These are all questions that the advertising ecosystem needs to answer before Chrome finalizes plans to follow Safari and Firefox in maintaining users’ privacy by killing off third-party cookies.

So many alternatives have been proposed for tracking and measuring in a cookieless world. Google, for its part, has proposed the Privacy Sandbox—a series of browser APIs that are intended to secure users’ privacy while also enabling advertising tracking and measurement—which includes Two Uncorrelated Requests, Then Locally-Executed Decision On Victory (TURTLE-DOV).

Criteo submitted a proposal, SPARROW (Secure Private Advertising Remotely Run On Webserver), to the W3C in response to Google’s proposal. Then there was DOVEKEY, proposed by Google to improve upon SPARROW. And now Magnite has another avian-named proposal on the W3C table that intends to improve upon TURTLEDOVE.

We reached out to Garrett McGrath, VP of Product Management at Magnite, to sort out all of these birds so we can figure out how each of them might shape the future of advertising.

Lynne d Johnson: Can you explain PARRROT to me like it was an elevator pitch?

Garrett McGrath: Google’s TURTLEDOVE, part of the Privacy Sandbox proposals authored by Chrome engineers, attempts to maintain retargeting functionality in an environment without third-party cookies and therefore without cross-site tracking as we know it today. TURTLEDOVE aims to accomplish this by centralizing the auction and all component actions within the browser — buyers and sellers only have access to aggregate reporting some number of hours or days after an impression is won. The browser itself becomes a giant black box that only has one key, which belongs to Google.

Whether or not a browser could even computationally handle all of this is an excellent question, to say nothing of this proposal making Google essentially the only ‘trusted’ entity within the programmatic advertising ecosystem.

SPARROW, a TURTLEDOVE counter-proposal from Criteo, maintains the TURTLEDOVE segment management model but recommends moving the auction out of the browser (auctions, like everything else, are handled solely in the browser under TURTLEDOVE), and to some external trusted 3rd-party server called a Gatekeeper.

How an entity qualifies to be a Gatekeeper, how many Gatekeepers there are, and how they are governed are all questions that would need to be answered.

DOVEKEY, also from Google but this time the Ads team, attempts to reduce the complexity of the SPARROW design by using simple key-value pairs to represent audience membership, rather than relying on more complex computations within a browser.

This concept may possibly be workable, however, the likely explosion of key-value pairs necessary to accomplish this at scale and the resources required to manage them are certainly open questions, especially for smaller publishers.

At the heart of all of this is the notion that, starting with TURTLEDOVE, somehow the browser is responsible for actually running the auction(s) and choosing a winner for any given impression.  Digging deeper into that statement, this means the browser would have to have all the information necessary to make these decisions — well beyond bid price, which seems to be the primary input for the TURTLEDOVE auction.

A programmatic auction for any given ad impression must consider many more factors beyond bid price. Frequently the highest bid does not necessarily win.

Within the publisher/SSP set-up there exists a long list of contributing factors: ad quality filtering, domain, creative or buyer blocks, prioritization, buying models, pacing, whether or not the impression is eligible for a Deal and if so how that Deal affects the relevance of bid price, regional factors, dayparting, targeting, custom parameters — this list can be quite extensive and can vary greatly pub by pub and impression by impression. As such, TURTLEDOVE as written falls well short of being a workable solution.

PARRROT (The Publisher Auction Responsibility Retention Revision of TurtleDove), from Magnite, maintains the privacy tenets of TURTLEDOVE but moves the auction decisioning back to where it belongs: the publisher.

Leveraging a proposal called the Fenced Frame, PARRROT gives back the publisher and/or the publisher’s systems (ad servers, SSPs) the job of considering the myriad of contributing factors necessary to determine auction outcome.  It essentially brings header bidding, or any publisher selected transaction technology, back to this model.

LdJ: How does PARRROT aim to improve upon TURTLEDOVE?

GM: Running a programmatic ad auction within the browser leaves out many necessary factors and data points. PARRROT lets the publisher run and decision on the auction while still maintaining the anonymity design of TURTLEDOVE.

LdJ: In that regard, how does PARRROT differ from DOVEKEY?

GM: PARRROT is complementary to DOVEKEY (or SPARROW) in that a server-side entity exists outside of the browser in both proposals.

PARRROT extends the key-value store component of DOVEKEY by allowing DSPs to directly and explicitly declare their bidding wishes; otherwise this is theoretically accomplished through Machine Learning in DOVEKEY.

PARRROT and DOVEKEY simplify the Gatekeeper by removing any computation tasks thereby increasing trust among users. PARRROT addresses where the auction logic is run, not how audiences are handled.

LdJ: There’s been a lot of controversy over whether the gatekeeper should be the browser or a third-party. What would be the benefit of allowing the publisher to retain control of the auction?

GM: Allowing the browser to be the sole repository of audience data or auction mechanics simply isn’t a workable concept — unless you happen to be the owner of that browser.

