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.

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.

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.

In response, transparency has become an industry rallying cry of sorts. It’s difficult to cut waste from a campaign if you can’t figure out where breakages are happening, where fraud is shaving away ad dollars, and ultimately who isn’t holding up their end of the deal.

To move the industry towards a more transparent future, the Interactive Advertising Bureau has been hard at work releasing specifications that help shed light on the programmatic buying and selling of ads. In 2017 it was ads.txt.

This year, it’s sellers.json and supplychain object. But the question is, what exactly do they do? We had a chat with Miguel Morales, CTO and Co-Founder of Lucidity, a technology company using blockchain to bring transparency to advertising.

AdMonsters: Alright, so what is sellers.json?

Miguel Morales: Sellers.json is one of the latest initiatives launched by the IAB Tech Lab in an effort to bring greater trust and transparency to programmatic advertising. It works as a json file hosted by exchanges and SSPs that lists that exchange’s sellers, their information (name, domain), and if the seller is directly or indirectly selling inventory for a publisher’s site.

With access to sellers.json, a buyer can find information about the final seller of an impression opportunity.

AM: What do you mean by “final seller?”

MM: In programmatic advertising, a bid request is rarely sold just once. Instead, a single bid request will often pass from seller to reseller to reseller, on down the supply chain until it is eventually sold to an advertiser.

However, in the case of a seller who is acting as an intermediary, sellers.json alone will not list information regarding the depth of the supply chain. For example, a buyer wouldn’t be able to determine the sellers further down the supply chain in an instance where the final seller is an intermediary.

AM: Well, what if a buyer wants to know the identity of the other intermediaries involved?

MM: This is where the IAB Tech Lab’s other initiative supplychain object comes in. The supplychain object specification was released alongside sellers.json to allow all the intermediaries involved in the sale of a particular impression to be discoverable. It works by housing the identity of each intermediary in a “node” which consists of both the advertising system identifier (asi) and the seller ID (sid). The nodes are then chained together in the same sequence as the 4flow of payments for each subsequent sale and resale.

With access to supplychain object, a buyer can traverse the supply chain, cross reference each node in the supply chain against sellers.json and ads.txt, and gain insights and information about who the sellers in the supply chain are.

Taken together, sellers.json and supplychain object allow advertisers, publishers, and anyone else in the programmatic ecosystem to track which companies participate in the sale of media, and whether they sell that media directly or act as an intermediary.

AM: Wait – isn’t this what ads.txt does?

MM: Not quite, but it is similar. Ads.txt is the IAB Tech Lab’s transparency initiative from 2017 that increases visibility into which companies are allowed to sell a given publisher’s inventory. Specifically, it allows publishers to “publicly declare” or list authorized sellers in an easily updated and maintained txt file. (You can find out more about ads.txt here)

The main difference is that ads.txt is provided by the publisher and lists who is authorized to sell their inventory. Think of it like a whitelist. In contrast, sellers.json is a json file provided by the advertising platform – so exchanges and SSPs – that identifies the sellers it transacts with.

In short, ads.txt is a list of who can sell an impression. Sellers.json and supplychain object uncover who did participate in the sale of a given impression.

AM: Why does programmatic advertising need something like sellers.json and supplychain object?

MM: Programmatic advertising has become quite cluttered and murky in recent years. The automation of media buying has led to an increase in who might participate in the sale of an impression, but a decrease in transparency into who’s actually selling it. This has become a major problem, as advertising waste has skyrocketed and advertisers are often left with very little visibility into what’s causing it.

Knowing exactly who is participating in the sale of an impression helps advertisers avoid buying from shady sellers known for fraudulent traffic or content that otherwise wouldn’t be brand-safe. It also increases accountability and incentivizes sellers to act honestly and provide value, as they can no longer hide behind programmatic’s opacity.

In turn, it increases the trust advertisers have in the programmatic ecosystem, and in theory, should incentivize advertisers to spend more which should benefit everyone in the ecosystem – not just the buyer.

AM: Last question. What’s with these goofy names?

MM: So the names “sellers.json” and “supplychain object” actually aren’t as confusing as they may initially seem. Especially if you think about what they each do.

Sellers.json identifies the last seller of an impression in a json file.

Thus, sellers.json.

And supplychain object identifies the supply chain of resellers involved in a transaction.

Thus, supplychain object.

Thinking of it that way is also a handy way to remember what the specifications do.

The post What Are Sellers.json and Supplychain Object? appeared first on AdMonsters.