The MFA site traffic craze was a hot topic in ad tech last year. Many questioned: are all MFA sites bad? What exactly distinguishes what an MFA site is? At the time of the craze, MFA sites made up 15% of global programmatic ad spend, but agencies were working to combat them, much like AdLib and Jounce, and are working on them now. 

In a strategic move to enhance the quality and effectiveness of programmatic advertising, AdLib Media Group has announced a partnership with Jounce Media by integrating its MFA detection technology. 

In an effort to guarantee that advertisers focus their media investments on premium publishers to drive real consumer engagement, AdLib is providing agencies with tools to optimize their digital ad spend by connecting Jounce Media’s advanced MFA detection technology to automatically block low-quality traffic. 

“MFA websites are a growing threat to advertiser success. By integrating Jounce Media’s technology, we can safeguard client campaigns against wasted media investment,” said Mike Hauptman,founder and CEO of AdLib.. 

Jounce Media President Chris Kane echoed this sentiment. If the industry proactively blocks low-quality traffic, it ensures that media investments go toward genuine publishers that influence consumer purchase decisions.

Mike Hauptman: The Future of Programmatic Advertising

Andrew Byrd: Why did AdLib partner with Jounce Media specifically to block MFA traffic? What stood out about their solution?

Mike Hauptman: We partnered with Jounce Media because their approach to detecting and blocking MFA traffic is both innovative and reliable. 

What really stood out to us was their ability to dynamically identify and classify MFA sites, ensuring that we’re always one step ahead of the curve. 

They don’t just rely on static lists—they continuously update and refine their detection methods, which is crucial given how quickly MFA sites can evolve. This level of precision and their commitment to transparency made them the perfect fit for AdLib, where our goal is to deliver the highest quality media experiences for our clients.

AB: How does this partnership align with AdLib’s broader mission and strategy within the programmatic advertising space?         

MH: This partnership is a natural extension of our mission to make premium programmatic advertising accessible to all agencies, regardless of size. Our strategy has always been about reducing complexity and increasing transparency in the ad buying process. 

By integrating Jounce Media’s technology, we’re ensuring that our clients can trust the inventory quality they’re purchasing. It’s about removing the guesswork and inefficiencies that have long plagued programmatic, particularly for mid-market agencies that don’t have the resources to tackle these issues on their own.

AB: What impact do you expect this partnership to have on your client’s campaign performance and overall media investment?

MH: The impact is going to be significant. By automatically blocking MFA traffic, our clients will see a reduction in wasted ad spend and an improvement in campaign performance. MFA sites are notorious for inflating metrics without delivering real value, so by eliminating them, we’re ensuring that our clients’ budgets are directed toward high-quality, impactful placements. This not only boosts performance metrics like engagement and conversion rates but also enhances brand safety and reputation. 

AB: How do you plan to further enhance AdLib’s DSP platform with similar integrations in the future?         

MH: We’re always looking for ways to bring best-in-class tools and technologies to our platform. The Jounce partnership is just the beginning. Moving forward, we plan to integrate additional solutions that address other pain points in the programmatic space. Our focus is on building a platform that’s not only powerful but also easy to use, so our clients can focus on strategy and creativity rather than the technicalities of media buying.

AB: What steps will AdLib take to educate and onboard clients about this new feature and ensure they fully leverage its benefits?

MH: The beauty of this integration is that it’s completely turnkey and automatically enabled for all AdLib clients at no additional cost. There’s no setup required—clients will immediately benefit from enhanced ad quality without lifting a finger. We’ll also provide insights through the platform to highlight the positive impact on their campaigns.

AB: Are there any initial testing results to share after Jounce integrated its MFA detection tech into your DSP?

MH: While we’re still in the early stages of gathering comprehensive data, the initial results from our beta testing have been very promising. We’ve already seen a noticeable decrease in MFA traffic, leading to a more efficient ad spend allocation and improved campaign outcomes. We’re excited to share more detailed results as we collect data.

Chris Kane: Accelerating the Shift Toward Premium Supply

AB: We’ve discussed the MFA problem. What is the current state of Made for Advertising sites from your perspective? Has the ad tech industry gotten better at eliminating MFAs?