But PARRROT is more focused on maintaining the aspects of the auction that are beyond audience membership and bid price because, as noted, there are many other factors that need to be considered. And almost none of those additional inputs are available to the browser.

LdJ: Do you see any limitations with any of the proposals, especially in terms of reporting?

GM: Yes, they all have limitations starting with the fact that none of them exist yet and the clock is ticking.

Reporting is an especially big issue since it seems to be marginalized in the Sandbox proposals (most answers are “the aggregate reporting API”, which no one has seen or understands).

However, we need consensus on how and where impressions are transacted before we have the luxury of figuring out how to report on them.

The post What Is PARRROT? appeared first on AdMonsters.

I was quite curious on the agency perspective as many advertisers turned off the spend faucets with the pandemic settling in. I got a whole lot more, as Jay ties the digital advertising milieu to the larger global economic picture, while also digging into publisher-marketer relationships during the pandemic; the fate of holding companies (as well as smaller agencies); and how maybe this crisis could change the industry for the better.

The post Goodway Group’s Friedman Says Pubs Gotta Meet Agencies in the Middle appeared first on AdMonsters.

According to eMarketer, programmatic accounted for under 5% of US digital display ad spending in 2010. By 2021, nearly 90% of digital display ad spending is expected to be programmatic. That’s truly a  revolutionary change. 

And now a new revolution approaches—this time for digital out of home (DOOH) advertising. 

AdMonsters spoke with by Phil Schraeder, CEO, GumGum about the rise of Programmatic DOOH and where we can expect to see it take off.

Phil Schraeder, CEO, GumGum

Lynne d Johnson: Why is OOH prime for programmatic and how have advances in digital shaped this revolution?

Phil Schraeder: The same factors that enabled programmatic’s rapid rise in the 2010s are poised to change the way advertising is sold and displayed across the growing crop of digital signs on kiosks, taxis, buses, and billboards the world over. The programmatic DOOH revolution’s epicenter, however, will be where the earliest DOOH adoption occurred: sports stadium and arena signage. 

When ad buys shifted from manual transactions to automatic real-time bidding based on algorithmic parameters, an entirely new ad tech ecosystem emerged. Through ad networks and other partners, advertisers gained the ability to automate campaign execution and monitoring, eliminating human error while giving brands the power to efficiently target audiences and allowing publishers to maximize inventory yield.

Similar advances are inevitable for DOOH, where media owners like Lamar and Clear Channel are currently making significant investments.

Why? Because digital is a growth segment of the OOH market and digital makes programmatic OOH possible. 

LdJ: Let’s take it back a few beats. You mentioned sports stadiums and arena signage as locations where programmatic DOOH can really take off. When I think of programmatic and DOOH, I think about reach but I also think about targeting—especially in terms of what can be done with geofencing and geotargeting. 

Are there other targeting use cases that brands should be thinking about, particularly in sports venues and live-event arenas? 

PS: Sports venue signage will be the first OOH to take advantage of programmatic sponsorship buying marketplaces not simply because so much venue signage is already digital, but also because game broadcasts actually deliver (technically OOH) sponsorship exposure to millions of in-home eyeballs. 

And, unlike billboards, where determining brand exposure is really a matter of guesswork, in-venue signage sponsor exposure can be calculated because audiences for broadcast and streamed games are quantified.

As things currently stand, however, the LED signage prevalent in professional sports is almost always purchased through conventional (i.e.: non-programmatic) methods—a carryover from the pre-digital era. Teams and leagues will soon recognize, however, that creating dynamic LED inventory marketplaces presents a far more profitable scenario. 

In a marketplace, teams and leagues can sell more sponsorships to more brands and capitalize on real-time bidding market competition to increase placement values. Brands will benefit by optimizing the scale and timing of sponsorship spends and aligning sponsorship messaging with in-game content and audience demographics. 

LdJ: That’s really interesting. How do you see this working overall in terms of auction dynamics?

PS: Professional and elite sports are already one of the world’s great data repositories, and OOH programmatic ad networks can easily leverage them. Real-time league and player data from providers like SportRadar can be used as a first layer of intelligence for brands evaluating games on a moment-to-moment basis, with highlight-worthy portions of games generating the highest value. 

Existing player, team and league data can be utilized to create programmatic rules for bidding valuations that, for example, account for scenarios that are likely to make highlight reels and recaps. Signage values would increase when the score is tied with seconds to go and decrease during broadcast breaks like timeouts or the seventh-inning stretch.

Existing player, team and league data can be utilized to create programmatic rules for bidding valuations that, for example, account for scenarios that are likely to make highlight reels and recaps.

Enterprising programmatic display providers could even set rates to be higher if a player or team is close to breaking a record or reaching a career milestone.

