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Business Insider’s Jana Meron will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC IO New York conference on October 25-26 in a presentation titled “Insider View From The Publisher.”
Meron is a big booster of ads.txt, the new IAB Tech Lab-created initiative that lets publishers easily broadcast a list of their authorized resellers via a small text file published directly to their servers.
Shortly after the spec came out this spring, BI became the first publisher to employ an ads.txt file, and this week the company put out the second version.
“I’m very bullish on it,” says Meron, whose title is VP of programmatic and data strategy, in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. “It creates a virtual handshake between you and a buyer and the exchange, so that you know that wherever you are buying your ad, you are buying it from a source that is trusted by the publisher. There’s no way to fake it, if you will.”
But to be a legitimate solution, all publishers need to adopt the format and buyers need to factor it into their bidding.
Meron says Business Insider is having “a lot of discussions with DSPs about what’s authorized and what’s unauthorized,” and what’s coming to light is this: There are people out there reselling and BI wasn’t aware that it was happening.
“We need to take a step back and say, ‘It’s alright that you did this, but here are the guidelines,'” she says.
Also in this episode: What header bidding hath wrought, the durability of open exchanges and how BI used programmatic to launch an entirely new media brand – the social-first Insider.
