Political advertisers are forecasted to spend over $12 billion across all channels during the 2024 election cycle, marking the highest spend in U.S. history, according to eMarketer. While a significant portion of that budget will go to linear TV, digital advertising remains a critical battleground. 

Election campaigns are turning to advanced techniques like bid shading to stretch their dollars in this high-stakes environment. But what does bid shading mean for publishers? Let’s dig into how this tactic impacts publishers, the challenges it presents, and how to navigate these waters during this unprecedented election cycle.

What is Bid Shading?

Bid shading might sound like some covert operation, but it’s actually a savvy strategy media buyers use in digital ad auctions. Imagine you’re at an auction, but instead of bidding wildly, you have an algorithm whispering the optimal bid in your ear. 

This algorithm analyzes historical pricing data, current market conditions, and the value of the impression to tweak bids just enough to win ad impressions without overpaying. The method is especially crucial in situations like political advertising where budgets, although large, need to be spent efficiently.

Example:

Picture a political campaign aiming to secure an ad slot. Without bid shading, they bid $10 and pay the full amount. But, with bid shading, the algorithm suggests $7.50 based on past data, saving $2.50 while still winning the spot and potentially saving the advertiser 25% on that impression.

The Impact of High Political Budgets on Publishers

With political budgets hitting an all-time high, this influx of ad spend can be both a golden opportunity and a potential headache for publishers. 

The Upside:

1. Increased Demand: More political dollars chasing your inventory means heightened competition, which typically drives up demand and fill rates.
2. Revenue Boost: Those previously unsold ad slots? They’re now hot commodities, filling up quickly and boosting your bottom line.

The Downside:

1. Revenue Volatility: While demand surges, bid shading introduces a layer of unpredictability as bids are adjusted downward, making revenue streams less predictable.
2. Inventory Devaluation: As campaigns use bid shading to cut costs, the perceived value of your ad impressions might take a hit, impacting long-term revenue strategies.

Navigating the Risks of Bid Shading

Bid shading isn’t just a double-edged sword — it’s a whole cutlery set. Here are the risks you need to watch out for and how to handle them:

Lower CPMs:

Bid shading typically results in lower cost-per-thousand impressions (CPMs). Some publishers have reported CPM drops of up to 20% due to bid shading. This is a direct hit to your revenue as bids are systematically adjusted to lower amounts.

What to Do:

Consider implementing dynamic price floors that adapt to market conditions in real time. This ensures bids won’t drop below a certain level, protecting your revenue.

Inconsistent Revenue Streams:

The dynamic nature of bid shading means your revenue from political ads can fluctuate wildly, complicating forecasting and planning.

What to Do: 

Leverage advanced yield management tools to analyze historical data and market trends. This helps you understand and anticipate the effects of bid shading, optimizing your inventory pricing and placement.

Competitive Pressure:

With multiple campaigns vying for ad space, the pressure to lower prices further increases, risking a race to the bottom.

What to Do:

Enhance your auction strategies with techniques like header bidding. By involving multiple demand sources, you can drive up competition for your inventory, balancing out the downward pressure from bid shading.

Making Bid Shading Work for You

Bid shading isn’t all doom and gloom—there’s a silver lining if you play your cards right. Here’s how to turn bid shading into an advantage:

Leverage Advanced Analytics: 

Investing in tools that provide deep insights into bidding patterns can help publishers adjust their strategies in real time and identify opportunities to maximize revenue.

Enhance First-Party Data: 

Rich, accurate data about audience segments can command premium prices, even in a bid-shaded environment. Investing in data collection and analysis can increase the value proposition for advertisers.

Dynamic Price Floors:

Setting smart, dynamic price floors can help you maintain control over your inventory pricing. Adjust these floors based on real-time market conditions, like time of day, user demographics, and current events to prevent your CPMs from dropping too low.

Auction Strategies:

Don’t just rely on traditional auction setups. Incorporate header bidding to get multiple demand sources competing for your ad space. Increase competition for inventory and mitigate the impact of bid shading from any single source by relying on multiple SSPs and ad exchanges. This improves the likelihood of higher bids, even with bid shading in play. 

Yield Management:

Invest in robust yield management tools and expertise. These tools help you make data-driven decisions about your ad inventory, optimizing pricing and placement to counteract the effects of bid shading.

Collaboration with Buyers:

Build strong relationships with your advertisers. Educate them about the value of your premium inventory and work together to establish fair pricing and bidding practices. This collaborative approach can lead to more stable and beneficial outcomes for both parties.

When in Rome Leverage Bid Shading to Your Advantage

Bid shading is here to stay, especially in high-budget political advertising cycles. Publishers who adapt and strategically manage their ad inventory can thrive, capturing the full potential of these high-budget opportunities.

While bid shading presents both opportunities and challenges, strategic measures can mitigate risks and maximize revenue. Implementing dynamic pricing, enhancing auction strategies, optimizing yield management, and fostering collaboration with buyers is key to navigating bid shading complexities and staying competitive.

Not all of the predicted $12 billion election cycle budgets will be subject to bid shading. Direct deals, bypassing programmatic auctions, will also play a significant role. Publishers offering unique value propositions, like highly engaged audiences or brand-safe environments, can command premium prices despite bid shading tactics.

The post How Bid Shading and the $12 Billion Political Ad Boom Could Impact Publishers appeared first on AdMonsters.

Floor pricing optimization is making waves again in the publishing world, but have we been overthinking it?

Kean Wang, VP of Product and Strategy at Intowow, dives into the evolution of floor pricing strategies and unveils a refreshing shift from complex mathematical models to the practical realm of behavioral economics. By understanding bidder behaviors and leveraging the strengths of Header Bidding and Google Ad Manager, publishers can streamline their approach and boost revenue without getting lost in the computational weeds.

Floor pricing optimization has regained popularity among publishers. Over the past five years, we have perfected our dynamic floor pricing algorithms. However, it wasn’t until a year ago, as we gained access to more data from major publishers around the world, that I realized we might have been approaching this problem unnecessarily.

For quite some time, we adopted a purely mathematical approach to floor pricing optimization, focusing on determining each price P that maximizes the RequestRPM according to the function 

RequestRPM(P) = SellThroughRate(P) × eCPM(P)

for each infinitesimally meaningful inventory segment. If demand is static, the calculations are straightforward and manageable. However, randomness introduces uncertainty in a more realistic scenario where hundreds of thousands of campaigns run concurrently and complete at different times. This uncertainty significantly complicates the computational process and requires intensive predictive modeling to find an optimal solution.

It turns out that an easy way out is to approach the problem from a completely different discipline – behavioral economics.

A Simple and Elegant Approach

In the real world, campaigns are managed by DSPs who bid for impression opportunities in auctions. These DSPs vary widely in their technical capabilities and operational strategies. So, if we could target the behaviors of different types of bidders and provide the right incentives and signals to facilitate communication and competition among them, we could reach an alternative solution that is more elegant. This approach allows the market to optimize by itself to maximize publishers’ benefits without too much interference and the need for excessive calculations.