The 2017 game in which Dirk Nowitzki surpassed 30,000 career points generated over $2.6 million in social media value for key sponsors. Had the Dallas Mavericks been selling programmatic sponsorship placements in that game, the Dallas Mavericks would have seen some of that outsized value come their way.

Given the amount of potential revenue that sponsorship rights holders are leaving on the table, it is clearly only a matter of time before they adopt programmatic DOOH. Once they do, sports sponsorships for OOH advertising will evolve into data-driven programmatic ad exchanges very much akin to those in the digital world––bidding on live sports moments based on context, audience demographics, viewership, and highlight-worthiness.

LdJ: Why is programmatic DOOH moving more slowly in other realms? Are metrics and analytics an issue?

Sports sponsorship will be powerful proof of concept for programmatic DOOH writ large. For non-sports sponsorship programmatic DOOH advertising, adoption will be slower because performance and audience metrics required to make programmatic work are not readily available. Soon new technologies will change that. 

A number of companies are developing innovative ways to track DOOH performance using big data and AI technologies. Some can calculate audience sizes and infer demographics based on the number and makes of cars passing a DOOH placement. Others can evaluate—in real-time—audience attention by analyzing whether and for how long pedestrians’ eyes land on a placement. 

At least one company is developing technology to understand brand lift for DOOH by assessing emotional responses using facial expression analysis software. Even if data privacy gets in the way of those sorts of tech, readily available data points like traffic density, route maps, and public event calendars will be collated to deliver reliable audience and demographic data for programmatic buying. 

So, if you ever find yourself stuck in late-night traffic and a roadside billboard lights up with an ad for the latest tie-dye fashions, there’s a decent chance that Phish just played a nearby stadium. 

The post Bases Loaded: Paving a Programmatic Path for DOOH appeared first on AdMonsters.

Indeed, this would be the moment for outside-the-box thinking in the open programmatic marketplace as the third-party cookie continues to crumble in the face of privacy initiatives (and regulations) and walled gardens increasingly reap the lion’s share of online ad revenue. It’s curious how legacy demand- and sell-side platforms will adjust to this new era of digital advertising.

“A lot of ad tech players want to keep things as they’ve been, but marketers are looking more into new ways to conduct business,” Marievoet says.

Certainly Adhese’s Gateway sell-side monetization technology is not easily classifiable—it’s a server-based connector that offers privacy via a unique user-syncing model and silos that enable monetization partners to keep data proprietary. This approach appears to be privacy-friendly while also facilitating tighter relationships between publishers and advertisers.

I caught up with Marievoet and his Adhese partner Tim Sturtewagon to better understand the Gateway’s operations while also discussing how the company is monetizing inventory lacking identifiers and empowering publisher alliances like the Dutch collaborative NLProfiel. 

GAVIN DUNAWAY: How does Adhese’s Gateway distinguish itself from other server-side header wrappers? What’s the advantage of your proprietary technology versus something open-sourced like Prebid?

ADHESE: To put it quite bluntly, Gateway is not a header bidding solution. It is a server-side connector-tool—with header bidding capabilities—developed over the last decade to connect supply and demand in a securely and transparently with the utmost respect for data ownership and privacy.

If publishers want to connect SSPs, good; want to connect DSPs, good; want to make direct deals with brands or agencies, good; want to share inventory across publishers in new marketplaces, good. For example, take NLProfiel, a joint effort between all the major Dutch media offering inventory across their various domains.

We can all agree that hardly any companies, outside of some well-known huge ones, see any gains in maintaining the current setup. So it’s time to get both sides to the table and reclaim some autonomy over the deals they want to close—and obviously keeping control over their data.

We use the OpenRTB standard and make our endpoints as widely available as possible. Prebid in the header before another ad server is one way of connecting to inventory, but we also have many direct implementations into whatever client is needed—from webpages to apps to video/audio players. Some publishers even integrate server-side into their content management systems, so no actual Adhese endpoint is even visible to the client—browser, app, video, audio, etc.

"We can all agree that hardly any companies, outside of some well-known huge ones, see any gains in maintaining the current setup. So it’s time to get both sides to the table and reclaim some autonomy over the deals they want to close—and obviously keeping control over their data."

The idea is to keep the client-side as dumb as possible and have all business logic on the server. This allows for updates without any change in the client. Rolling out a new SSP, adding extra data—every operation is executed at a single central point. Reporting is fully centralized and a single bid trail is created, which is ideal for auditing (especially if personal data is used and consent needs to be verified).

As all connections to the market are handled from our server, we limit the dependency on the site visitor’s connection speed and reduce latency. Simplicity in the client also leads to faster ad rendering and thus higher viewability. And of course, as no on-page, client-side code is needed, bidders are not able to identify the user unless consent is there and the publisher allows it.

GD: Low ID-matching rates have been a big setback for server-side header solutions. How do your cookie-less setups with DSPs operate?