Chris Kane: Because MFA publishers are highly dependent on paid traffic, the availability of MFA supply is extremely responsive to buyer behavior. As buyers spend more on MFA inventory, those publishers can afford to buy more paid traffic. And as buyers pull back their spending on MFA sites, those publishers can no longer profitably buy traffic. 

The result was a giant run-up in the availability of MFA supply from 2020 through mid-2023, peaking at 30% of all web auctions. But as marketers have implemented MFA blocking solutions, MFA has contracted to less than 10% of web auctions. Still, MFA is a very large share of available supply, and buyers need to actively manage whether they participate in MFA auctions.

AB: Please remind us how Jounce Media developed the technology to accurately identify and block MFA sites. Can you walk us through the process?

CK: We post our criteria for classifying inventory as MFA here. We perform a battery of tests every day on every RTB-traded website to quantify whether each domain meets our criteria for MFA classification. Based on that daily-updating process, we regularly add and remove sites from our MFA list, and AdLib will now similarly continuously modify their default exclusion list to block new sources of MFA supply and re-enable bidding on sites that have retooled their operations to create a premium advertising experience.

AB: How does Jounce Media differentiate between MFA sites and legitimate publishers that might have similar characteristics?

CK: In addition to the process described above, we publish our complete MFA list to all of our clients via dashboards and data feeds on a daily-updating cadence. There are over 3,000 advertising professionals from over 100 companies that have direct access to our data, making our MFA list far more transparent and far more pressure tested than any other solution in the market.

AB: In your opinion, how will this partnership with AdLib impact the broader industry’s approach to MFA supply?

CK: In addition to benefiting their clients, AdLib’s decision to block MFA supply by default will accelerate an industry-wide shift toward premium supply. SSPs feed DSPs what they eat. 

When buyers shift their spending patterns away from MFA supply toward premium publishers, SSPs reshape the mix of ad opportunities that they make available to DSPs. Premium publishers are more available in the bidstream today than they were last summer, and AdLib’s decision to block MFA will accelerate this trend.

AB: What are the next steps for Jounce Media to improve and expand its technology to identify low-quality traffic?

CK: We are continuously researching new sources of supply chain inefficiency and new opportunities to deploy RTB investments more effectively. Among other topics, we are currently studying the landscape of in-stream video, benchmarks on ad density, and the accuracy of user targeting signals.

AB: Can you share any initial testing results after integrating your MFA detection tech into AdLib’s DSP?

CK: In July 2023, MFA bid request volume was at 30% but has since decreased to 10%. Through their partnership, AdLib and Jounce are committed to implementing best practices to reduce this percentage further.

The post AdLib Media Group and Jounce Media Join Forces to Combat MFA Traffic appeared first on AdMonsters.

When it comes to ad tech, Jack Smith is no stranger to innovation. With over 25 years of experience and seven patents in AI and machine learning, DoubleVerify’s Chief Innovation Officer knows a thing or two about navigating the digital wild west. In DoubleVerify’s latest Global Insights Report, they uncovered a nearly 20% surge in MFA sites, fueled by the rapid rise of AI-generated content.

The report reveals that MFA impression volume increased by 19% in 2023, with a staggering 73% jump in “Low-tier” MFA impressions. These sites, which blend MFA and non-MFA characteristics, are reshaping the internet faster than a Netflix show drops spoilers.

Using advanced AI technology, DoubleVerify analyzed over three dozen “High-tier” MFA websites, finding numerous instances of likely AI-written content, including examples like HeroInvesting’s Clint Eastwood aging article and Noteabley’s Best Steakhouses list. These sites often bombard users with ads, making the user experience as pleasant as navigating through a maze of pop-up ads in the early 2000s.

In this Q&A, Smith breaks down the complexities of distinguishing high-quality AI content from the low-tier junk flooding the internet. We dive into DoubleVerify’s sophisticated blend of AI and human review and explore how advertisers can protect their investments amid the explosion of MFA sites.

Join us as this ad tech luminary shares his insights and strategies for staying ahead in the ever-evolving world of AI-driven ad tech. Whether you’re an advertiser looking to make the most of your budget or a publisher striving to maintain quality, this conversation is packed with valuable takeaways.

Lynne d Johnson: Your report touches on the surge in MFA sites. However, the digital landscape often sees legitimate sites misclassified as MFAs due to their ad strategies or content distribution tactics. Can you explain DoubleVerify’s criteria for distinguishing true MFA sites from legitimate content sites that might superficially appear similar due to high ad-to-content ratios or aggressive monetization strategies?