Generally speaking, bidders buy through two open auction channels: Header Bidding and Google Ad Manager (GAM), both of which are extensively integrated by most publishers. By analyzing bidding behaviors across these channels, we have consolidated the following best practices:

1. For Header Bidding, set up floor prices low enough on SSPs to encourage bid tendencies but high enough to filter out low-quality ads.
2. On Google Ad Manager, use the winning Header Bidding bid prices and dynamically trigger Unified Pricing Rules (UPRs) to provide competitive price signals through Google Ad Exchange and Open Bidding.
3. Ensure that Header Bidding line items are correctly priced on GAM with your net earnings to facilitate an efficient unified auction.

These best practices take advantage of a key behavioral distinction between these two channels of bidders: 

Google Ad Manager bidders, predominantly Google Ads and DV360, primarily adjust their bids based on floor price signals, whereas Header Bidding bidders make extensive adjustments in response to changes in win rates.

Excessive floor prices do not stimulate Header Bidding bidders; instead, they block their bids and reduce competition. By allowing more Header Bidders to participate in auctions, we maximize the competitive bid signals sent to GAM. On GAM, triggering these signals with UPRs can restore the “last look” advantage for Google bidders, encouraging higher bids that benefit publishers. (Google’s decision to cancel this feature was due to pressure from other SSPs, but this move also negatively impacted publisher revenue.)

With more competitive bids from Google bidders taking over some winning opportunities from Header Bidders and driving down their win rates, Header Bidders are incentivized to adjust their bid prices, which in turn encourages more competitive bids from Google. This fosters a perpetual cycle of healthy competition across these two channels.

For publishers with extensive Header Bidding coverage, these best practices are generally sufficient. Beyond this, additional efforts would likely yield only marginal benefits unless you are determined to invest intensive R&D to further optimize price ranges specifically for Google bidders across each traffic segment, where the benefits could add up to be significant.

More About the Behavioral Distinction

Upon further research and some reverse engineering, we were able to gain a clearer understanding of the factors contributing to such a behavioral difference.

For DSPs, floor prices are one of the pre-auction signals useful for optimizing bid decisions to maximize campaign ROIs. However, for floor prices to serve as reliable indicators, the environment must meet three criteria:

1. Floor prices, along with the associated traffic metadata, should be consistently supported across all stakeholders.
2. Floor prices must maintain their integrity during transmission and should not be lost, overridden, or manipulated down the supply path.
3. To benefit from these signals, bidders must possess powerful predictive capabilities with the technical bandwidth to perform cost-efficient real-time calculations.

Only Google, with its unified and streamlined programmatic ad supply path, meets these criteria across all stages. Information from publisher web pages is collected by the standardized Google Publisher Tag (GPT) library, consistently formatted as ad requests, and transmitted to the centralized Google Ad Manager. From there, bid requests are uniformly assembled and sent to DSPs via a robust server-to-server connection using the Authorized Buyer Real-Time Bidding Protocol.

On the buy-side, Google Ads and DV360, operating with powerful predictive capabilities leveraging Google’s highly integrated cloud infrastructure, can accurately estimate ad performance using real-time client-side signals and determine reasonable bid prices for each impression opportunity before an auction occurs. 

In contrast, for Header Bidding, every bid request is processed by at least two entirely separate parties (e.g., publisher-hosted Prebid.js, vendor wrappers, or SSPs) before reaching DSPs. Even for large DSPs with strong predictive capabilities, such a fragmented supply path makes it difficult to ensure the integrity of information, forcing them to downplay the option of adjusting bid decisions based on real-time sell-side signals. A rather reliable source of information is win rate data, which each bidder processes post-auction but is often delayed and lacks granularity.

These disadvantages of Header Bidders are particularly evident when we compared bid CPM trends from early to subsequent ad refresh instances or across different ad position series. For example, for the same inventory, when comparing the CPM of the first ad to the fifth ad refresh, average bid prices from Google bidders can drop by over 50%.

However, for Header Bidders, the average win bid CPM only decreased by 3%, which falls within the margin of statistical error. Such inability to perform per-impression bid adjustments from Header Bidders can also be highlighted by the fact that, on average, they purchase the same inventory with the same level of CTR and viewability performance at approximately a 35% premium compared to Google bidders.

To further pinpoint the issue, we took the same Header Bidding bidder and compared its bidding behaviors across two different channels: Header Bidding and Open Bidding (a unified server-to-server bidding solution provided by Google).

Under the same floor pricing strategy for the same bidder, through Open Bidding RequestRPM could be improved by 8 to 10%, compared to only a marginal 2% improvement through Header Bidding. This suggests that a fragmented supply path is the primary factor preventing per-impression bid adjustments for Header Bidders, forcing bidders through this channel to forgo floor prices and focus on win rate signals instead.

Future Outlook for Floor Pricing Strategies

Floor prices, like other real-time client-side signals, provide valuable information that encourages bidders to recognize the fine nuances in publisher inventory. However, these signals can only be effective when information integrity can also be guaranteed across the entire supply path.

The above behavioral distinctions between Google bidders and Header Bidders underscore the importance of Supply Path Optimization (SPO) and demonstrate how a more streamlined supply path can encourage bidders to utilize more sell-side signals, ultimately improving efficiency across the industry.

But for now, with these simple yet elegant best practices, publisher ad inventory is effectively categorized into two groups: one with extensive competition from both Header Bidders and Google bidders, and the other with only Google bidders. Publishers with more inventory in the first category can significantly benefit from the competitive cycle facilitated by these simple steps.

However, for publishers whose inventory primarily falls into the latter category, an active floor pricing strategy using a traditional mathematical approach is still necessary to realize the huge growth potential from Google demand.

The post Are We Overcomplicating Floor Pricing Optimization? appeared first on AdMonsters.

This year, our Decoder series covered the gamut — iOS 17 privacy updates, state privacy laws, and supply path optimization. If you missed them or want a chance to revisit them, here are the top AdMonsters’ Decoder stories from 2023.

If you see an ad tech term and are still thinking, WTF?!!! This is the place for you. 

Everything You Need To Know About the iOS 17 Update and Its Lasting Impact on Advertising

When Apple introduced its iOS 17 privacy updates, consumers awaited exciting new features, but publishers were concerned about the impact on their businesses. Marketers faced significant updates affecting link tracking, reducing the ability to track user behaviors through shared URLs in messages, email, and Safari Private Mode. 

We spoke with several industry experts who shared advice about how publishers should handle the new updates. They said publishers must prioritize transparent practices, understand third-party data usage, and embrace advanced measurement technologies. It’s crucial to pivot towards contextual advertising, leverage first-party data, and ensure privacy compliance while maintaining engaging ad experiences to uphold user trust.

What Are Made for Advertising (MFA) Sites and Why Are They a Scourge on Ad Tech and Sustainability?

Currently, MFA sites account for at least one in five online impressions, consuming 15% of global programmatic ad spend and generating 26% more carbon waste than legitimate publisher sites.

Major brands are paying for advertising on these low-quality sites, almost certainly without their knowledge. The number of these sites is likely to increase as AI-generated content continues to be more commonplace and as the industry phases out the use of third-party cookies. This is because MFA sites rely in part on outdated contextual targeting tactics to bring in clicks.