ADHESE: A publisher can request for a user sync to be triggered between the publisher’s ID and the SSP/DSP. This process is executed over an OpenRTB user sync, and exposes the SSP/DSP to the user to obtain his identifier. The ID is then transmitted to Adhese and stored in the user’s profile. It’s a very similar process to client-side user syncing, consequently boasting similar match rates.

This process is executed independently from any bids, so we see relatively high user match rates, as the user is often already synced before the first bid request is sent. Once a user is synced, we often retain their ID longer than a full third-party setup as our IDs live in a first-party domain environment.

DSPs that are bidding on cookie-less traffic receive a bid request without IP address or buyer_uid. They apply different strategies, based on contextual data, domains, time of day, season… anything that makes sense in the given inventory. As no IP address is available, no geo-location targeting is allowed either. We offer full transparency on the url where ads appear as well, so the publisher is accountable for its content, something often hard to find in the cookie/audience targeting world.

GD: “It’s your data”—you offer clients complete transparency and access to all data within your platform. How do publishers best take advantage of this?

ADHESE: Every one of our clients operates in a sealed-off data silo that will only connect to other systems based on rules that all parties agree upon. Publishers and brands can take advantage of this by creating unique propositions with each other.

"Every one of our clients operates in a sealed-off data silo that will only connect to other systems based on rules that all parties agree upon. Publishers and brands can take advantage of this by creating unique propositions with each other."

To create these, you have to safeguard the components of the offer, and usually that is strongly connected to proprietary data. There’s no use in a sealed-off data-puddle, it becomes murky and smelly. You need proper flow to keep the business healthy. On the other hand, it could be even worse to blindly throw your bucket of data in the vast data ocean and hope the big fish magically gather to feast.

Instead we find the right balance, making decisions on what to do with which elements and acting accordingly. There’s no use in shutting everything down, but there is use in finding alternative or parallel paths and exploring them vigorously.

Technically every Adhese customer runs its own instances, databases and domains. This means that if identifiers (cookies or others) are used, they are only unique within the Adhese account holder’s environment. Typically a publisher will use a session ID and/or a login ID as a unique identifier over Adhese. These can be stored in cookies, but can also be used in a fully cookie-less setup, where identifiers are part of the request and all corresponding data is stored server-side.

The data tied to a user can be used in specific bid requests and is controlled by the publisher. They can decide to expose a certain DMP segment to one buyer only over a single SSP connected to their inventory. This data can be an individual or aggregated, depending on the setup. This allows them to communicate intent data in limited ways, making sure it will get monetized, rather than broadcasting it to anyone listening, but not buying.

We even go as far as offering the first full cookie-less, consent-less setups. We have the first “no-consent” DSP connected and are thus running direct campaigns, booked in our ad server, next to programmatic campaigns coming through Gateway from that DSP.

Basically, this means that publishers can now pursue a mixed model where they are able to work optimal, and legal, with both consent as no-consent visitors. It is great to see brands and agencies are taking initiatives to follow-up on these setups, investigating how they can co-operate to provide privacy driven campaigns.

The post Opening a New Programmatic Gateway: Adhese’s Post-Cookie Connectors appeared first on AdMonsters.

Lively debate and discussion? A community sharing issues and ideas? A discovery of tactics and strategies to implement right away? How about all of the above? At least that’s what happens on the last day of an AdMonsters Publisher Forum when publishers go into their workshop groups to explore the issues affecting them in their day-to-day—and things were no different at PubForum Scottsdale.

Following, are some top-level takeaways from the PubForum Scottsdale Workshops:

ALL ABOUT DATA TRACK: Optimizing Your DMP

After each publisher shared how they’re using their DMP for sales, they got into specifics about what kinds of benefits they reaped from their ad tech partners. There was a lot of conversation about switching from using unreliable third-party data to using first-party data, with the caveat that as a publisher you need to have reach to do it. Also, some talked about in-housing audience extension.

Supply Path Optimization

In this conversation, the group all weighed in on defining exactly what SPO is before talking about whether they were already doing it or planning to. Overall, they felt it was a wait and see strategy and that they should focus on PG (Programmatic Guaranteed) & PMP (Private Market Places) revenue as they watch and wait on SPO.

Outsourcing

The topic of outsourcing comes up again-and-again at nearly every Publisher Forum. This time there was a strong focus on understanding your goals with outsourcing before developing your best practices. Determining your goals will lead you to the best tools for evaluating an outsourcing partner by asking the right questions. Next, thinking about best practices will prep you for setting up your onboarding documents. One key takeaway: treat them as part of your team and empower them to weigh in on your business.

Programmatic Reporting

In this group, everyone agreed that data and mapping can be complicated, but they were all optimistic that in the next couple of years it will get better. Programmatic reporting requires a full-time person to monitor and manage data connections, the group recommended.

ALL ABOUT DATA TRACK: Selling the Data

The selling the data workgroup focused on leveraging branded content to create unique data signals and producing an enhanced first-party data solution to eliminate the black box of third-party data. And here’s a great tip: Publishers can possibly weaponize their data collectively through producing a second-party marketplace.