Jack Smith: This is a great point, and thank you for raising it. When it comes to MFA content, we believe nuance and surgical categorization — not blunt, one-size-fits-all lists — are key to safeguarding advertiser investments and supporting quality publishers and, more broadly, the open internet.

We were the first verification vendor to really define MFA content in an effort to create a common yardstick from which to evaluate. While we have a clear overall definition — DV defines MFA sites as those whose sole purpose is to deliver advertisements — our definition also considers nuance. MFA sites can be identified by analyzing several factors across their ad monetization activities, ad traffic sources, and approach to content creation. That combination of criteria needs to be robust to properly distinguish content in a way that’s fair and equitable for content creators. 

With that in mind, DV’s approach allows for the deepest and most nuanced level of analysis, preventing miscategorization and false positives. For example, a website may feature a significant number of ads while still registering high rates of direct and search-enabled traffic. In this instance, the publisher would not meet our definition of MFA. For sites we do classify as MFA, we have a tiered system of high (more egregious examples), medium, and low. Advertisers can then make decisions on the tiers and how they best fit or don’t fit into their campaigns. For DV to classify a site as MFA, it really needs to consistently show high signs of arbitrage both in terms of heavy reliance on paid traffic and arbitrage traffic.

For DV to classify a site as MFA, it really needs to consistently show high signs of arbitrage both in terms of heavy reliance on paid traffic and arbitrage traffic.

Also, just as an inclusion or exclusion list-only approach doesn’t allow for nuance in categorization, we don’t solely rely on AI for classifying content. Algorithms can be biased just like people and are not infallible. To ensure protection and support publisher monetization, we blend AI with expert human review to help ensure that sites that don’t ultimately qualify as MFA content, including those owned by underrepresented groups or news publishers, are not incorrectly flagged. We also regularly audit our categorization criteria, which is critical as the space evolves quickly.  

As a result, publishers have embraced and supported our MFA solution. We also developed it with feedback from the community to ensure responsible and thoughtful categorization.

LdJ: With the report highlighting a 19% increase in MFA sites largely driven by AI-generated content, how does DoubleVerify differentiate between low-quality AI-generated content and high-quality AI content that might also be prolific in ad placements? Are there specific markers or technology you use to make this distinction clear?

JS: AI-generated content is an interesting topic because there is often a rush to judgment. Just as many rush to say all MFA content is fraudulent or bad, we’ve seen the same about AI content. Ultimately, AI-supported content can range from high to low quality. We’ve seen trusted publishers in the financial space, for example, rely on AI for quality reporting for years. AI can be an additive tool for quality journalism. 

At DV, for these reasons, we don’t automatically or bluntly label AI content as “bad.” However, we do believe it’s problematic when AI is used to create low-quality content at scale, while coupling that with a heavy reliance on paid and arbitrage traffic to take in ad dollars that would otherwise go to quality publishers. For instance, DV has found some sites that publish in excess of 1,000 pieces of content per day, powered by AI. That level of output usually comes at a cost to quality. We factor these considerations into our evaluations of MFA and quality more broadly.

As new Gen AI tools have emerged, tracking AI content can be a difficult task given its growing volume. To help us with this process, we built our own proprietary AI to detect and analyze replicated and AI-generated content across the web. In doing so, we also gain so much more data and signals to help better understand the use of AI in MFAs, but also fraud and other areas.

LdJ: Given the significant growth in ‘Low-tier’ MFA impressions, could you elaborate on the real-world impact this surge has on publishers and advertisers? How do these ‘Low-tier’ MFA sites specifically dilute the efficacy of digital advertising campaigns, and what measures can advertisers take to safeguard their interests?

JS: The growth of low-tier MFAs really speaks to the earlier topic you raised about nuance and categorization. What we classify as “low-tier” covers sites or sections with a blend of MFA and non-MFA content — for example, sites where only a section or a subdomain exhibits MFA content or characteristics. These publishers make up the highest percentage of MFA publishers, which highlights the need to have different tiers so they can be treated differently. 

Ultimately, we classify, and it is up to the advertiser to determine if MFA inventory aligns with their own performance outcomes and is suitable for their brand. However, by having this nuanced categorization, brands have the freedom and tools to decide if and to what extent they want their ads to be served on MFA sites.