Oregon Sets the Bar: Landmark Consumer Data Privacy Bill Becomes the Strongest in the Nation

Oregon passed the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act (OCPA). Oregon stood out amongst six states to enact such laws this year, setting the bar as the strongest bill nationwide. Unlike other states’ regulations, OCPA mandates opt-in consent for 13 to 15-year-old Oregonians, adding extensive protections for sensitive data like national origin and victimization status.

OCPA’s data minimization rules could pose challenges, particularly for marketers aiming to match customer IDs for CTV outreach. This law demands businesses to disclose third-party data sharing and categorize entities involved.

“The data minimization is huge. It is one of the biggest issues the trade groups have against the draft federal privacy law. It has the potential to minimize not only data but the value of data. And it hurts creating a profile,” said Wayne Matus, Co-Founder, General Counsel, and EVP at SafeGuard Privacy. 

What Is Dynamic Flooring?

With the help of Keith Candiotti, Founder and CEO of Optimera, we explored the concept of dynamic flooring in programmatic advertising, focusing on publishers’ strategies to maintain ad inventory pricing competitiveness in the open marketplace. Flooring, the practice of setting a minimum price for ad inventory, empowers publishers to control pricing while participating in real-time bidding. Publishers using GAM leverage Unified Pricing Rules (UPRs) to ensure bids meet their minimum price requirements.

However, setting optimal CPM floors manually poses challenges, as publishers face a constant trade-off between maximizing revenue and maintaining ad fill rates. Dynamic flooring emerged as a solution, using real-time data to adjust floors intelligently for each page view. Nevertheless, not all dynamic flooring solutions are equally effective, with some favoring specific demand partners and failing to generate additional revenue.

What Is Supply Path Transparency & Optimization?

According to an IAB report, the ad tech industry is witnessing substantial growth, and they projected it will increase by 5.9% YoY. However, this growth introduces unique challenges, notably the necessity for transparency within the programmatic supply chain. Supply Path Optimization is a solution to enhance efficiency and transparency by reducing intermediaries that don’t add significant value. 

SPO benefits both supply and demand sides by providing visibility into the ecosystem, improving brand safety for advertisers, increasing revenue opportunities for publishers, reducing ad fraud, and enhancing overall efficiency.

For this explainer, Abhinav Choudhri, Director- Customer Success at AdPushup, dove into recent industry developments, such as the implementation of the OpenRTB 2.6 draft, Ads.txt 1.1, and Transparency Center, and how they have further advanced the cause of supply chain transparency and optimization.

What Is IAB Tech Lab’s ‘Green Initiative’?

The IAB Tech Lab’s Green Initiative aims to address sustainability in the programmatic supply chain. Despite the widespread commitments to carbon neutrality by major tech firms and brands in 2021, putting these commitments into action has proved challenging. 

To tackle this, IAB Tech Lab partnered with AdNetZero to establish a standardized emissions framework. Leveraging expertise and available data from contributing members, the Tech Lab plans to expedite progress in this crucial area to counteract the environmental impact while acknowledging the limited time available.

How Can Publishers Boost Their Ad Revenue with Header Bidding?

Automation has transformed business operations significantly. Consequently, companies are compelled to adapt by integrating advanced technologies. Programmatic advertising, particularly Header Bidding has revolutionized ad buying and selling, boosting efficiency for publishers and advertisers.

Header bidding refers to a real-time auction where multiple demand partners bid on an ad impression before it reaches the ad server. By integrating JavaScript code into a website’s header, this technology enables publishers to simultaneously offer ad space to multiple buyers, enhancing transparency and fostering competition among demand sources.

What is vCPM, and How Does It Relate to Viewability?

vCPM, a metric for measuring the cost of viewable impressions, aids advertisers in maximizing ROI and empowers publishers to boost ad revenue. Despite the rise of attention metrics, viewability remains pivotal for advertisers. 

Marketers must ensure ads are not just seen but viewable. Unlike before, ads generated revenue regardless of visibility; advertisers now prioritize viewable impressions. Publishers must understand how to gauge impression costs to monetize their digital ad space effectively.

An ad must fulfill specific criteria to be viewable, typically with at least 50% of its pixels visible on a user’s screen for at least one second. Unlike traditional CPM, which accounts for all impressions, vCPM zeroes in on viewable impressions, allowing advertisers to allocate budgets more wisely and enhance their return on investment.

The post Explain This to Me…Best of AdMonsters Decoder 2023 appeared first on AdMonsters.

In Jounce Media’s annual report, ‘The State of the Open Internet,’ three influential market forces shed light on the obstacles that media companies and advertising technology platforms face: demand concentration, bidstream bloat, and bidstream blindspots.

How can we level the playing field between the dominant walled gardens and the rest of the open internet? Of course, achieving this equilibrium is no simple task. Open Internet media companies and their ad tech counterparts are caught between the short-term financial obligation to contribute to bidstream bloat and the long-term financial goal of transitioning to two-sided marketplaces that unlock privileged data access. 

Buy Side Chronicles and the Rise of the New Walled Garden

Walled gardens are experiencing a notable surge in their influence and evolving models.

“Over time, marketers pour more and more money into the walled gardens, which makes them critical business partners to bring demand to the open internet,” Chris Kane explained. “They have allocated almost 100% of their net new digital spend each year to walled gardens like YouTube, Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Tik Tok to name a few. By controlling huge pools of demand, these companies are extremely well positioned to build DSP-like offsite advertising businesses.”

In the past couple of years, we’ve witnessed the emergence of at least 12 new commerce businesses adopting the walled garden model for their advertising products. Brands like Doordash, Etsy, Instacart, Uber, and Walgreens have all ventured into this sub-sector. We all know about Netflix’s newly launched walled garden and CVS, as well as other legacy open internet media businesses are now operating as sub-scale walled gardens.

In the future, it’s looking like most media companies will succeed in the open internet while utilizing third-party advertising platforms that produce billions of dollars of demand. Obviously,the best-fit platforms for aggregating demand are the walled gardens.

Over half of the $85B deployed by advertisers to the open internet in 2023 is expected to flow through walled garden buying systems. Walled gardens aren’t sellers on the open internet; they have become the largest buyers, wielding considerable influence.

Boo to Bidstream Bloats

Publishers’ success in acquiring programmatic demand is driven by their ability to secure a significant share of the bidstream, a phenomenon called “volume bias.” This bias arises when DSPs allocate investments based on the number of auctions conducted. Now, here’s where the bloat comes in, and yes, I am referring to what your stomach looks and feels like after three slices of pizza.

Aside from the volume bias and non-exclusive monetization partnerships, publishers contribute to auction duplication in two ways:

Multi-Integrations: Publishers initiate auctions through multiple integration points with various exchanges. They may simultaneously employ Prebid, Amazon Publisher Services, and Google Open Bidding. Consequently, DSPs receive three bid requests from each ad exchange for every available impression.

