prebid

Why retail media is going in-house. Plus, Prebid.org’s latest update addresses three biggies: SPO, data privacy and the end of third-party cookies.

The new version of header bidding software makes it easier to identify specific ad transactions, gives publishers more granular control over how they express user consent to downstream partners, and enables testing of Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

Privacy Sandbox APIs will be generally available starting in July. That means publishers have roughly one year to get acclimated … and to raise any red flags to regulators.

It’s possible to improve your efficiency as a publisher while also reducing your carbon footprint, with no cost to revenue.

Supply-path optimization conjures an image of SSPs and DSPs dueling it out to each render the other obsolete. But it’s actually not that dramatic.

On the heels of the launch of its latest supply-path optimization product, PubMatic posted $55.4 million in Q1 revenue, growing 2% YOY.

Ad tech companies manage billions of advertising bids across thousands of publishers in a matter of milliseconds. So, when a privacy error slips through cracks, it can metastasize into a potential GDPR concern in the blink of an eye.

The alternative ID landscape is incredibly fragmented. So how are publishers – especially long-tail publishers that tend to be strapped for tech resources – supposed to pick the ID solutions that work best for them?

In 2022, SPO solutions largely revolved around creating direct connections to so-called premium publishers. But machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) also took on a bigger role in SPO this year. And 2022 was the year the ad industry began touting SPO as the solution of choice for sustainability-focused marketers.

UK-based publisher LADbible Group is testing post-cookie alternatives and building its contextual targeting capabilities. But the social-first publisher has yet to be convinced that any of these alternatives will be a truly viable replacement for the much-maligned – and yet still widely used – third-party cookie.

Google Ad Manager (GAM) was out of commission for about three hours Thursday evening across web, app and video inventory. Any ad placement served through GAM, even ads monetized by a non-Google SSP, went dark, leading to lost revenue for publishers of all sizes at a time when they can least afford to lose out on revenue.

SSPs had traditionally been among the first in the ad tech ecosystem to build profitable businesses. But their future in the programmatic tech stack is uncertain because they’ve evolved from publisher-centric technologies to demand aggregation businesses, often competing with their biggest customers: buy-side platforms or DSPs.

My Code, a publisher network that specializes in multicultural media, manages display and video inventory across nearly 800 sites under its umbrella. Because of the complexity of programmatic sales across such a diverse portfolio of sites, including a mix of owned and third-party clients, My Code has relied on PubMatic’s OpenWrap unified bidding solution for the past two years.

Kevel launched a new set of APIs on Thursday, called Relay, for publishers and their ad tech partners to build their own programmatic stacks. Kevel’s overarching vision is to provide an AWS cloud-like infrastructure to support online advertising. The purpose of Relay, specifically, is to help publishers get more innovative with their programmatic monetization strategy.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the value of a publisher’s first-party data, but publishers can’t effectively monetize their data programmatically if they don’t have a standardized way to categorize it. On Monday, ArcSpan released Contextual APP, a data processing tool that enables publishers to structure their first-party contextual data into salable audience segments, including seller-defined audiences, using the IAB Tech Lab’s content and audience taxonomies.

What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.

Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Improved Transparency (Sure … ) The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) has launched a certification program for addressable media identifiers (AMIs), which have become super important since ATT.  If you haven’t heard of AMIs, don’t worry. It’s not a common term, at least not […]

Publishers that pack their ad servers with hundreds of thousands of line items can go ahead and clear them out: Google Ad Manager is building a connection to Prebid to better support header bidding

Prebid hired Mike Racic as the industry group’s first president. Prebid’s growing membership numbers and the expanded scope of projects taken on by its committees necessitated hiring a leader who could focus full time on running Prebid as a company, Racic said.

Solitaire remains a popular mainstay in app-based gaming – and it’s the next frontier for cookieless advertising. Pubfinity, an SSP that places ads in Windows-based desktop game apps like Simple Solitaire, is hitching itself to Epsilon’s cookieless identity solution, Core ID.

The Trade Desk recently made waves with the rollout of OpenPath, its direct-to-publisher offering, and its plan to turn off Google Open Bidding, a one-two punch in supply path optimization (SPO). Both of these SPO moves could reshuffle the ad buying ecosystem, making publishers less reliant on SSPs and cutting off a revenue source for Google’s Open Bidding.

The Trade Desk’s OpenPath demonstrates supply path optimization (SPO) is moving from concept to reality. But what does it practically mean for publishers or yield teams tasked with driving business KPIs? The question is to whom SPO is important, writes Emry DowningHall, SVP of programmatic revenue and strategy at Unwind Media.

With third-party cookies on the road to nowhere, data management platform Audigent has been working to develop its own cookieless identifier, which it’s calling the Hadron ID. Audigent hopes the new identifier will keep the company competitive in a world where DMPs are being supplanted by customer data platforms.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rich Calkins, Director of Product Management, OpenX. For ad tech wonks who spend countless hours in industry working groups, getting deep in the weeds to solve problems is all but required. But when it […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Rich Calkins, Director of Product Management for OpenX.  Publishers are right to be worried about the impact that third-party cookie deprecation in Chrome will have on their programmatic revenue. In 2019, Google ran a study […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Opening The Books Amazon is acquiescing to an audit by the Media Rating Council of the online retailer’s ad tech. Amazon’s demand-side platform saw tremendous growth in Q1 as ad revenue soared nearly 90% year over year. Sponsored Products – Amazon’s cost-per-click product listing […]

“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 Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.  Today’s column is written by Tom Kershaw, CTO of Magnite and Chairman of Prebid.org. For the second time in the past 13 months, Google managed to plunge the world of ad tech into complete chaos […]

This article is sponsored by Xandr. In about a year, more than 56 million US households will be cord cutters or cord nevers, making CTV and OTT a must-have medium for advertisers to tell their stories at scale. Coupling this with programmatic’s ease of transacting and flexibility, CTV and OTT programmatic ad spend is on […]