LdJ: As AI technology evolves, so too do the strategies for generating and monetizing content on MFA sites. What are DoubleVerify’s plans for staying ahead in this technological arms race, particularly in terms of improving detection mechanisms and helping advertisers avoid these pitfalls?

JS: We heavily invest in R&D at DV, more than any other verification provider, and most other technology companies in our space. This emphasis on innovation has given us a substantial lead in the market, providing an edge over tech advancements that may negatively impact advertiser investments and transparency. This strategic focus ensures we anticipate future developments and adapt quickly.

Beyond the tech, the arms race in AI isn’t just about countering the technology itself — it’s also about aligning with a brand’s preferences for how advertising is incorporated into an environment. Effective policy plays a critical role in maintaining this alignment, ensuring that our solutions continually meet the evolving needs of advertisers.

LdJ: With the proliferation of MFA sites and AI-generated content, what are the broader ethical implications for the digital ecosystem? How does DoubleVerify envision the future of online content quality, and what role do you believe regulatory bodies should play in curbing the growth of low-quality, ad-centric platforms?

JS: This is a great question. AI-generated content is already subject to some regulation, and it’s inevitable that more regulations will emerge. As the technology improves, the regulatory landscape is likely to evolve and expand, which we support to help ensure the safety of the Internet.

Interestingly, these regulations often focus on end-consumer protection and enhancing transparency rather than directly curbing the creation of the content. This means that AI-generated content will continue to proliferate within the digital ecosystem. Even if it’s labeled transparently due to new rules or standards implemented by large tech companies, we, at DV, need to help advertisers navigate this growth. Our role is to support their ability to advertise safely and effectively alongside and around this content, but really any content, whether AI-created or not.

__

Jack is responsible for ensuring alignment between DV’s commercial and product organizations. He manages senior level product relationships with key customers, identifies new client-driven product opportunities and supports sales efforts. Prior to joining DV, Jack served as Global Chief Product Officer, Investment at Group M, where he developed products and platforms that empowered teams to make better decisions about where to invest over $80 billion of media spend. Previously, Jack co-founded the machine learning company Solariat, which was acquired by Genesys. He brings over 25 years of experience in executive strategy, technology, client and market insight to his role as Chief Innovation Officer. Jack holds seven patents in AI and machine learning for signal detection in natural language and the prediction of consumer media consumption.

The post The Rise of AI-Driven MFA Content: Insights from DoubleVerify’s Global Report appeared first on AdMonsters.

The proliferation of low-quality, Made for Advertising (MFA) sites has been one of digital advertising’s biggest talking points over the past 12 months. It recently rose to the top of the agenda when Forbes — one of the world’s most respected publications — was accused of running ads on a secret subdomain.

The rise of MFA does bring up an old question: at what point will the industry stamp out these bad behaviors?

For the sake of a sustainable ad ecosystem, this clean-up needs to happen sooner rather than later. While change will come from multiple directions, a real driving force will result from all industry contributors adhering to and enforcing the guardrails. Specifically, those standards set by the Media Rating Council (MRC) and the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), ensure digital advertising practices remain above board.

The certifications and accreditations awarded by these organizations are not easily secured. Indeed, being independently audited by some of the highest authorities around, they provide concrete assurances about quality, care, and trust. If the industry can unite and back these initiatives to the hilt, it can focus on its most important task: delivering game-changing ads to consumers.

Setting the Standard

Founded in the 1960s as the Broadcast Rating Council, the MRC audits and accredits media measurement and data products across the entirety of the media space. It grants accreditation to those who, based on an independent audit, meet its set standards and guidelines around measurement. Notably, accredited services are reaudited every year to ensure standards are maintained.

Receiving MRC accreditation is a costly and lengthy process, and requires a significant allocation of resources. This is a testament to a business’s commitment to promoting trust and transparency internally and externally.

Meanwhile, TAG focuses on ad fraud, brand safety, transparency, and malware. The cost of TAG may be less than that needed for MRC, but certifications are still awarded based on an auditing process. Compulsory independent audits are specifically carried out for brand safety and ad fraud, but compliance with TAG’s other programs defaults to self-attested, although you can choose to be externally evaluated. If the industry is to clean up its act, having compulsory third-party reviews apply to all TAG’s programs would be beneficial.