Rebroadcasting: This primarily applies to mobile and CTV publishers and involves multiplying bid requests through reselling. A publisher collaborates with an ad network, enabling these networks to source DSP demand by reselling ad exchanges. Ultimately, the DSP gets five or more resold bid requests from each ad network for each impression.

Along with the bidstreams bellies getting too bloated, publishers reap all the benefits of ballooning auction volume. Still, the ad tech companies doing all the work are paying for it and only generating revenue when the impression is filled at the end of the process.

Eliminating Bidstream Blindspots and Keys to Future Successes 

Jounce Media’s State of the Internet report reveals that buyers now have greater access to information about ad placement, thanks to industry initiatives focused on transparency within the supply chain, such as ads.txt and sellers.json. 

While buyers can now verify the authenticity of available inventory, review complete payment histories, and identify the highest value of ad placements, their ability to make bidding decisions based on audience and content continues to go downhill thanks to privacy regulations, platform policies, and media buying decisions. 

“CTV content blindspots area business choice. Media companies are looking to maintain control of advertising budgets,” Kane explained. “Although it would be desirable for publishers to collaborate and establish standards while forging deep partnerships with one or possibly two exchanges, the likelihood of this occurring is quite low.”

Bidstream filtering is also getting worse. Publishers are increasingly conscious of traffic shaping and consequently required to submit duplicate requests. Kane strongly emphasizes the need for change to originate from the buy side, urging buyer behavior to evolve and DSPs to take assertive actions before it becomes too late.

You can explore the full report here to delve deeper into these findings.  

The post What Will the Ad-Supported Open Internet Look Like in 2023 and Beyond? appeared first on AdMonsters.

But, the status quo for SSP protocol is no longer working. According to a new survey from Emodo, marketers crave more innovation and keener targeting and measurement skills from SSPs. 

SSPs are beginning to reassess their practices, especially after Yahoo shut down its SSP and other major ones filed for bankruptcy. There is clear evidence that SSPs need to evolve with the times, but how do they make it happen? 

“We’ve been hearing a lot of commentary about the commoditization of supply and demand and how brands and agencies have been struggling to understand the value SSPs truly add to the supply chain,” said Damian McKenna, Chief Operating Officer at Emodo. “This survey underscores the key focus areas for SSPs to remain competitive and deliver value for buyers and sellers. While we are focused on all of the above, Emodo is doubling down on innovations around optimization, especially as it relates to targeting, innovative formats, and unique inventory.”

Innovation Over Efficiency

Andrew Byrd : Emodo recently released a study stating that 56% of marketers are demanding SSP Innovation and 53% want enhanced targeting and measurement. Why did you decide to create this study? Were the results what you expected? Did anything surprise you?

Damian McKenna: There’s a fever pitch surrounding Supply Path Optimization (SPO) to the point where it’s almost talked about too much. We agree that eliminating redundancies and focusing on quality supply is incredibly important, but marketers want more than improving efficiency and removing redundancy. Most marketers we hear from want to deliver something unique, something impactful, and something that speaks to the consumers we are trying to reach, and that’s why we did a study.

Interestingly, this study shows that marketers defined SPO as less critical to them than innovation and enhanced targeting and measurement. If you read the trades and generally talk to people at conferences, SPO always comes up. But innovation, especially related to new formats and targeting, is a place where smaller, more nimble companies like Emodo can stand out as an SSP. Efficiency is essential, but it is half as crucial as innovation to reach your audience. 

AB: I’m curious about the shift to focusing more on innovation and not efficiency, especially when it relates to how generally SSPs are doing within the industry. Evidence shows that a lot of SSPs are struggling right now and are starting to reassess their business practices. What are the issues and is the industry starting to remedy them? 

DM: It’s the battle between scaling innovation and the rapidly expanding space. If you look at the market data over the past 15 years, the expansion of the programmatic marketplace was incredible. It’s hard even to put it on a chart and quantify it. So much of the innovation in the first decade of programmatic was simply curation. The value of SSPs was the curation and connecting of the content to multiple formats.

As the market continued to expand, innovation became lost amid rapid expansion. If you think about the share of spend, publishers over the last few years probably felt a little lost and not heard. At the same time, there were so many intermediaries in the middle. Publishers wanted to find new and unique monetization opportunities, and they wanted that percentage of brands and DSPS. The SSPs and these intermediaries in the middle were trying to catch up with other mediums, over-indexed on scale and availability, and under-indexed on innovation.

Additionally, there are changes in how people listen to programmatic opportunities. There’s a focus on supply path optimization, which forces these SSPs to reevaluate how they operate, the partners they keep, and how they add value and differentiate. At  Emodo, we’re in a unique position because we have a two-sided marketplace. Our managed service team deals directly with large holding companies and marketers. We also have an SSP, and we can offer publishers unique demand and opportunity and not be lost as just a part of the value chain. We can see the whole thing, and our managed service team has helped us understand the needs of that marketer and the agency’s needs.

Cutting Out the Middleman 

AB: You mentioned cutting out intermediaries in the supply chain and that is a sentiment I’ve heard from publishers and advertisers. Do you think cutting out the intermediaries will be hard for SSPs in the future? Will it hurt or help them?

DM: The shift in header bidding happened because publishers are running from current auction practices. They are vying for the same impressions at the same time as ad tech vendors or intermediaries, and on the buy side, ad tech is trying to reduce the number of auctions they have to sit through because the cost is too high. That puts pressure on pure-play intermediaries. Analysts say they will pressure intermediaries, but that’s a natural evolution. 

In some cases, advertisers are unknowingly bidding against themselves and subsequently driving up the prices. They pay because of too many intermediaries, and that needs to change. Continued pressure will be on any intermediary that doesn’t provide incremental added value or efficiency by having their stake on both sides or a differentiated solution.

The Automation of the Supply Chain

AB: SSPs automated the process where an ad publisher would manually assign specific ads to spaces through negotiations with human media buyers and sales teams. Do you think some of the kinks have developed because the process has become automated? 

DM: When I started in the industry in the 90s, digital media promised that technology would make buying and advertising more efficient. It’s more efficient than it was, but we’ve also had to look at programmatic buying and recognize some severe complexities now. There are inefficiencies that innovation has brought, and that’s natural in some ways. 

For example, publishers are doing publisher-initiated auctions that move through fewer ad tech pipes as intermediaries disappear. So publishers are trying to get the maximum opportunities to bid further on their inventory. So there’s a tension between efficiency and effectiveness on the buy side. 

Publishers need to maximize the opportunity and quality they can bring to their users. Simply put, there’s a need for increased simplicity and control in the buying and selling process. Sometimes we get too complex for our own good.

Stand Out From the Crowd

AB: What final advice would you give SSPs to improve the results of the service? 

DM: When we launched the survey, we expected SPO to be at the top of the list of concerns for marketers. The results showed that SPO is half as important as innovation and value. I advise you always to listen and build for your customer’s needs. You also have to understand what the buyers want and what publishers need.  

Our job is to be the intermediary, the curator, and also to provide unique, differentiated value, and we have to deliver value to both sides. It’s incumbent upon us to do that. We have to lean into innovation and differentiation. If we can’t confidently clarify where we’re innovating, bring value to both sides, and differentiate ourselves, then we must look hard at what we’re doing.

