Programmatic

Amazon looks to support a more collaborative programmatic ecosystem now that the APS Prebid adapter is available for open beta testing.

Competitive tensions and ad tech drama have flared all year. And this drama has rippled out into the investor circle, as evident from a slew of recent ad tech company earnings reports.

Brian Gleason joined contextual ad platform Seedtag as CEO earlier this month after a stint as CRO and president of retail media at Criteo.

Pub tech SaaS startup Swivel wants to make ad ops much less manual and time-consuming with an AI-driven yield optimization tool designed by people who used to build ad servers.

PubMatic’s new AI curation features are helping it forge closer relationships with ad agencies like GroupM that are ramping up their use of AI.

Equativ is now blocking made-for-advertising content from all exchange activity, marking a larger trend of pushing to eliminate MFA sites.

While some Privacy Sandbox testers lamented their seemingly wasted effort, they remain committed to post-cookie targeting and measurement – even if Google eventually abandons the Sandbox entirely.

Most sell-side curation deals appear in line with typical SSP take rates, according to Jounce Media. In fact, some of these fee structures resemble how publishers have long done business with supply-side partners.

Roku reported $4.1 billion in revenue for 2024, an 18% jump year over year. Its platform business in particular, which includes ad sales and streaming distribution, reached $3.5 billion last year, also an 18% jump compared to 2023 (or 15% excluding political ad revenue).

Making TripleLift stand out among the pack is one of Helmreich’s top priorities, as is ensuring supply chain health. And, he said, the company has no plans to shy away from its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

AdExchanger reached out to a number of major DSPs to gauge the current state of adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s new video ad standard.

Canada-based demand-side platform StackAdapt secures $235 million in equity funding led by Teachers’ Venture Growth, the investment arm of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Yahoo’s endorsement could drive further adoption of the IAB Tech Lab’s data transparency labels throughout the programmatic ecosystem after years of inaction.

DSPs have been slow to adopt the Tech Lab’s new signal for classifying online video, causing confusion about which placement signal should be prioritized.

The IAB Tech Lab is officially rebranding its Seller Defined Audiences spec as “Curated Audiences” to spur adoption in response to this year’s sell-side curation trend.

Curation is a reaction to programmatic’s worsening queries-per-second problem, says Permutive’s Joe Root. DSPs are biased toward impressions that have an identifier attached, so SSPs are using curated deal IDs as a stand-in for third-party cookies.

Forrester released its first SSP wave since 2014 last week, and there’s a surprise. The research firm ranked Google – whose sell-side ad tech platform is facing federal antitrust charges – as a mere challenger.

Current ad pricing often doesn’t correlate to a site’s attention score, which means there’s an arbitrage opportunity for buyers and resellers.

CTV advertising continues to drive significant growth for Magnite. That’s all thanks to “increasing programmatic adoption by the industry’s largest players,” CEO Michael Barrett told investors on the company’s Q3 earnings call this Thursday.

To court new programmatic buyers, SoundCloud is now selling its display and video ads via open auction and private marketplace deals that combine multiple types of inventory.

By implementing the anti-MFA playbook detailed in the ANA’s November report, brands were able to reduce the portion of their programmatic budgets going to made-for-advertising sites to about 1%.

Sovrn is now offering its header bidding managed service, dubbed Ad Management, as self-serve software for a flat CPM fee.

Programmatic media buyers care about serving the needs of their advertiser clients. But there’s no reason they can’t also help publishers – especially diverse publishers – at the same time.

PubMatic’s $5 million loss from DV360’s bidding algorithm fix earlier this year suggests second-price auctions aren’t completely a thing of the past.

Athletes aren’t the only ones competing during the Paris Olympics. Advertisers are bidding to reach tens of millions of viewers during the first programmatic Olympic Games.

E.W. Scripps becomes the first CTV publisher to adopt OpenPass, The Trade Desk’s single sign-on product for user authentication.

Inspire Brands, the fast-food franchise that owns popular chains such as Dunkin’, Sonic and Arby’s, is rewriting parts of its TV playbook to better manage reach and frequency in streaming media campaigns.

Curation’s shift to the sell side is giving DSPs less control over how advertisers curate audiences, which is creating new tensions in the programmatic ecosystem.

For Magnite, the biggest growth opportunity lies in supply-path optimization. The trade-off is the pressure to differentiate itself from other supply-side platforms competing for agency deals.

PubMatic has its supply-path optimization initiative, its strategy to introduce direct deals for CTV and online video, to thank for its quarterly revenue growth.