Google Confirmed Click

This workgroup explained a mobile ad feature that Google instituted to account for people accidentally tapping on advertising (and being lead to a site they hadn’t intended on visiting). The feature places on overlay on AMP ads that says “visit site,” asking users to confirm whether they clicked on the ad.  This protects the user, but also the advertiser who is paying CPC. But for the publisher, once the flag is on, the DBM stops receiving bid requests. The group suggested a few layout enhancements to try and turn it off, like placing a gray box behind ads or adding padding, but realized they need more insight from Google to fix the issue from occurring for them.

Privacy Regulations

There was no surprise here that everyone in this group felt there was a lack of clarity on exactly what CCPA means or how to comply with it. But they see the impending regulation as an opportunity to evaluate all tags and prevent data leakage. Some recommendations included setting up a compliance taskforce, leaning on other teams and educating consumers.

Balancing Subscription and Advertising Revenues

One of the main themes to emerge from this conversation was the need for coexistence among the advertising and subscription strategies. Some questions that followed: Should there be one persona managing ads and subscriptions? Do users want the ability to eliminate ads for a cost? There was no right answer here, as every business is a unique case. But the fact remains, just by talking it out with others in the same situation, you’re bound to come away with ideas.

You can just think of AdMonsters Publisher Forum Workshops as a sort of support group that merges with a brainstorm. To learn about upcoming AdMonsters Publisher Forums, visit our events page.

The post PubForum Scottsdale: The Wonderful World Of Workshops appeared first on AdMonsters.

In gauging the effect of this enormous industry shift, we’ve got to start with what we know—namely, what is actually changing. Cafe Media’s Paul Bannister decided a good before-and-after diagram could clear up confusion. Certainly Bannister’s charts show a more streamlined and theoretically more efficient auction system. But can publishers make it more advantageous to their revenue efforts?

There’s always more to the story, but this is a great place to dive in.

The post The New GAM Auction Logic appeared first on AdMonsters.

Truth is, there’s much more to location than pushing a half-off coupon to a mobile consumer when they’re near their favorite chain coffee shop. Location-based advertising in 2019 is about analyzing a wide set of mobile data over extended periods of time in order to better understand individuals and audiences—and, most of all, it’s about delivering robust contextual and personalized experiences to consumers—every screen, every time.

The data that advertisers and marketers can access when mobile consumers grant them permission to see location-focused device information allows them to unlock insights about those users’ preferences, passions, and patterns of behavior. These insights mean brands and marketers can then build relationships with defined, segmented audiences… discovering new customers, separating signal from noise, seeing the bigger picture that reveals new prospects who are likely to love the goods and services and identify the advertiser as a new favorite brand.

At the same time, the programmatic space has greatly evolved to bring this quest for personalization and context to the scale that competitive advertisers require. Programmatic, however, all too often associated with a fraud-filled cookie-hunting ground full of remnant inventory, has required a great deal of refinement and effort—but it’s safe to say that, in 2019, a premium-class programmatic experience exists. Newer approaches, including private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed, now offer advertisers and publishers brand safety, control, and transparency.

Meanwhile, location-technology partners that can assess, score, and cleanse the second- and third-party data that has contributed to programmatic’s historically shaky reputation are now building the future in new and innovative ways for advertisers, publishers, and marketers. The ecosystem has evolved. The time for bringing location and programmatic into fresh focus as the premium go-forward approach for all has arrived.

This playbook is for publishers, brands, and marketers who are looking for a snapshot of how location and programmatic fit together to create market-changing, consumer-forward approaches. In addition to helping publishers and advertisers understand the nuances of location data, this playbook represents a guide to the workings of private marketplaces and programmatic guaranteed, and also a look at what factors in the near future will further influence the world of location-based and programmatic ads.

[download-link]Download your copy of the Location and Programmatic Playbook.[/download-link]

The post AdMonsters Playbook: Combining Location-Based Context and Programmatic Scale appeared first on AdMonsters.

—Ad-Tech William Shakespeare, “The Taming of the SSP”

Ad-tech news junkies were a-buzz last week with a report from DoubleVerify exposing a “new” Ads.txt fraud scheme. My use of quotation marks probably clues you in that the ploy ain’t so novel. (Nothing fazes someone who’s been in ad tech as long as me!)

However, the fraud is interesting because it highlights an issue with exchanges that’s been lurking on the edges of debate, while also raising serious questions about the future of auction-based programmatic.

A Plot Most Complex

DoubleVerify discovered a content-scraping scheme to build lookalike sites of premium publishers, sometimes with new or different ad placements. Domains were then spoofed, but here’s the wrinkle: the fraudsters examined the premium publishers’ Ads.txt files and signed on with the same resellers; some likely spoofed the actual content of the Ads.txt files to sow confusion.