The post Emodo SSP Survey Says Marketers Crave Innovation appeared first on AdMonsters.

But from the outside, looking in, it seems she was always destined to end up right where she is today.

Ironically, her first job was interning at her uncle’s advertising business, learning the ropes, which made becoming a CBO what she calls “a natural fit.” During our discussion, she reminisced about messing around with nonexistent desktop publishing applications like PageMaker and Quark when she was a young girl.

In college, Bracegirdle experimented with various mass media majors. She eventually married, moved abroad, and changed her major to teaching, receiving a degree in Social Sciences. While this may seem far-fetched from where she is in her career today, Mediavine prides itself on teaching its publisher customers how to achieve their business goals, earn more from every session and page view, and keep their audiences engaged.

Along her career journey, influential female bosses believed in her and encouraged her in moments of self-doubt. Amber takes great pride in her empathetic leadership approach, which she greatly attributes to those strong female leaders who molded her into an executive who uplifts her employees.

Early Days

Yakira Young: After college, what was your career experience like?

Amber Bracegirdle: Shortly after college, I worked in customer service at Travelocity, which was a great lesson for how we wanted to do customer service at Mediavine. 

I got into fraud analysis and loved it. Many people would ask if fraud at Travelocity was just people getting free vacations when it was actually fighting child trafficking, drug trafficking, and human trafficking in general. It was such a fascinating, analytical job, and I adored it, and it allowed me to see the world. I got to work at our UK offices, German offices, and the San Antonio office. But the most impactful thing about working at Travelocity was my boss.

Becoming an Empathetic Leader

YY: How did this boss impact you? Was she also a woman?

AB: Her name is Sheila Korte, and she taught me how to be an empathetic leader and turn mistakes into learning opportunities. She taught me that the people who don’t make mistakes are those who don’t make any moves. Everything she taught me about management along the way boiled down to first, we must always be kind.

She is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and every day I continue to try and make her proud with how I manage my people and how we work with our customers. I grew tremendously under her leadership. Whenever I felt unsure of myself, she pushed me forward and said, “you can do this.” And that’s how I manage my people, and it’s how we talk to our customers.

Halfway through my time at Travelocity, we changed CEOs, and our CEO became a woman named Michelle Peluso. Today, she’s in the C-suite at CVS, and Michelle is a genius who, with friends, created a website called Site59 that would make deals with hotels in New York City for the inventory they hadn’t sold. She made contracts with hotels so she could sell their unsold daily inventory for less than the walk-in rate.

When Travelocity purchased Site59, Michelle was made CEO of Travelocity simultaneously. Despite dealing with thousands of employees, she was approachable and always kind. I could email her, and I’d have a response in 30 minutes full of ideas and action items for how to solve the problem at hand. That’s the kind of leader you want to be. You want to ensure you’re lifting up the people who work for you because all ships rise when you do that.

Managing Work-life Balance

YY: What is your experience managing work-life balance as a C-suite executive and mother of two? How do you prioritize your time and responsibilities, and what strategies have you found most effective for maintaining a healthy balance between work and family life?

AB: My work-life balance has gotten better over the years. We started Food Fanatic, the site I founded with Eric Hochberger, Stephen Marsi, and Matt Richenthal when I was seven months pregnant with my first son, Evan when I came to work for them full-time. Mediavine hiring me at seven months pregnant says a lot about the three of them and their willingness to buck trends. 

I was pregnant with Will when the ad management part started to take off. My work-life balance was rough for the first few months of my kids’ lives; outside of bathing and eating, I worked all day with childcare in hand. But now that we’ve got such great people and so many on the team, I’m better able to balance things. I can take a vacation and know I have nothing to worry about back at “the office” – otherwise known as Slack. My family just returned from a week-long vacation in Florida, and I didn’t stress once about the lack of internet access. I can also volunteer at my kids’ school, which I just did this morning. I have much more time for things like that. 

Over the summer, I took Fridays off completely. It’s important to claim your time. Work-life balance comes down to boundaries, and you’re the person that sets them. And it took me a long time to realize that. 

It’s hard when it’s exciting, and it’s your startup. My advice to anyone considering starting a company is to be intentional about setting boundaries for your personal life because you don’t think about it when you’re excited about what you’re doing.

It can lead you to burnout and lead to your family not feeling like they’re as important as the company. I had to step back on that because my kids thought work was more important than they were at one point, and I had to fix it. So that’s why I show up for things like field day or their field trips. They each have one a year, and I show up for those because they must know how important they are to me.

YY: The Pandemic has helped shift the work-life balance amongst many people and helped people realize that family is more important than work.

AB: I agree. At Mediavine, it got harder because we’ve always been remote. So for us, it was business as usual, and then everyone in the world was online, so our application volume went through the roof because we had sites that were only three months old suddenly reaching out to join because their traffic was at our threshold. We realized we were spending more time on applications that would never be approved than on the customers needing our help moving the needle on their own businesses. The quickest way to shift that focus back to the people that need us most was to raise our threshold. It was a hard decision, but ultimately one that served the people that already trust us with their livelihood the best.

I had to homeschool my kids on top of everything for longer than most people because I have a kiddo with a heart condition. So I homeschooled for two-and-a-half years and juggled everything at Mediavine. The marketing and communications team, led by Jenny Guy, started putting out roughly four times as much content, and we had, I think, four people on the team at that time. Growing that team has been a huge priority because moving everything online became a huge lift. We were used to meeting our customers at events and conferences worldwide, and suddenly that went away.

It brought home some hard truths for many of us at Mediavine about making those boundaries around work and family because suddenly, there was more work than we knew what to do with, and we couldn’t hire fast enough. It made us realize that we had to draw those boundaries, or it would never be a balance.

Mediavine’s Launch Into Ad Management

YY: Can you tell me more about how Mediavine was created by accident? I’m curious to know how a chance occurrence led to the development of your company and what steps you took to turn that accident into a successful business venture.

AB: I jokingly say accident because this all started with a single friend asking for our help with the new tech Eric had built for our four sites. Then more friends asked, and suddenly we had more friends than we knew what to do with! Once we decided that we were going to open the floodgates and work with people we didn’t know personally, we made some very intentional decisions. 

Stephen Marsi, Matt Richenthal, and Eric Hochberger founded Mediavine as an SEO shop for hire. Then he moved into making their content websites, which led them to need advertising to support those websites and the company. Creating the ad tech was purposeful because we needed it for our own four sites. So that was very purposeful, and my coming to work for them was very intentional. 

We were working on creating a food site because their ad company had told them they needed a lifestyle site. In working with me, I think I was really their first direct and continuous experience with content creators that also had their own web presence, social media, and personal websites. We hired food bloggers to create content for the site we were building together, Food Fanatic, and I introduced Eric to many food bloggers as part of that. 

