Header bidding wrappers came on the scene a decade ago. At the time competition was fierce, as multiple solutions competed for market share. But Prebid has emerged as the dominant solution. And now the open-source wrapper can claim yet another partner integration: Amazon is integrating into the Prebid wrapper.
This partnership simplifies the ad setup for publishers, since they don’t have to manage separately from other wrapper partners. And it’s a victory for Prebid, which has long tried to be the neutral, open-source alternative to Google’s (monopolistic) ad server.
To understand how this news fits into ad tech history, we open the podcast with a walk through publishers’ decade-long attempt to gain more control over their ad tech stack.
Then we discuss Amazon’s Prebid integration contextualized among other product announcements at two big conferences last week: Amazon’s publisher conference and Google Marketing Live last week. While the conferences had different scopes, with Amazon’s focusing on a subset of the advertising business focused on publishers, it’s striking to see just how many product announcements Amazon is making, and how many three-letter acronyms it’s coined in recent years. Not so long ago, Amazon was barely cracking $1 billion in ad spend and its play to become part of the “triopoly” was far from assured.
Meanwhile, Google appears to have shifted its focus beyond advertising execution to AI. It’s planning to answer more search queries with AI-produced results, even as it dries up publisher referrals.
And there’s barely a drip of new Google products that improve its DSP and SSP (unless we’re talking Performance Max). The Trade Desk and Amazon are clearly gaining momentum in programmatic products, as Google is stymied by its antitrust cases.
Both bets – AI and improved ad-buying products – could likely pay off. But the success of each could once again upend the power balance between tech platforms and publishers.