So when the reseller puts out a spoofed domain for auction on an exchange, the reseller ID lines up with the premium publisher’s Ads.txt. The content scraping adds a layer of subterfuge to confuse the middle exchange, DSP, and end buyer, though in reporting the seller ID for the premium publisher would not match the spoofed domain.

This is a complex scheme, one far more complex than Ads.txt was designed to solve. No one, the IAB Tech Lab included, has ever said that Ads.txt was more than a simple solution, and it’s only one step in a proposed plan to combat fraud. Ads.txt files are easily accessible and can be copied—something that has been warned about since the launch.

This fraud doesn’t exhibit a flaw in Ads.txt, but it does show how bad actors can circumvent it. Ads.txt puts a huge dent in domain spoofing, but it unfortunately doesn’t completely solve the problem.

Blame the Resellers!

The fault really falls on the exchanges and the resellers. The resellers should be more vigilant in monitoring the publishers they work with to weed out scam artists (particularly the domain spoofers), and by turn the exchanges should be more vigilant about the resellers they work with.

But the problem in our current auction-based programmatic system is that the intermediaries benefit from most fraud. Call them unwilling or incurious accomplices, but accomplices they are nonetheless.

There needs to be a stronger disincentive for resellers/agencies to work with fraudsters, but there’s barely any reputation management in ad tech, and frankly (all) the middlemen still make money off of fraud.

— Gavin Dunaway (@AdMonsterGavin) February 8, 2019

Yes, the buyers should ensure SellerIDs and domains line up in reporting, and then use that as leverage in reconciliation with exchanges or as a way to punish gross offenders. But a demand-side friend mentioned that buyers have been pleading for enhanced controls within exchanges for years—notably the ability to turn off inventory from resellers.

SSPs should step accepting resellers, period. Google gets great traction because they say, “We own the tech from marketer to publisher” and they’re right! Plus, AdX has 1MM sites – why do marketers need more from resellers through other SSPs?

— Jay Friedman (@jaymfriedman) February 8, 2019

So should we say to hell with the resellers? Trade coverage of the DoubleVerify report featured many voices calling for direct relationships between end buyers and sellers in programmatic, as well as a renewed call for preferred transaction chains (Supply Path Optimization anyone?). Basically, they’re advocating buyers use private marketplaces, private exchanges, and preferred deals.

Jay Friedman is right that Google controls the full stack—who would have thought merging the most popular supply-side ad server with your in-house exchange would be so advantageous? Google’s SSP rivals likely need to leverage resellers to offer the scale to compete. For smaller or midsize publishers with quality traffic but not enough to make a top-tier SSP viable, giving up on resellers is not an option.

And this was one central promise of programmatic, particularly with the auctions—democratizer that enabled upstart publishers with valuable audiences to compete with established sites with established bases. On the other side, willing buyers had a giant tapestry of sites (BUT NOT INFINITE!) to unleash targeted campaigns.

But more than a decade of rampant fraud and abuse makes these notions seem laughably utopian.

Thar’s Gotta Be a Better Way!

There is a better way. I agree buyers should have the ability to shut off resellers within their partner exchanges. Those looking for more scale will choose to wade into the reseller waters.

What will help make those waters bluer and safer is Ads.cert, the authentication salt to Ads.txt’s seller-validation pepper. Ads.cert enables publishers to include an encrypted signature on inventory that buyers can match in real-time to a public key in real time to certify that creative is appearing where desired. Scam artists may find a way to circumvent it, but it will bring high-powered halogens to the dank, programmatic basement.

The hangup is that the rollout of Ads.cert is tied to OpenRTB 3.0, which is a top-down rehaul of the OpenRTB standard. Programmatic players—in particular, DSPs— are going to have to rewrite their tech stacks to comply.

The IAB Tech Lab is offering tools to ease the strain of reconfiguration (which it will describe during its special session at the AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Miami on March 12), but widespread integration is going to take a long while, and there will be notable holdouts. Because let’s be frank—Ads.cert and enhanced transparency within the auction is going to affect the bottom lines of many intermediaries.

Wither the Auction?

Despite its limited nature, Ads.txt is exposing the true price of premium inventory transacted through the auctions… And it’s not the penny-CPMs marketers once enjoyed on the open exchanges. Private marketplaces are not only expensive, they also take a fair deal of manual labor and collaboration to perform well.

For years, programmatic and remnant inventory were conflated, but that was never the intention. Buyers flocked to the exchanges not just for the enhanced control in targeting and better transparency (just about anything is a step up from an ad network), but because inventory was cheap. Arguably, the latter was the biggest driver.

What happens when auction inventory is no longer cheap? Or rather, when the majority of fraudulent inventory is excised from the market, revealing that valid programmatic inventory was never cheap? I think we’ll find out this year, if we aren’t seeing it already. I believe auction spend is going to start flowing into programmatic direct/guaranteed channels. Certainly buyers are already showing their preference for rate-steady preferred deals.

