Viewability Deep Dive; Pinterest Ads On The Home Feed

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Viewability Battleground

The Wall Street Journal’s Mike Shields takes a deep dive on viewability and finds rancor. Publishers are upset about lost revenue, vendors want new methods of bidding with viewability metrics and advertisers are demanding make-goods on their investments. “The industry needs to aspire to 100% viewability,” said Google’s VP of display ad products, Neal Mohan. “The only way you can truly achieve that for publishers is baking that technology natively into the ad server as opposed to an after-the-fact report.” Mohan’s counterpart at AOL, David Miller, disagrees: “While most ads can be measured as viewable or not, there are hundreds of millions of viewable ads which are not being measured as viewable because the technology to detect and tally all types of ads is not there yet.” More.

Into The Feed

Pinterest has extended its core paid media product, Promoted Pins, to the platform’s engagement-rich “home feed.” This will push ads closer to users, as in Facebook and Twitter’s news feeds. But why is Pinterest pushing its ad product now? “I would say we are speeding things up because the advertisers are ready,” Joanne Bradford, Pinterest’s head of partnerships, told The Wall Street Journal. “We’ve worked very hard over the course of the beta period and took all those learnings and built a very aggressive road map for 2015.” Read the blog post. A spokesperson tells AdExchanger, “Since there is an additional quality bar we will show less ads in the home feed then we will in category and search feeds.”

Beacon Breakthrough

In-store beacons aren’t novel and neither is online retargeting, but combining the strategies could be a breakthrough for adland. Location-based marketing firm Total Communicator Solutions and ad server Unacast are partnering to let advertisers use in-store beacon data for display retargeting campaigns. “Until now, the utility of beacons has been limited to allowing retailers and brands to communicate with shoppers whilst they are in the store,” writes Business Insider advertising editor Lara O’Reilly. “Now beacons are acting as the data collector to inform post-shopping ad campaigns.” More.

PubMatic’s APIs

PubMatic will let its publisher customers plug their supply into Bidtellect’s native ad exchange, the companies said Tuesday. Buyers can snatch up native ad inventory programmatically through Bidtellect’s native DSP, while publishers can package their native slots into private marketplaces or expose it to indirect demand. Read the release. The move continues a wave of partnership and API news from PubMatic, which still positions as a “pure-play” SSP. More on that.

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