I was simply consulting until I decided I wanted to leave my fraud analysis work (and work travel) behind to focus on my first baby. I asked the guys if they would consider hiring me full-time, and I’m very grateful they did. As I said before, I came on full-time when I was seven months pregnant. The guys never even questioned that as part of our conversation, something that I think is very special and unique, especially in the tech field. After I came on full-time, our ad company fell apart, and our ad income sort of cut in half overnight. And here we were, supporting four families and an army of contributors.

Great ideas are born out of desperation. Eric was researching programmatic advertising then and thought he could build something beneficial to recoup some of the ad dollars we didn’t see from our ad management company. He started making the first version of our script wrapper, but it was only for our four websites. 

He built the script wrapper focusing on SEO since that’s how we have always focused on growing traffic. Our most prominent site was founded on SEO. If you Google celebrity gossip, one of our sites is the one that owns that top search result and has for years. And it’s one of the main ways that the site got traffic. 

He started out thinking his wrapper would provide a backfill for our main ad company’s inventory, but we quickly started earning more with his header bidding auctions than we were making with them. We decided to sever ties with them and continue to do our own thing. And luckily, The Hollywood Gossip was big enough for us to have seats at the exchanges. In an offhand conversation, I told my best friend, also a food blogger, what we were doing, and she said, well, you know, my ad company sucks too. “Could you guys help me?” That question led to us recently surpassing over 10,000 active sites using Mediavine’s ad management. 

Bloggers always talk to each other, and they always talk in Facebook groups. So, five other people that wrote for Food Fanatic said, “I’d really like you to help me too.” And so, we launched six websites in June 2015. Initially, the idea was that this would be a bonus for people who write for Food Fanatic because we couldn’t pay them a ton for their content but making a little mini ad network made us stronger together. 

We looked at all our experience with different ad companies and said, what’s the 180 of that? And that drove many of our purposeful decisions after we accidentally started an ad company. 

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging at Mediavine

YY: What specific diversity and inclusion initiatives is your company implementing, and how does your role as Chief Brand Officer contribute to these efforts?

AB: From our first efforts at influencer marketing and programmatic advertising, one of the primary directives that we decided on was to make sure that we put diverse voices in front of brands whenever we were doing an influencer campaign. We also work hard to make sure that everyone in a campaign is making an equitable amount of money for their rate of engagement, including increasing their rate when it makes sense for industry trends within the budget. 

In the last few years, SSPS and DSPs came to us looking for the ability to take earmarked budgets and apply them to Black-owned, women-owned, or LGBTQIA+- owned publishers. We moved very quickly to ensure our publishers could self-identify in their dashboards if they wanted to. It provided us with key values we can pass in the ad string and grab those budgets for the publishers that can benefit from them. A huge percentage of those budgets are run through Mediavine pipes, and that’s incredibly important to us. 

You will see us talk about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEI&B) a lot more soon under the banner of our corporate responsibility arm, which we call Shine. Shine was launched in 2021, but started as an idea from a travel publisher in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. From a publisher and an ad partner perspective, we have some new initiatives you will hear about shortly. On the People Operations side of our company, we have always focused on making inclusive and diverse hires. Still, it’s been an especially large focus for our Chief People and Culture Officer, Yolanda Evans, to ensure that we are hiring in a way that provides equity to diverse communities. We post our jobs in places where someone might not normally expect us to.

We also have an employee resource group called PRISM, which our People Operations team also runs. PRISM is currently working on bringing in speakers for Women’s History Month. We had several speakers and an employee-led panel about the Black experience in the tech industry and at Mediavine in general, with even a little bit of constructive criticism, which was awesome because there’s always stuff we can do better. So are we behind some diversity efforts? The answer is a resounding yes. 

The post Leading With Empathy, Women’s History Month Q&A With Mediavine Co-founder Amber Bracegirdle appeared first on AdMonsters.

For example, in the digital advertising landscape, programmatic advertising has revolutionized how advertisements are bought and sold, using technology to automate the process and deliver targeted, data-driven campaigns. This has only been further compounded by the emergence of ‘Header Bidding,’ which offers a more streamlined and efficient way for publishers to monetize their inventory and for advertisers to reach their desired audience. 

A recent study showed that header bidding led to a 23% increase in fill rate and a 20% increase in average CPM. With these benefits and more, it’s no wonder why header bidding has become a popular and essential tool for publishers looking to maximize their monetization potential.

What Is Header Bidding and How Does It Work?

Header bidding, or pre-bid or advanced bidding, is a programmatic advertising technology. It is a real-time programmatic auction where multiple demand partners bid on a single impression. 

Header bidding allows publishers to offer their ad inventory to multiple SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms), ad networks, and ad exchanges to bid before sending the bid call to the ad server. This results in a more competitive and transparent bidding process, as demand sources compete against each other for the same inventory in real-time.

Behind the Scenes:

Header bidding works by incorporating a JavaScript code snippet into the header of the publisher’s website. So, when a user visits a page, this JS code sends out an ad call to all configured demand partners to bid on the available ad units. While the header auction happens, Google Publisher Tag is paused. Once the bids are received, they are sent to the ad server for the second auction round. Based on the configuration set by the publisher, the ad server filters out the winning bid and serves the creative on the user’s page. 

What’s interesting to note here is that all these auctions happen while the page loads on the user’s browser. And as soon as the page loads, the aim is to display the ads at the required places. 

Benefits of Header Bidding

Before header bidding, publishers and advertisers relied on the ‘Waterfall or Daisy-Chaining’ method to buy and sell media. In waterfall, a series of demand partners sent ad requests, each given a priority based on their past performance and the estimated value of the ad inventory. So, if a demand partner sitting at level 1 cannot fill the ad request, the bidding call will go to the next bidding partner sitting at level 2. The bid request will keep on moving down until it is sold off. 

As the bid request trickles down the hierarchy, it often results in a slow and inefficient process, with many ad impressions going unsold. Also, as the partners are arranged based on their past performances, it might happen that a bidder who is willing to bid more but is sitting at level 2 or 3 might never get a chance to bid. The method lacks transparency and limits the ability of publishers to earn maximum revenue.

Header bidding evolved as a replacement for the waterfall method and brought great relief to the users as it allowed:

1. Increased competition: Header bidding allows multiple demand sources to bid on the same inventory simultaneously, leading to increased competition and higher CPMs for publishers.
2. Improved transparency: It provides greater visibility into the bidding process, allowing publishers to understand the value of their inventory better and make informed decisions. 
3. Faster load times: Header bidding enables publishers to load bids from multiple demand sources in parallel, reducing latency and increasing the number of impressions served. The bidding happens during a fixed timeframe. 
4. Flexibility: It allows publishers to make real-time adjustments to bidding strategies, enabling them to optimize for specific inventory and respond quickly to changes in market conditions.
5. Better targeting: Header bidding provides more advanced targeting capabilities as publishers can share relevant data with the demand sources in real-time. This, in turn, allows advertisers to reach specific audience segments and helps publishers increase revenue by providing more personalized ad experiences to the users.

How to Set up Header Bidding?

Setting up header bidding can be complex, but it’s worth the effort. The first step involves the integration of a header bidding wrapper, a piece of JavaScript code that is placed in the header of a publisher’s website. The wrapper communicates with demand sources, allowing them to bid on inventory in real-time. Once the container is in place, publishers can integrate demand partners, such as ad exchanges, SSPs, and ad networks. They will also need to configure the settings to meet their specific needs.