In addition, the industry and bodies should continue to set new standards that address the evolving challenges and opportunities facing the industry. This includes signal loss, which the MRC recently issued guidance on, emerging types of fraud, such as low-quality MFA sites,  as well as growing technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI). Moreover, if the associated costs of these processes can be kept down, so as not to be prohibitive, more businesses would feel empowered to be accredited.

Creating a Cleaner Industry

These genuine indicators around the reliability of players within the digital advertising ecosystem are one of the first things brands should review when exploring partnerships. Moreover, with AI and increasingly sophisticated AI-driven scams and schemes, having safeguards in place ensures that these instances of non-compliance and bad practices are the exception.

Because of this, brands should see these certifications and accreditations as an essential hygiene factor when choosing partners. They should also pressure their existing partners to meet these levels of quality and care and threaten to seek more reliable and trustworthy partners if these standards aren’t met. Transparency should be the bare minimum that any advertiser expects from their partners.

By the same token, it’s up to legitimate vendors to evangelize for these certifications and accreditations, or the industry will never be able to leave behind its past and move toward a more sustainable, trustworthy, and profitable future.

Creating this trust can only be beneficial for the industry. It will lead to stronger partnerships between advertisers and vendors, more effective use of ad spend, and a better quality digital advertising ecosystem overall. This is especially pertinent for the Open Web, as without action advertisers will only be increasingly drawn toward spending in the relatively safe confines of the walled gardens.

Digital advertising’s next chapter should be one built on quality, care, trust, and transparency, and the standards set by not-for-profit organizations should be placed at the center of the story’s continuation. Advertisers need to create an environment where they only work with partners who are adhering to these standards, forcing the hands of vendors to fix up or lose out on business. It’s going to require every stakeholder to begin putting more emphasis on the importance of living up to certain standards.

The post Why Advertising Standards and Certifications Matter in 2024 appeared first on AdMonsters.

The video publishing industry is a strange enigma. In what other industry do you create a product, only to make revenue from a byproduct of those products?

And it’s not a small amount of revenue either. Total ad spend is predicted to reach up to $390 billion in 2024, of which publishers get to keep a large majority. With such a large percentage of revenue in the video content space, outside of SVOD, coming from the sale of the ad space, the value of the content itself has been severely underplayed.

Typically, when direct-selling, a publisher can offer advertisers data surrounding user behavior, cookie-based demographics, and traffic metrics, which only assigns value to the audience and not the content. This is how many Made-for-Advertising sites have flown under the radar for so long, with many DSPs providing traffic metrics over quality metrics.

However, with the death of cookies, the decline of MFA sites, and 96% of publishers depending on contextual targeting for their business, a paradigm switch is set to occur, placing more value, and power, to the publishers who create high-quality content. Content creators who can provide precise data on their content and whom it resonates specifically will have an impressive advantage against the competition.

The Golden Age of Video

The growing ability to understand content through advanced metadata analysis truly makes this era the golden age of video. Content creators, SSPs, and DSPs that can provide deeper analytics on what video content is available will reign supreme.

Contextual targeting in the video space has thus far been relatively limited to relating ads to the general content scheme of the text on the page or the overarching IAB category of the video in its entirety.

This happens all the time when advertisers and brands purchase contextual placements through DSPs that don’t have advanced video analysis tools. Imagine a publisher packaging up 50 travel videos and presenting them to Delta Airlines. Usually, ads are placed on an overarching content scheme – i.e. “travel,” then an advertiser like Delta Airline ads may be placed within videos about the “Best Way to Travel Without Flying” or “Backpack Itinerary for the West Coast.”

Let’s say the content is narrowed down to “Air travel .” Still, the general nature leaves advertisers with crucial questions about the emotion and deeper context – is it a joyous family trip to Disney World, or perhaps, it depicts a tragic incident involving an airplane?

Understanding this distinction is important, as it heavily impacts the advertisers’ interest. This is one of the reasons why advertisers are typically wary of news and Made-for-Advertising sites. There is so much bad news out there, that the probability of an advertiser showing up on a news article or video that is inappropriate or just plain insensitive is high.

However, by offering Delta Airlines the same package of 50 videos that are guaranteed to feature families happily flying to Disney World on their planes, the content’s worth becomes immeasurable. Some studies have shown that strategies like this boost brand recognition, awareness, and consideration by up to 30%, showcasing that the ability to understand and contextualize content intimately is a game-changer.