That’s not bad for larger, household-name publishers—especially if they’re smart about channel pricing. But it is bad for smaller publishers that truly leverage their valuable audiences in the open programmatic market. In theory, it’s limiting for advertisers, but as we’ve mentioned above, the fraud in the open market is so flagrant that neither the scale nor the supposed “low price” are worth it anymore.

UPDATE 2/12/19 8:48 am: Jud Spencer of The Trade Desk notes something interesting:

There is a lightly adopted property in OpenRTB 2.5 that could help here, pchain. PChain allows all of the intermediaries in a transaction to be identified. Increasing adoption of pchain (and plugging a couple of holes in it) could allow buyers to make “cleaner” decisions.

— Jud Spencer (@JudSpencer) February 12, 2019

I remember this being announced, but I was more intrigued at the time with the announcement about programmatic native support. PChain could be a good intermediary step in lighting supply chains as we work towards Ads.cert. However, it is based around the TAG Payment ID and requires TAG registration.

Also, I’ve been mulling this column over and realized I ducked out of a conclusion… If buyers move away from the open marketplace and then further toward programmatic direct (mainly with highly visible, well-known publishers), sure, it will be deterrent to fraud. But a lot of honest, smaller publishers will also suffer. Most SSPs and exchanges not named Google likely need resellers and those honest, smaller publishers to buoy their scale.

The DoubleVerify report has really hit it home that Ads.txt is not a cure-all, but next steps aren’t very clear. Of course, the anti-fraud vendors are using this to push their wares on buyers, but it should be noted that a lot of these rely on whitelists and blacklists that lose freshness as they’re being updated, and scanning isn’t 100% effective. We need a better programmatic market, and change must come from the inside.

Publishers need to be vigilant about choosing ethical resellers, but that’s a tough ask. How do you know who is a good guy? Well, you should really talk among your peers and with larger exchanges… and my marketing people would kill me if I didn’t mention that the AdMonsters Publisher Forum is an excellent place to do that. Happens we have one in Miami March 10-13.

And exchanges… It’s time to clean house. Kick the scummy resellers to the curb and actively police a zero-tolerance domain-spoofing policy. Because the programmatic reckoning has already begun, and it’s going to catch up with all of our bad acts sooner rather than later.

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I was—and still am—concerned that this move strengthens Google’s stranglehold on supply-side ad delivery and discourages demand-partner competition that… could make publishers more revenue. Shouldn’t that be to priority for an ad server—ensuring clients aren’t leaving money on the table?

From what I heard at last week’s Publisher Forum in Austin, GAM ain’t a monster, but it’s a bit more of a feral beast than many publishers were expecting. Despite a slow, deliberate rollout, a breakout session focused on working with GAM showed that many publishers were facing similar, sometimes surprising hangups. The biggest: inefficiencies in reporting.

Stumbling Blocks

This echoes what I heard a few months ago, and still kinda blows my mind. If the exchange and ad server are now virtually one, why are publishers saying they have more trouble compiling reports? A chief culprit seems to be an unwieldy interface that forces users to hunt down variables in multiple locations.

There was a desire for overall better visibility in programmatic. Setting rules is difficult and publishers wished they could group inventory in bundles rather than at the ad-unit level. They also commented that the native user interface is very manual.

Programmatic deals have proven quite challenging. Deals are being reported as gross, not net, and troubleshooting with regards to data has been inaccurate. The ability to adjust priority settings in deals seems non-existent, and some publishers were irritated by the requirement to actually build products to go with deals.

But the session wasn’t all complaints: publishers were impressed with the overlap-key-value function that enabled cross-referencing and layering with predefined key values. In addition, the key value reporting is quite beneficial, even if limited. And the new screenshot tool, which details line item and inventory tied to ad, works well… Under perfect circumstances.

Fostering Change

Overall, though, the disenchantment was palpable over the fact Google cares a lot more about itself and its own product rather than the wellbeing—or welfare—of its publisher clients. It’s well known that publisher services are not raking in the monster cash for Big G, and the supply side aren’t quite opening their purses as wide as the buy side.

However, one publisher representative had good advice to take advantage of Google’s self-interest: when providing feedback, make it actionable items tied directly to the performance of Google’s systems. Sure, you’re helping me out, GAM account manager, but you’re really driving more revenue. This will require some Tom-Sawyer-worthy cleverness, but ultimately move addressing your challenges a little closer

There’s also a lot to be said for strength in numbers. I’m hoping to help assemble a unified front for presenting challenges (and possible fixes) to Google about GAM. I plan to be a modern-day Martin Luther and nail a printout of these theses on the door of Google’s Chelsea offices.

HA! You all know I think physical media is obsolete. I would like to present agreed-upon issues to my Google contacts and start a dialogue. If you’d like to join in, hit me up at Gavin at AdMonsters.com—the more the merrier. And I won’t take credit for this idea—I’m just trying to serve as an information conduit and make something good happen for the industry.

