The Sell Sider

Buyers already have access to the same information from the same trusted third-parties that publishers use to define Contextual Categories. So why bother?

With so much reliance on third parties in all of our businesses, it is important to remain appropriately skeptical and vet each company.

If CNAME access and third-party cookies go away, identity companies – and most of their clients and partners – are going to get hurt, and badly, writes Kevin Mullen, chief product officer at Roq.ad.

Success in the first-party web is based first and foremost on relationships, quality and trust, neither of which are improved by most content currently provided by recommendation engines, writes audience and data strategy consultant Alessandro De Zanche.

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.

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.

Publishers’ operational success depends on the abilities of a few specific individuals. If you have amazing operations leaders that can think strategically, you can do things other publishers can’t. But lose that leadership and the company’s future prospects take a hit, writes Rob Beeler, founder and CEO at Beeler.Tech.

In theory, there is a lot a publisher may know about how audiences interact with their content that doesn’t fit neatly into the way cookies operate or the broader categorization schemas that are used today. This is where SDAs can make all the difference, writes Andrew Rosenman, global product marketing lead for advanced TV and video at Equativ.

In recent months, the IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audiences (SDA) have rapidly emerged as a strong contender for privacy-compliant audience classification. But many publishers still rely on time-consuming, manual processes to assign categories to their content, writes Oleksii Borysov, VP of product at MGID.

Publishers that don’t buy traffic don’t usually have a problem, but even what you might call “good” or scrupulous publishers do have some invalid traffic, says Steve Guenther, VP of digital auditing services at the Alliance for Audited Media.

Supply-path optimization remains a hot industry topic. Increasingly, advertisers and publishers see the value in SPO to get closer to one another’s audiences. But identity is stoking the fire on the convergence of programmatic supply and demand, writes Lauren Fisher, GM of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

In Q2 of 2022, ad tech witnessed a slowdown in scaled deal activity (almost 60%). The reason? Global inflation, the Russia-Ukraine war, rising interest rates and the prospect of a recession are just a few factors. But what does this mean for publishers in particular, and how can they prepare? Kean Graham, CEO and founder, MonetizeMore, offers his perspective.

Everyone in our industry has been on the edge of their seat since Google first began developing the Privacy Sandbox more than three years ago. But things have been moving slowly, writes Lukasz Wlodarczyk, VP of programmatic ecosystem growth and innovation at RTB House. The cookieless future is virtually here, and the time to experiment with alternatives is now.

Forget the post-cookie future. For Dailymotion, user-based targeting is already a thing of the past. Hamza Kourimate, VP and global head of sales marketing and data solutions at Dailymotion, spoke to AdExchanger on how the video platform is using its first-party data trove to build a contextual framework for video.

As technology and industry self-regulation converge to make supply and demand path optimization more seamless and efficient, we need a better name to describe optimization across the advertising ecosystem, writes Stephen Johnston, CTO of PubWise. “I’d like to submit for your consideration a new term: advertising logistics.”

First-party data will be indispensable in a world without third-party-cookies. But before publishers can monetize that data, they need to respect it, said Karthic Bala, executive vice president of data, product and technology at CNET, a Red Ventures-owned publisher that covers tech and consumer electronics.

While Google’s recent decision to extend the life of third-party cookies for another year didn’t come as much of a surprise, it nonetheless sent another ripple throughout the ecosystem. As we enter a future focused on restoring consumer trust, the past few years have seen a ton of changes to the digital advertising landscape, writes Mark Pearlstein, CRO of Permutive.

There’s a new TLA (“three-letter acronym”) that’s crept into the media-buying conversation. MFA: Made-for-advertising content. MFA is a combination of paid traffic, clickbait and other incentivized traffic, engineered to create ad impressions and generate revenue. New sites pop up virtually overnight with millions of impressions, sucking up ad dollars and hurting campaign performance, writes Tal Almany, VP of publisher development at Kargo.

Hardly a week goes by without a marketer or an investor declaring their interest in committing more support to minority-owned media. But the timing is unfortunate, writes Lashawnda Goffin, CEO of Colossus SSP. Just as brands are ready to shift more dollars toward minority audiences and publications, the death of third-party cookies is making those audiences harder to zero-in on.

The Financial Times has long avoided chasing open web programmatic ad revenue. Now, with signal loss prompting a renaissance for contextual targeting and direct deals – and with momentum behind attention metrics, of which the FT was an early proponent going back to 2015 – the publisher’s longtime strategy seems prescient. Brendan Spain, the FT’s VP of advertising for the Americas, spoke with AdExchanger.

Apple made an announcement that might have digital advertising ramifications sooner than news about the company’s DSP. Apple’s forthcoming “Lockdown Mode” can protect consumers from illicit activity and unwanted tracking. But it’s designed for a specific group of individuals vulnerable to attacks – plus, it can impact functionality in a way most users won’t tolerate.

The programmatic ecosystem is so complex and opaque that bad actors are able to game the system to fund hate and social harm. Now, advertisers are getting more concerned about funding harmful activity through ad fraud and high-velocity disinformation within social and programmatic ecosystems, writes Sarah Bolton, EVP of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

Brands without scalable first-party data are turning to retailers to connect directly with customers. At the same time, writes Andreas Reiffen, CEO of Crealytics, retailers are seeking ways to combat margin pressure, emulate Amazon’s extraordinary advertising success, deepen relationships with brand partners, and better understand their customers. Cue the retail media boom. 

For Enthusiast Gaming, a publisher that specializes in ad-supported gaming content and game development, macroeconomic trends have contributed to a perfect storm. But Enthusiast is looking at the bright side, as advertiser interest in game-related properties is on the rise. Enthusiast CRO Bill Drolet talked to AdExchanger about gaming’s cross-platform value proposition, plans for continued direct sales growth, early forays into in-game advertising and more.

The LGBTQ+ community is the fastest-growing minority group in the US, accounting for over 20% of Gen Z. Yet, to date, social platforms have not fully embraced and supported our community. Across popular social networks like Facebook and TikTok, queer creators face censorship and potential legislation to limit their rights, writes Lauren Zoltick, director of performance marketing at Storyblocks.

Marketers are often mission-driven. But too often, when informing the public through news and information is of utmost urgency, marketers choose to steer clear not just from bad or hot-button issues, but from all news content entirely, choking off potential revenue for news enterprises and doing a disservice to the public good, writes Dev Pragad, CEO of Newsweek.

Multiple threats to the ad tech industry make navigating forward complicated, writes Rob Beeler, Founder and CEO of Beeler.Tech. But as “fun” as it is to bet on what dooms us, might I suggest we start placing bets on what saves us? For publishers, the way forward lies in revenue diversification and building real trust with consumers.

All ad tech activities, from buying impressions to processing data, require electricity. And it’s estimated that the Internet’s overall environmental impact is around 2%-4% of global carbon emissions, which is on par with the airline industry. But there’s a very real opportunity to ignite real, long-term change that can benefit all stakeholders involved, writes John Goulding, global chief strategy officer at MiQ.

Investment firm North Equity has amassed a portfolio of established media brands like Popular Science, Field & Stream and Saveur with a few new media upstarts mixed in, including The Drive, Task & Purpose, Donut Media and MEL Magazine. In 2021, North Equity launched Recurrent Ventures as its media division. Its CRO, Matt Young, spoke with AdExchanger about Recurrent’s acquisition strategy, its ambitions in CTV and gaming and why the company is prioritizing its private marketplace business to reduce its reliance on open web programmatic.