openRTB

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.

Publishers and SSPs aren’t incentivized to accurately label their video inventory. But increased pressure from the buy side could correct the skewed pricing dynamics that result from outstream being sold as instream.

Industry experts weigh in on Forbes’s MFA subdomain and why ad verification tools still regularly fail to flag some instances of alleged SIVT.

Buyers will soon have far more transparency into video ad inventory sold through Google’s platform. But some publishers and video platforms have concerns.

Publishers and online video platforms that rely on accompanying content video ads could see their revenue drop after Google AdX’s April 1 update.

In today’s newsletter: Can The Trade Desk make UID2 happen?; IAB Tech Lab weathers a European legal challenge to OpenRTB, but the TCF’s fate remains undecided; and Meta removes the Facebook News tab in the US and Australia.

In today’s newsletter: Can Etsy and Wayfair compete against Temu?; audience data dominates the TV upfronts; the FTC sues to block the Kroger/Albertsons deal.

As bold and ambitious as Privacy Sandbox is, it’s rolling out with a lot of confusion and ambiguity. And there’s plenty about the new paradigm that we don’t currently understand.

While 2023’s return to fiscal responsibility made for rough waters, it will pale in comparison to 2024.  Here are eight trends worth watching.

Here are the pros and cons of client-side and server-side header bidding, and some typical use cases for each.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Long-Tail Retail Walmart Connect and Target Roundel are the two retail media players with the biggest adoption outside of Amazon, according to a recent Digiday survey. But both lag far behind Amazon’s 76% adoption rate. Twenty-four percent of those surveyed used Walmart Connect’s […]

Programmatic retail media is stuck in a holding pattern until there are OpenRTB standards – the protocols for automated online advertising – that address sponsored listings.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Video Jockeys The Trade Desk publicly adopted the IAB Tech Lab’s new video protocols, which create more specificity around the type of online video ads being bought, Adweek reports. The news worried some publishers who run low-quality videos, like easily ignored spots or […]

Given industrywide pushback, the IAB Tech Lab has amended its previous update to its guidelines for in-stream and out-stream video.

Despite the IAB Tech Lab’s clear specifications, 33% of contextual SDA signals and 75% of user SDA signals fail to meet the necessary signal requirements.

Podcaster adoption of dynamic ad insertion (DAI) increased from less than 50% in 2019 to a whopping 84% in 2021. But for podcasters to get the most value out of DAI, they need an open environment. Using DAI within a walled garden makes it harder to get the full benefit of great innovation, writes Jon Stephenson, Founder and CEO of SoundStack.

Brand marketers are still hesitant to lean into a mobile-first approach, particularly in programmatic. But with the mobile app economy predicted to grow to $156 billion by 2023, why the uncertainty? Today, the digital advertising industry has the opportunity to transform the mobile app channel by acknowledging, understanding and tackling marketers’ concerns, writes Steve Roach, head of mobile app sales at Index Exchange.

The IAB Tech Lab has updated its OpenRTB standard to include objects specifically designed for DOOH. It also published new DOOH-specific guidelines and technical resources for real time bidding in collaboration with the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) and Outsmart, the Out of Home Advertising Association for the UK.

You can’t have supply path optimization (SPO) without supply chain transparency. The ads.txt version 1.1 update released in April added OWNERDOMAIN and MANAGERDOMAIN variables that allow publishers to label a site’s parent company and the intermediary that is selling a site’s ad inventory. The IAB Tech Lab’s Jill Wittkopp spoke to AdExchanger about how these supply chain transparency tools relate to the industry’s pursuit of SPO.

The IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audience (SDA) spec is touted as a key contextual targeting alternative for the post-third-party-cookie digital ad ecosystem – one predicated on privacy-friendly addressability and publisher first-party data monetization. Some publishers are enthusiastic about testing SDA campaigns in the run-up to Google’s 2023 deadline for the phaseout of third-party cookies in Chrome. There is growing concern, however, about a marked lack of advertiser interest in doing the same.

While Topics API is a significant improvement from Google’s initial proposal, FLoC, there’s a more efficient and privacy-compliant window into interest-based advertising, says Stephanie Layser, News Corp’s VP of data, identity and ad tech. The answer? Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA).

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Don’t Hate, Verifi … cate  The newspaper company Gannett, best-known for publishing USA Today, misrepresented ads in programmatic auctions over the course of nine months until just last week. In many cases, the inaccurate ads were seemingly bound for the flagship USA Today site […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Marc Goldberg, CRO at Method Media Intelligence. Can prebid cure all that ails you? In a word … no. The RTB protocols were put into place so that sellers and buyers […]

The revised OpenRTB 3.0 spec released Tuesday makes major changes to the programmatic standard to stamp out bad ads and fraud. The IAB Tech Lab’s new spec is now open for public comment for 60 days. The eight-year-old OpenRTB standard governs how demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) communicate with each other to buy […]

The IAB Tech Lab wants to change its OpenRTB 3.0 programmatic auction standard so that it authenticates basic details of the transaction, like the identity of the seller. The current OpenRTB standard assumes buyers and sellers honestly identify themselves and their intentions – but some shady players took advantage of that honor system. One problem […]

RTB whiz Neal Richter is the new CTO at Rakuten Marketing, the marketing solutions subsidiary of Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. Richter, who serves as a technical adviser to a number of ad tech startups, including Metamarkets and nToggle, joins the company after more than seven years with Rubicon Project, most recently as CTO. At Rakuten, […]

In ad tech, even standards need standards. On Monday, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab unveiled a compliance program for vendors to prove they’re adhering to the alphabet soup of ad delivery industry standards. Over the years, the IAB has developed a protocol for ad delivery: VAST for video ad serving; VPAID to allow video ads […]

Ad tech partnerships are fast and frequent, as vendors move to establish a presence in disciplines where they were formerly lacking, or to bolster their inventory pool. Certainly, these integrations are easier with the emergence of standards like openRTB, but there’s still more to it. “Now that everyone can support openRTB, you have to do […]

There’s an updated standard in town: OpenRTB 2.3. The latest version incorporates guidelines for native advertising creative within a real-time bidding environment, accounting for metadata like headline, content URL, description text and images. The standard should mean more native advertising will flow through more exchanges with fewer hiccups, right? Well, not exactly. AdExchanger asked industry […]