Why Wasn’t Google at the PubForum?

I’m often asked why Google isn’t at the Publisher Forum, and this recent iteration in Austin was no exception. It’s a very valid question—Why doesn’t the company with the most widely used ad server come to a gathering of those most intimate with its product?

AdMonsters has pretty strict rules about who can attend and who must sponsor PubForums. Generally, anyone who manages or is involved in monetization or revenue for owned-and-operated digital media properties (e.g., websites, apps, newsletters) is allowed to attend; we also let agency people on the opposite side of the coin come.

Providers of tech and services can only attend, have access to attendees, and potentially speak if they choose to sponsor. And sponsorship is how we’re able to assemble the publisher revenue people in the trenches for three-and-a-half days of intense discussion, learning, networking, and (gasp) fun at a relatively low price point.

There are exceptions, and as a team we’ve made hard decisions over the years about the people that can attend, some of which we later reversed. This gets harder every year as more companies we would traditionally label publishers start offering products and services to their peers. Still, this general guideline has helped us put together 46 highly valuable U.S. Publisher Forums over nearly 20 years.

Google was actually AdMonsters’ top sponsor for a long time, and always took top sponsor billing at Publisher Forums when I joined AdMonsters seven years ago. Google led sponsored breakout sessions at Publisher Forums, and some representatives were quite candid about DFP challenges with attendees. At the same time, “that’s on the roadmap” quickly became a running joke that we still reference today.

Several years ago, Google decided that they would no longer sponsor our events, and if we wanted them to attend or speak, we should invite them. That’s an exception we could not make, because it’s horrendously unfair to all the other ad-tech companies and service providers who sponsor.

Those companies are out there hustling to make a dent in this space where Google already has a huge advantage—I’ll argue AdMonsters doesn’t need to give Big G any more perks. We shouldn’t roll out a red carpet for Google just because they dominate the space while forcing everyone else to pay at the door.

If Google would like to attend or even speak, I’m happy to make the proper introductions. PubForum Miami is March 10-13, 2019, and I hear there are some decent packages available.

The post DFP 4EVR: Google Ad Manager Fallout appeared first on AdMonsters.

That’s the premise behind 33Across’ just-launched AttentionX exchange, which also enables time- and attention-based bidding optimization. I caught up with 33Across’ Eric Wheeler to hear more about the inner workings of AttentionX as well as garner takes on CPM vs. attention-based metrics and how publishers can best take advantage of buyer’s interest in optimizing on time in view.

GAVIN DUNAWAY: How does AttentionX differ from other real-time viewability buying solutions such as pre-bid viewability?

ERIC WHEELER: We’re filtering out all non-viewable inventory before it reaches our open exchange, taking advantage of our direct integrations with more than 1,500 publishers (real-time viewport analysis). This saves DSPs the time and resources to sift through the 50% or more of impressions that are not in-view once they reach they exchange.

A lot of exchanges are working with buyers to manually curate PMPs to do this. This is not particularly scalable or efficient.

GD: 33Across leverages real-time quality filters—what variables are you examining outside of viewability?

EW: The foundation for the exchange is human and viewable. On top of that we’re also offering buyers the option to bid on other attention signals.

GD: Could you share some more details on 33Across’ attention-based bidding products?

EW: Right now, we’re able to let DSPs know the projected time-in-view for impressions. Via PMP, their buyers can now bid on placements known to be in-view for a certain minimum length of time.

For example, they can say we want to bid on 5-second impressions, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, etc. Buyers are still buying based on CPM, they are simply factoring in time-in-view as an optimization lever. Over time we expect that buyers will get better and better at understanding the value of these various attention levers.

Looking ahead we’re also testing other attention signals. For example, we’re alpha-testing share-of-voice, which allows buyers to bid more for 100% SOV.

GD: Time (and particularly engaged time) is a universal metric across media platforms. Are you moving towards selling on an engaged-time basis rather than CPM?

EW: One of our key focus areas (and differentiators) is building a true programmatic solution. This means being able to execute at meaningful scale. While time-based currencies have gotten some positive traction on a pub-direct level, CPM-based approaches will scale more easily across programmatic platforms. We’ve also conducted some qualitative and quantitative buyer research that validates a significant preference for CPM-based approaches in the short-term.

We think that CPM-based buying leveraging optimization on attention metrics (as described above) can drive significant positive changes for the industry without requiring massive upheaval for buyers.

GD: How should publishers adapt their monetization strategies as buyers are increasingly optimizing against time (or engaged time) in view?

EW: Understand how buyers are evaluating inventory and make sure you’re working with monetization partners that are in a position to: 1) compensate you fairly for the quality attention you’re delivering and 2) provide the insights that help you understand how your inventory performs against the metrics that matter.

Spoiler alert: we’re going to be announcing some new publisher-focused features that address these needs in a few weeks.

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