The Transition From Cookies & MFA

The current model of publisher and digital advertising puts content as the vehicle for ads, instead of being the main show, capable of engaging specific audiences that advertisers are interested in. However, this wasn’t always the case. In an essay by Bill Gates in 1996, he said “Content is king.” Somewhere along the journey, we got away from that as the mode for buying and placing ads.

If content is king, then context is queen. With the shift from cookie-based advertising to more context-based advertising, publishers can confidently approach brands, presenting content that resonates specifically with their desired audience.

In addition, the decline of Made-For-Advertising sites marks a critical pivot in the preference for advertisers and users alike to have a user-friendly, more content-focused experience. Statista reported that from September 2022 to January 2023, 15% of programmatic spend was spent on MFA sites. Companies like Magnite, Sharethrough, and Pubmatic have announced that they are blocking MFA sites moving forward.

In this landscape, where personalized, targeted and user-first approaches reign supreme, content creators with precise data can confidently approach brands, leveraging intelligent insights that navigate the traditional uncertainties.

How Publishers Can Take Control of Content

Due to the 93% of advertisers who said that they will use contextual advertising for some or most of their purchases and their increasing reliance on attention metrics vs. traffic metrics, a deeper level of contextual understanding needs to occur. This shift is poised to be the biggest game-changer in the industry this year, unlocking new possibilities for publishers and advertisers alike.

Publishers and content creators should look to equip tools that analyze video content in real-time, capturing trends and behaviors that unlock a world of enhanced media investment decisions that prioritize premium, trustworthy content. Utilizing AI and computer vision technologies, content creators can contextualize a video frame-by-frame, enhancing how content is packaged and presented. This level of insight allows for strategic positioning of content to advertisers, offering not just exposure but alignment with precisely curated content that speaks directly to target demographics, because where the great content is, the people are.

Publishers equipped with the ability to detect keywords, tags, and topics at scale within their content are not just responding to the post-cookie challenges and the transparency-first future; they are setting new standards for engaging and captivating audiences. For those who master the art of leveraging detailed video analytics, the future is bright.

The post Power Returns to the Content Creator: Why MFA & Audience-based Advertising Is No Longer the Way appeared first on AdMonsters.

According to Eli Heath, Head of Identity at Lotame, this underscores advertisers’ need to explore alternative strategies to ensure brand safety and ad quality through data curation.

Heath asserts that solutions like Lotame Collaborate via Spherical can help marketers shift towards more precise, curated marketplaces (PMPs) by aligning their data with publisher datasets for targeted advertising. Furthermore, we spoke with Heath about how Lotame’s Spherical Platform tackles the MFA problem by actively managing inventory quality, fostering collaborations with brands and SSPs, and more.

Andrew Byrd: Despite the prominent MFA scourge that happened last year, the Adalytics report revealed that MFA sites are still prevalent in the industry. Why is that the case?

Eli Heath: Two reasons we cannot eradicate MFAs: Buyer time and resources and buyer KPIs. 

Buyers, particularly at agencies, are extremely stretched. Many buyers establish allow lists at the campaign launch, but active site list management often falls by the wayside following the launch. It requires significant effort to pull domain reports, cross reference to known MFAs (which are source-specific and always changing), validate, and make updates to include lists.

Campaign performance informs media spend. MFA sites deliver on superficial campaign goals, ingeniously engineered to “game” buyer KPIs. DSP campaign goals set too high viewability? DSP will bid on sites with intrusively positioned ads that refresh every 15-30 seconds. High completion rates? DSP will bid on sites stuffed with muted auto-play outstream video. High CTR and low CPC? DSP will bid on cheap, high-click volume inventory. The bottom line is that MFA sites are highly performant based on upper and lower-funnel KPIs, and platform algorithms will prioritize ads that exceed campaign objectives.

As a result, this may disincentivize buyers to monitor and remove MFA inventory from programmatic ad buys.

AB: Lotame’s approach to curated marketplaces (PMPs) involves aligning 1st party or 3rd party audience data with publisher datasets. Could you elaborate on how this alignment is achieved and its impact on targeted advertising?

