Supply chain transparency

Complexity hasn’t made the CTV supply chain difficult to trust. This is a transparency problem and, more specifically, an ads.txt problem.

It’s been 15 years since this comic first ran in January 2011, and there’s something both quaint and timeless about it. Here’s to more (and more) transparency in 2026, and happy New Year!

Meet Greenbids, a Paris-based startup that helps intermediaries reduce carbon in the bid stream using predictive machine learning.

Marketers are wasting 25% of their ad spend on made-for-advertising websites and inefficiencies. And the ANA thinks consolidation and education are the solutions. Plus: 2024 ad spend will grow, but at a slower rate. And streamers will grapple with CTV’s rising ad spend and linear TV’s accelerating decline.

After 12 years of working in – or adjacent to – the ad tech industry, I am coming to terms with the simple answer to many depressing questions.

Google’s new “reject all” cookies button is about to disrupt the entire ad tech ecosystem even more. The next era of ad tech is about user consent, not cookies, writes Joe Root, CEO of Permutive. And the age of opt-outs means publishers and advertisers need solutions to serve an ad without processing user data – and some are already making mistakes.

Transparency in audience measurement and ad sale pricing and has grown over time. But The need for greater transparency around the cacophony of growing advanced TV offerings is glaring, writes John Link, VP of sales at AdImpact. Compared to the linear TV market, digital ad transactions remain more opaque because the nature of the medium calls for more advanced targeting with more granular data.

The biggest reason marketers aren’t shifting their linear TV dollars to CTV is the lack of visibility into where their ads are going, said Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of Integral Ad Science. In attempt to bridge that gap, IAS is tying its contextual tech into its CTV strategy, which started maturing after the company bought the video ad server Publica last summer.

The IAB designed the sellers.json specification to follow the money – but the spec has its own limitations that require hygiene practices and general maintenance for accuracy. What’s more, just because an entry exists on sellers.json does not mean inventory is available to buyers, writes Eric Bozinny, senior director of marketplace quality at PubMatic.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Romain Job, Chief Strategy Officer, Smart AdServer.  With our programmatic marketplace becoming increasingly unwieldy, the challenge of identity resolution in a privacy-first, consent-based marketplace has made curation essential. What is curation? Simply put, it’s […]

Lou Paskalis is on a mission to “save marketing from itself.” “It has to go from what it is today, which is something I sort of endure to get things done, to something I love because it enables me to do things,” Paskalis says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. Paskalis is a recognizable […]

“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 Nico Neumann, assistant professor and fellow, Centre for Business Analytics at Melbourne Business School. There were many explosive findings in the recently released ISBA report about the United Kingdom’s ad […]

Privacy protection isn’t a tick-the-box exercise, and so policymakers need to think outside the box. At the Federal Trade Commission’s annual PrivacyCon event in Washington, DC, on Thursday, the agency invited nearly 20 privacy researchers and academics from around the world to dig into the nitty gritty on consumer privacy, data collection, security and the […]

First there was Ads.txt, then there was App-ads.txt. Now there are Sellers.json and OpenRTB SupplyChain Object Specifications. The two new specs, released for public comment by the IAB Tech Lab on Thursday, are both meant to help advertisers get a better understanding of whether the inventory they’re buying is legit and where it’s coming from. […]

Adobe and AppNexus plan to give marketers supply-chain transparency from the DSP to the SSP by partnering on a pilot program. Adobe Advertising Cloud will reveal all fees taken by the DSP, including the platform fee and any add-ons, as well as AppNexus’ bill to the publisher, which will help marketers track media dollars through […]