Every Friday, AdExchanger publishes an original comic creation inspired by trends in the online advertising industry.
We get together to spitball ideas and then share them with our very talented comic artist Kevvo.
From the rise of curation to the Google ad tech antitrust trial in Virginia, he helps us translate the biggest news into the nerdiest of cartoons.
Sometimes, though, we’re simply amusing ourselves – and hopefully you – with a little ad tech-related wordplay. (Pandora’s Chumbox, anyone?)
We do on occasion wonder whether Kevvo thinks we’re crazy. He probably does! But he never misses. When we send Kevvo the concept for a comic, he transforms it into art.
These are the stories – and the highly specific double entendres – behind AdExchanger’s top 10 comics of 2024.
Enough With The Pearl Clutching
There was no lack of ad tech scandals in 2024, many of them unearthed by the folks at Adalytics, a programmatic log file analytics startup with a knack for dropping research that delves into the inner workings of online advertising.
What it finds is typically unflattering, including brand unsafe user-generated content, MFA flowing unfettered through programmatic pipes and Forbes operating a mislabeled MFA subdomain unbeknownst to buyers.
After each scandal breaks, the industry engages in a collective act of pearl-clutching. How could this have happened? Why didn’t someone stop it? It’s time for change!
Eventually, though, the furor dies down and the industry settles back into the status quo.
Here’s to fewer shocked gasps and to more real action in 2025.
Told Ya So
Were you one of the ones who predicted that Google wouldn’t actually deprecate third-party cookies?
Well, you called it. Feel free to remove your tinfoil hat.
Before July, which is when Google said “just kidding” about that whole deprecation thing, it was considered somewhat of a conspiracy theory to assert that Google wouldn’t go through with the phaseout.
There’s no feeling like being able to say, “I told ya so.”
(This was our instruction to Kevvo for this comic, by the way: “Please draw a group of people looking smug and snacking on cookies. Oh, and make them look like The Lone Gunmen from The X-Files, please!”)
Pandora’s Chumbox
The online advertising industry has a tendency to navel gaze and get lost in the weeds without a compass.
Case in point, the semantic debate this past year over whether the term for cynically produced clickbait content should be “made for advertising” or “made for arbitrage.”
To be fair, there is an important distinction. One could argue any content that aims to monetize with advertising is made for advertising, whereas made-for-arbitrage sites deliberately manipulate programmatic advertising to monetize low-quality content.
Regardless of what you call it, though, most advertisers want to avoid MFA at all costs – not that they know how to define it. But as US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964 to explain his threshold test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
And we all “see it” nearly every time we browse the internet, from never-ending slideshows to clickbait that fails to deliver. In this comic, we lampoon the most notorious forms of clickbait using themes from ad tech. The headline, “17 DMPs And What They Look Like Now” gave everyone on the editorial team a serious chuckle.
Court Is In Session
“This is my Super Bowl, this is my Roman Empire.”
That’s how Ari Paparo, who does the Marketecture thing these days, described his experience of covering the Google ad tech antitrust trial in Virginia in September, and we couldn’t agree more. We were also there in person during the first week of testimony.
The trial, which lasted for just three weeks, was like a vivisection of the ad tech ecosystem in all of its tangled and murky complexity. From header bidding to auction dynamics, witness after witness took the stand to air grievances or defend business practices.
Our comic is from Judge Leonie Brinkema’s view of the courtroom where it all went down. And the gallery is chock full of Easter eggs. Shout out to Stephanie Layser, Andrew Casale, Brian O’Kelley, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Carnegie, Mr. Monopoly and Lex Luther.
Layser and Casale both testified. Mr. Monopoly wasn’t called.
The ‘Premium’ Internet
During The Trade Desk’s Q1 2024 earnings call, CEO Jeff Green introduced a new term: the so-called “premium internet.”
TTD defines the “premium internet” as “the best of the open internet,” including connected TV, streaming audio, live sports and trusted journalism – all of which are highly attractive to advertisers.
And so there’s no reason why the walled gardens should attract such a magnitude of ad dollars, Green argued to investors, especially when these big ad platforms are also some of the largest distributors of MFA content.
In February, TTD launched its SP500+ marketplace in beta, which aggregates what it considers to be the top, most premium publishers on the open internet. And in the spring, TTD released a list of what it considers to be the top 100 most premium publishers on the internet.
Both announcements caused a stir in the industry, sparking the question, ”Who has the right to define the premium internet?” In our comic, we took that idea to the next logical conclusion: a “quality coaster” where Green decides who’s premium enough to ride.
Runners up
It’s that time again, when people like to designate a “word of the year.”
So what should the ad tech industry’s word of the year be? Probably “curation,” which became one of the buzziest and most controversial topics of 2024.
Also, “curation” has the benefit of actually being a word.
According to Oxford University Press, 2024’s word of the year is “brain rot,” which, it must be pointed out, is two words. Meanwhile, “AI” is the ANA’s word of the year for the second year running. (We do all realize that AI isn’t a word, either, right? It’s an initialism.)
Anyway, back to curation, it got a lot of people hot under the collar as they debated whether it was really a new thing or just a rehashed version of ad networks.
But as much Sturm und Drang as there was over curation this year, it was rivaled by the acrimony swirling around ID bridging.
The practice, which involves using first-party data to make matches and recover third-party cookies for bid requests when third-party cookies aren’t available, sparked a debate that raged within the IAB Tech Lab.
“This was easily the most contentious working group conversation I have ever had,” Hillary Slattery, the Tech Lab’s senior director of product management for programmatic, told AdExchanger in July.
Since then, the Tech Lab has added “ID provenance” to the latest OpenRTB spec, and the waters have calmed.
Prebid.org, the industry standards body that developed and maintains Prebid.js – the widely adopted open-source header bidding wrapper – was much in the news in September.
And that’s because Prebid came up multiple times during the Google ad tech antitrust trial, including this juicy tidbit.
According to Brian O’Kelley, whose prerecorded deposition was played in court, Google was “vehemently opposed” to the idea of Prebid, because it heralded the rise of header bidding. As the IAB’s largest financial contributor, Google was able to pressure the Tech Lab not to incorporate the tech.
Not that this stopped header bidding in its tracks – far from it. Prebid.org was formed as an independent org to support header bidding and both have thrived ever since.
Although alternative TV measurement currencies haven’t been able to knock Nielsen off its pedestal, it’s clear that the TV advertising industry is ready for change.
Providers like VideoAmp, iSpot and Comscore are making life difficult for Nielsen.
For example, Paramount and Nielsen remain locked in a battle over the price of Nielsen’s service. Paramount, which believes Nielsen’s fees are too high, let its contract lapse. It’s now relying on VideoAmp for its viewership numbers instead.
Last but not least, publishers have been talking about using attention metrics as a unit of currency for media buying for at least a decade. See this 2014 (!!) AdExchanger story by yours truly about attention metrics starting to get traction.
Over the past year, though, attention has been getting a lot more attention, and who knows: Maybe in 2025, the click-through rate will make its way to the measurement version of Silicon Heaven and attention metrics will finally start to gain real momentum.
This comic was inspired by the Mets and their impressive run during the 2024 season. They may not have made it to the World Series, but they did generate a lot of attention. (Sorry, we had to). The Mets/metrics wordplay also proved irresistible.
🙏 Kudos again to Kevvo for bringing our comic concepts to life! ✏️
