OpenPath

GAM’s dinner with ad agencies sparked speculation that Google is preparing to spin off its bundled SSP and ad server as a remedy to its ad tech monopoly. But Google says it’s just part of the trend of SSPs going direct to buyers.

TTD turns its back on SSPs; scientists are finding a home on Bluesky; and a hacker used Anthropic’s Claude to plan a cybercriminal operation.

Is TTD forcing agencies to adopt the new Kokai interface despite claims they can still use the interface of their choice? Here’s what we were able to find out.

In 2017, Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise predicted the demise of supply-side platforms. The category survived, but he’s sticking to his theory that pureplay SSPs are a thing of the past. Plus: An update on Mediaocean’s $550 million Innovid acquisition and Wise’s counterpoint to recent criticisms of The Trade Desk.

After adopting OpenPath, Freestar pubs now see 3x higher inventory fill rate from The Trade Desk demand and 27% higher programmatic revenue from these buyers.

An Adalytics report released Friday details numerous instances of brands serving ads to known bots that appear on the IAB Tech Lab’s International Spiders and Bots list and TAG’s Data Center IP List.

Warner Bros. Discovery officially launched OpenPath last week, with the goal of driving demand for its news sites’ display inventory. But for now, CTV is not part of the integration.

The first half of this decade has left publishers reeling from a pandemic jab and an AI uppercut that rearranged our reality and knocked us to our knees. Here’s how pubs and their ad tech partners can punch back in the years ahead.

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.

Ari Paparo’s Marketecture acquires another ad-tech publication; Spotify is launching an SSP; and CPG brands turn to “chaos packaging” to stand out among the crowd.