficulty discovering its origin. A high VAST error rate might be plaguing a video demand source without an easy way to identify the source creative asset.

Within Google AdManager, there exists rich protections, reporting, and creative review of AdX, and to a more limited extent Open Bidding demand. In the header, vendors have tried to fill this gap: Confiant, Clean Creative, GeoEdge, and others offer malvertising and creative content or advertiser blocks. While malvertising protection is well developed, the latter is certainly a work in progress.

Communicating Across the Aisle

Adomik, Ad-Juster, and others offer tools to see who is buying your inventory across your many header demand sources. The IAB provides some specifications for communicating buyer seat and domain, but they are only recommended. Adoption of the Ad Management API (which will provide the buy-side equivalent of sellers.json) is a work in progress.

At Prebid.org, much of our recent work has been around standardizing how buyers and sellers communicate with each other. In the past, prebid adapters have consumed information in very different ways, but as that type of information becomes common to transmit, publishers tire of configuring it for each demand source in a different way.

Examples include consuming video parameters from the ad unit and not the bidder parameters, consuming consent, identity, and floors from their respective modules, and reading from a common first-party data interface. Conversely, publishers are demanding a more standard and richer bid response.

With Prebid 4.0, much of the standard ways of communicating will become recommended behavior, with an eye towards making them required in future major releases. One of these recommendations is called the bid.meta object. It is the part of the bid response with information such as the advertiser domain(s), buyer seat, and disclosures on rich media formats. Prebid analytics adapter providers can report aggregations of these fields to publishers who have their adapter installed.

A header bidding key for advertiser domain(s) will soon allow publishers to set universal price rules and protections in their ad server. Publishers who define the ‘hb_adomain’ key and advertiser domains of interest as values will be able to easily obtain reporting on header advertiser impression count and price paid cut by demand source. Publishers with the ad server logs or analytics adapters will have full transparency into adomain and buyer seat when header demand partners are setting it.

Demand More From Your Demand!

Adapters setting this information remains the key; the bid.meta object in the bid response object currently only has limited adapter support. Your communications with your SSP partners to keep their adapters modern (eg supporting the floors module, the identity module, the bid.meta object, and reading video ad unit parameters) is critical to the success of the Prebid project.

Publishers with other header bidding integrations should be demanding their provider keeps up, with the end goal being full transparency of buyers.

The post Sellers Need Buy-Side Transparency appeared first on AdMonsters.

1) Who was getting most adversely impacted along the waterfall—focused primarily on publishers receiving 51% of advertiser spend on average, and;

2) The mysterious “unknown delta”: unattributable costs making up 15% of advertiser spend.

While these are certainly interesting data points, given my current focus on tech stack architecture for enterprise clients I was taken aback by another issue—how difficult it was for the data to be accessed in the first place.

The Spend Waterfall

My opinion is that the breakdown will be bespoke to the customer, and that “ad tech tax” is an oversimplification (MightyHive CEO Pete Kim also wrote about this at length on our company’s blog). Since each element is necessary for the ecosystem to function, optimization of this breakdown should be set up to improve ROI—starting with transparency into where exactly media spend is going.

The Unknown Delta

I prefer to take a more hopeful view on the importance of the scandalous 15% figure because the potential causes were outlined in the study (below)—meaning we have a jumping-off point for continued investigation.

• Limitations in data sets
• DSP or SSP fees that aren’t visible in the study data
• Post-auction bid shading
• Post-auction financing arrangements or other trading deals
• Foreign exchange translations
• Inventory reselling between tech vendors

As PWC has confirmed in numerous interviews, there is no single smoking gun amongst these. However, without access to data, advertisers, agencies, publishers, DSPs, and SSPs will be hard-pressed to start identifying where these scenarios occur and begin to make the unknowns known. Data collection for the study occurred for three months and overall the study ran a full nine months longer than planned due to difficulties accessing needed data!

Next Steps for the Industry

After the study’s release, Phil Smith, Director General of ISBA, stated, “The challenge now is for the industry to come together, as they will in the new taskforce…to allow companies and consumers to benefit properly from online advertising.” Subsequently, Nigel Gwilliam, director of media affairs at The IPA, proposed The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) as “the obvious body to facilitate this collaboration.”

JICWEBS is comprised of four UK trade bodies: IPA, ISBA, AOP, and IAB UK. The inclusion of IAB is encouraging, especially since Trustworthy Digital Supply Chain is a longstanding pillar of the IAB Tech Lab. However, there has been nothing publicly released about specific next steps for a new taskforce to take actions directly influenced by the study data.

Of course, these things take time. One of the potential causes of the unknown delta is inventory reselling between tech vendors, which is now addressed by the continued evolution of ads.txt, first launched in June 2017. The latest release from July 2019, sellers.json and the supplychain object, validates the complete financial path with the ultimate goal of “transparency into the origins, paths, and legitimacy of ad inventory.” It has yet to reach widespread industry adoption; this illustrates the lead time required to solve just one of the elements of the unknown delta.

That said, I do have some thought starters for publishers and platforms in the near term.

Immediate Areas of Focus

1. Data Aggregation. MightyHive works with many brands looking to offboard media buying operations from agencies and bring them in house. A step in this process that often seems to require an inordinately heavy lift is piping data into whichever data visualization tools and/or cloud environments are necessary for performance analysis. One example is lack of transparency into changes to the data format with little advance notice, e.g. API calls that have been utilized previously being rendered irrelevant due to a product update or changes to the fields available in log files. Taxonomy was addressed numerous times in the study, and it’s my perception that many tech companies are in the dark as to whether data is coming back “null” for the advertiser unless the advertiser pushes for changes. My guidance would be increased proactivity and visibility into the roadmap as it pertains to data formatting, as much as privacy concerns will allow.

2. Data Availability and Freshness. Some challenges in this area are lag times in receiving data that make the data set unreliable, e.g. receiving log files from one partner every 24 hours versus every 12 from another. It’s entirely possible that one partner could appear to outperform the other if data isn’t represented equally, thus jeopardizing the credit assigned to the partner with a lag time. Similarly, there is a lack of consistency in data retention. Publishers and platforms should be asking relevant questions to ensure they’re at parity with the competitive set and if not, perform the cost-benefit analysis necessary to assess whether or not to make investments in their product.

3. Thought leadership. I find that these elements are often undersold in comparison to “shiny new objects.” From a thought leadership perspective, I always want to hear about ways in which someone my client is considering for partnership has a proven track record of early adoption as it relates to industry best practices. To harken back to the sellers.json example, TripleLift used it to teach buyers how to find exchanges that add value, while The Trade Desk gave exchanges an ultimatum to either post a sellers.json file or get dropped as a partner—with only two months of lead time. In a similar vein, any instance where tech was modified based on client need in the form of case studies or whitepapers are increasingly valuable sales collateral.

Ideally, these small steps can help make the industry more transparent and effective as we await larger-scale changes from industry bodies. With continued effort from every corner of the industry, the necessary changes may manifest more quickly if there is increased focus on making improvements from all participants in the supply chain.

The post Making the Unknowns Known: A Media Buyer’s Guide to Supply Chain Transparency appeared first on AdMonsters.