Owing to the technical complexity of the setup, it’s always advisable to look out for a header bidding provider. A good header bidding provider will handle the setup, bring in good demand sources, and offer complete transparency. 

Wrapping up

The benefits of header bidding are numerous, and for publishers looking to maximize their revenue, it is an essential tool in their arsenal. By partnering with a trusted header bidding provider, publishers can access the latest technology, expert support, and valuable insights to help them achieve their revenue goals. 

With the right partner, the benefits of header bidding are endless, and publishers can rest assured that they are making the most of their ad inventory and reaching their target audience with the most effective and relevant advertising. 

The post How Can Publishers Boost Their Ad Revenue with Header Bidding? appeared first on AdMonsters.

As app developers juggle an ever-increasing list of considerations — such as the user experience, revenue goals, multiple types of demand sources, and more — the importance of reliable and flexible mediation tech is more important than ever.  

 Originally, ad mediation emerged to help publishers optimize their revenue more effectively, but the first generation of mediation often left monetization teams with more questions than answers.

As the tech has advanced and publisher needs have become more complex, let’s revisit mediation: how it works, why it’s important, and what publishers should look for. Let’s dive in. 

How Mediation Works 

At its core, ad mediation seeks to optimize ad revenue. At its best, mediation finds the best result for all sides of the advertising ecosystem: the publisher, the advertiser, and the end user. It does this by assessing in real-time which ad opportunity among a set of demand sources will yield the best result at that moment for that user. This drives higher eCPMs for the publisher, more relevant and enjoyable ads for the user, and better campaign performance for the advertiser. 

Open and unbiased auctions put the publisher in the driver’s seat, providing them with the controls and transparency required to optimize across waterfalls, ad lines, and various demand sources

This optimization is managed by an auction process, which can vary from one mediation platform to another. Among these, open and unbiased auctions put the publisher in the driver’s seat, providing them with the controls and transparency required to optimize across waterfalls, ad lines, and various demand sources.  

Further optimization is achieved when the ad mediation platform provides robust tools with options for creating user cohorts, placement settings, and demand integrations.

These mechanisms empower monetization teams to choose the users who will view different types of ads, when, and from which ad partners. In so doing, apps can optimize average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU) while minimizing churn or cannibalization.  

Why Mediation Is Important 

Ad mediation can deliver optimal ad revenue for app publishers while respecting all other publisher KPIs and commitments. Moreover, it can do this while saving monetization teams countless hours each week, allowing them to focus on more meaningful projects. 

Mediation offers a more dynamic approach to optimization for publishers still reliant on ad monetization waterfalls.

Depending on the mediation solution chosen —, this can work across all demand source types, creating a more competitive, and thus more lucrative, revenue ecosystem for the app. As more publishers begin to spin up their ad sales teams, the ability for demand diversity in ad mediation is more important than ever.

When mediation systems are transparent, flexible, and neutral, app publishers can truly maximize ad revenue. 

For publishers concerned about cannibalizing their users — particularly those with the highest lifetime value (LTV) — the user segmentation options within mediation tools can provide a powerful and much-needed degree of control. By dynamically cohorting users based on parameters set at the mediation layer, monetization teams can automatically optimize advertising ARPDAU without exposing high-value users to competitors’ ads. 

App publishers can maximize ad revenue when mediation systems are transparent, flexible, and neutral.

What Publishers Need 

Ad mediation is best when it empowers the app publisher and values the user experience at its core. To this end, publishers must seek several key elements from their mediation tech solution, whether they build it themselves, rely on a third-party managed solution, or leverage a customizable mediation-as-a-service solution (like InMobi’s Meson). 

First, publishers need absolute transparency in the mediation process. No auction dynamics should be obfuscated, and pricing must be upfront and clear. This allows the monetization team to make informed decisions on monetization settings and fairly assess business costs with each partner.

Moreover, without transparency, publishers cannot verify that the mediation tech is working in the publishers best interest. Thus, it’s no surprise that in a recent Advertising Perceptions study, the lack of transparency offered by many mediation companies was a top concern for 22% of publishers. 

Second, publishers need unmitigated control. Every app is unique, and maximizing monetization for many user types requires granular control mechanisms.

Indeed, 76% of publishers report that they would rather pay for greater control over their mediation than rely on a free tool with limited options. In this pursuit, publishers should ensure that their mediation solution allows for user segmentation based on user behavior, context, demographics, and other custom parameters. 

Third, publishers need flexibility. Demand sources and preferences vary by app, and mediation solutions must be able to accommodate them. To this end, publishers should verify that their mediation tech allows them to choose which demand partners and third-party vendors they work with.

While some vendors may have native integrations with the mediation tech, it’s equally important that the publisher create their own adapters and connect any other demand source of their choice. 

What’s Next in Mediation 

To attain the control, flexibility, and transparency needed for ad monetization, many publishers are revisiting their approach to mediation. Indeed, during a recent webinar on the future of monetization, predictions emphasized the importance of ad relevance, publisher control, and building trust with ad tech vendors.    

This aligns with a recent Advertiser Perceptions study of over 100 top mobile publishers, wherein a majority of publishers (55%) expressed concern about the lack of control provided by their current mediation solution, and half (50%) were frustrated by an overall lack of transparency. 

 Given the complexity of building mediation from scratch and the need for transparency and control, we expect to see the rise of mediation-as-a-service solutions like Meson. Indeed, among publishers without their own mediation platform, 73% would prefer to manage their mediation in-house, provided an outside tech company handled the infrastructure.  

No matter how monetization teams  integrate ad meditation into their tech stack, one thing is sure: publishers can make growth happen in 2023 if they allow transparency, flexibility, and control to empower them.

The post What App Publishers Need to Know About Mediation appeared first on AdMonsters.

A recent study found that the vast majority (95%) of ad buyers are currently implementing or planning to implement SPO technology, with 52% of ad buyers saying half or more of their advertising budget is transacted programmatically.

So, what is SPO and how should advertisers and agencies be thinking about it?

Defining Supply Path Optimization

Supply Path Optimization is the strategy through which buyers look to remove redundant intermediaries and streamline their access to supply. There are many reasons why agencies and advertisers are taking a close look at supply paths, but the main three would be: 1) to reduce infrastructure costs, 2) to increase performance, and 3) to maintain transparency for inventory quality.

SPO in mobile has an additional level of complexity compared to the web because ads on mobile devices are facilitated mostly through software development kits (SDKs) – and understanding the type of SDK connection can have meaningful implications to that path optimization.

Understanding the Key Players in SPO

The main players to consider for SPO analysis are the sellers, the exchanges, and the demand-side platforms (DSPs).

Starting with the seller, or app publisher in mobile, each app needs to evaluate and prioritize many sources of demand to optimize its yield. To do this, they work to integrate SDKs that represent the exchanges. Understanding the type of SDK connection each exchange has with the app publisher can have major implications for how you, as a buyer, can think about prioritizing these partners. To simplify this, there are three types of SDK partners:

Mediation SDK – The platform that acts as the central ad server and ultimate decision-maker on what ad will be shown to the end-user. Those mediation SDKs that enable unified auctions allow buyers to participate in the first and final auction. As a buyer looking to optimize your access, connecting to supply through the mediation partner gives you the most direct and full access to that publisher. 

Advanced Bidder SDK – A demand source directly integrated with the app publisher and participating in the unified auction conducted by the mediator SDK. This type of buyer participates in the real-time auction with their bidder and uses their SDK to render. They rely on the mediator SDK to host the first and final auction for their access.  

Traditional Network SDK – Or waterfall-based network is an integrated partner set up in the mediation SDK with a series of priorities or price floors and does not participate in the unified auction. If the impression is unfilled at the top priority, the same network would be called again to run an auction for the second, third, fourth, and so on until it is filled.

These networks have no way of communicating their true price in the auction, and because of this setup, the waterfall creates a tremendous amount of duplicative bid requests. A DSP buying supply through this type of exchange is likely to see up to 10 times the number of bid requests for each unique impression opportunity compared to the mediated SDK partner. Since the mediator SDK conducts the first and final auction, the waterfall priority established with these networks is translated into a first look or exclusive access, duplicating and obfuscating the actual price and scale. 

Whether mediator, bidder, or traditional, these SDK partners are direct to the publisher and can be seen in sellers.json and app-ads.txt. However, behind these direct SDK partners also exist hidden intermediaries that are not integrated directly and resell the auction to other buyers.

These resellers are exchanges or networks that add another auction to the programmatic chain, include additional tech fees, and provide zero visibility into where that impression opportunity originated from. As a DSP, you can look to identify and limit your buying through reseller channels as an immediate way to reduce inefficiencies in your SPO strategy.

Creating Efficiencies in SPO

Developing an effective SPO strategy on mobile can be a challenging initiative for DSPs and buyers. Now that we’ve outlined the different types of SDK partners above, here are three key ways in which buying through mediated SDK partners directly helps advertisers with SPO:

Infrastructure efficiency: There could be an exponential number of requests for every opportunity to serve an impression. Let’s look at an example where a publisher is working with a mediation SDK like AppLovin’s MAX and five SDK networks. Three of those networks are advanced bidders participating in the unified auction, and the other two are traditional waterfall networks.

If a DSP is integrated with all of those supply partners, they will effectively be hit with one request from the AppLovin Exchange (ALX), three requests from each advanced bidder, and up to 10-20 times the number of requests for each waterfall network. That one impression opportunity has now turned into more than 24 requests to that DSP’s server. This does not include resold or indirect sources of supply, so this duplication stands to increase further, causing a major drag on infrastructure costs as servers are becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. You can minimize these server costs by eliminating connections with traditional network SDKs and reseller connections that inflate requests without providing an added benefit to access. 

Performance efficiency: We can break down performance efficiency by looking at competition and price. As you can imagine, with the above scenario and inflated server costs, you also run the risk of self-competition as you bid into each of these supply paths without knowing they all represent the same impression opportunity.

Direct access eliminates intermediary tech fees that reduce your buying power from a pricing standpoint. It is hard to understand fee transparency with direct access as traditional networks may not disclose their auction pricing. The cleanest way to assess competition and price is to focus on the unified auction that minimizes the risk of self-competition while providing more transparency in fees.  

Premium access and scale: Each supply-side platform (SSP), whether SDK direct or reseller, differs in access, data collection, and support for measurement and verification solutions. In addition to considering infrastructure and performance efficiencies, buyers must ensure they can adequately target and measure their campaigns across the supply. For this, they need to evaluate access and support for OMSDK, key fields like sellers.json and app-ads.txt, and what invalid traffic (IVT) solutions are in place. 

For DSPs and buyers looking to jumpstart their SPO optimization, prioritizing access through the mediator SDK is key. The Applovin Exchange is powered by the largest mediation SDK in mobile and can give this edge to buyers looking for the most direct and efficient way to reach publishers and the end consumer. When buying power increases and programmatic bloat is eliminated, publishers and advertisers both benefit as we grow the advertising market with efficiency and transparency.

The post What Is Supply Path Optimization (SPO) in Mobile? appeared first on AdMonsters.

Google’s incorporation of prebid is supposed to make ad ops easier by allowing publishers to manage their header bidding relationships through “yield groups.” This will enable publishers to identify some portion of their inventory for Open Bidders to target, and prebid bidders can now do the same.

Ad servers will no longer need to be filled with line items to heighten header bidding demand. Publishers and programmatic executives over at Bustle, AccuWeather, and Cafe Media are all currently testing out this new feature and seem to be in favor. 

This Google Ad Manager prebid link-up does help to eliminate some discrepancies.

“Currently, prebid rounds all the prices before submitting them to GAM, but in the new setup, GAM is reading the price from prebid before prebid has done any rounding,” said Patrick McCann, SVP of Research at CafeMedia and Chair Prebid.js. “You won’t see the rounding errors. You end up with a better auction outcome when people are bidding closely to each other thanks to the rounding effect in prebid.”

Will This Interrupt Pre Existing Header Bidding Set Ups?

It’s looking like it just might. Yesterday on LinkedIn, we saw ad tech vendors questioning CafeMedia’s CSO, Paul Bannister, after he posted about the “bridge to prebid.” 

“There is an existing setup with the orders and line items which publishers are efficiently running and is a proven model,” said Dikshant Joshi, Director of Publisher Development at AdPushup. “While this seems to be a promising tool introduced by Google, there is no proof the performance would be at par or better or less. Google mentions the setup of yield groups (an additional and different setup). Still, the experts in the industry would want to benchmark the performance of the header bidding yield groups before they make a complete move or stick with what they currently have.” 

Google also mentions an offering of a “NetworkMinimumBidToWin” metric that publishers can access via Data Transfer Files. Nonetheless, this is a paid feature with recurring costs, so you know what that means; many won’t be able to access it if they do not wish to pay. 

If “NetworkMinimumBidToWin” were a tool to help publishers and the ecosystem, we would have seen this as a part of standard metrics accessible through APIs and the query/reporting tool.

What Is the Future of Google Ad Manager and Header Bidding?

I have asked the Universe tons of times to provide me with a crystal ball, but until then, we will have to ride the wave to see how this pans out. When we spoke to Dikshant, he mentioned that ad tech is an ever-evolving space, and with this promising change, it will be interesting to see “the actual value it brings against the current set up.”

Although many publishers will have to change their ways of using GAM’s services, others can see the benefits.

“The timeline is easy to criticize since header bidding has had such widespread publisher adoption for so long, but this still feels like a step forward,” said Emry Downinghall, SVP Programmatic Revenue, and Strategy at Unwind Media. “Google publicly acknowledges that +90% of publishers use header bidding, and they are working to support that. If this provides mediation transparency and simplifies setup in GAM, publishers win.”

The post Will Google Ad Manager’s Link-up With Prebid Reinvent the Wheel? appeared first on AdMonsters.