EH: Lotame Curate includes both custom-built behavioral and demographic audiences and machine-learning-driven, predictive, contextual audiences paired with select inventory from leading premium supply sources, which interoperate with Lotame’s cookieless Panorama ID to achieve higher match rates and unlock incremental reach, compared with open marketplace buys. Our curated PMPs are optimized using supply-side signals to deliver improved campaign performance. 

AB: How does Lotame’s Spherical Platform solve the MFA problem that brands are facing? 

EH: We select inventory from leading premium supply sources, including MFA detection and filtration, and actively manage block and allow lists to ensure quality inventory controls. We also give preference to publishers with Lotame Panorama ID-enabled via PreBid or ad server to ensure maximum scale of addressability.

Lotame hand-selects inventory across multiple premium exchanges and integrates first- and third-party data from trusted providers into its curated packages. Why is data curation important especially in the current state of the industry?

EH: Curation unlocks data targeting upstream from the DSP, which adds privacy safeguards to programmatic buying and removes the need to map or send user IDs up and down the ad supply chain, including the open bid stream. Instead, audiences are matched to traffic using publisher first-party signals and sent to the DSP on Deal IDs, removing the audience and traffic matching burden off DSPs relying heavily on cookies and legacy identifiers. 

AB: How does Lotame collaborate with brands and SSPs to enable data and deal curation within its curated solutions?

EH: Lotame typically works with brands and agencies to understand campaign goals and business objectives and builds customized addressability programs that include audience data and curated inventory across scaled supply partners. Once the campaign is live, Lotame strategically and continuously optimizes buyers’ desired outcomes using SSP reporting and metrics.

AB: Can you provide examples of successful collaborations between Lotame and brands and SSPs that have resulted in effective data and deal curation?

EH: One example is our collaboration with advertiser Banana Boat (Xaxis = buyer) and Pubmatic to unlock incremental reach in cookieless browsers (Safari) and achieve above-benchmark performance on viewability and video completion rates.

AB: Looking ahead, what trends do you foresee in the evolution of curated marketplaces, and how is Lotame positioning itself to stay at the forefront of these developments?

EH: Direct SSP and publishers’ relationships with buyers will likely expand as the drive towards transparency and sustainability increases, and Lotame hopes to serve as a central hub to facilitate connections and bridge gaps in solving for addressability at scale. 

The post How Data Curation Cures Publishers’ MFA Sickness: Q&A with Eli Heath, Head of Identity at Lotame appeared first on AdMonsters.

Brian Murphy has been in the digital ad-tech industry since the 1990s, working at various companies, including DoubleClick, Yahoo! and Google. In 2020 he joined OpenX as Senior Vice President, Buyer Development, getting involved in the ad tech company’s path to net zero. 

To say the experience changed his life is an understatement. Opting to focus on lowering the carbon footprint of the digital advertising industry, Brian left OpenX to launch the Alpine Project, a consultancy that helps advertising agencies, ad tech platforms and publishers create and implement environmental sustainability strategies. 

The goal is to help everyone in the industry future-proof their businesses, unlock new revenue opportunities, and leave the planet in a better state. 

AdMonsters spoke with Murphy about Alpine Project’s progress, how brands and agencies can measure the environmental impact of their ad spend, why ad tech companies should start operating on cloud-based platforms, greenwashing and so much more.

AdMonsters: The internet, including digital advertising, accounts for approximately 3.7% of carbon emissions. You launched Alpine Project to help advertising and technology companies measure, reduce and remove carbon from their operations. How are we doing?

Brian Murphy: We’re making progress but there is more work to be done. A good indicator of how any industry is doing is the number of companies that have publicly reported their verified emissions data and validated their science-based emissions reduction targets. Those are the first two important steps to any corporate climate action plan. If we look at the biggest ad-spending brands, many of them have taken these steps. And the six largest ad agency holding companies have done so as well. 

But if you look at ad tech, it’s a much different story. There are only a handful of pure-play ad tech companies listed in the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) database as having set an emissions reduction target and even fewer with publicly reported verified emissions data. So ad tech has some catching up to do. 

Another good indicator for the ad sector is the support of Ad Net Zero, the non-profit organization that started out of the UK’s Ad Association three years ago and launched a US chapter in early 2024. There are now over 100 Ad-Net-Zero-supporting companies in the US, including many major brands, agencies, and ad tech platforms. There are five Ad Net Zero working groups, and this is where real education and action is taking place. It has been really encouraging to see so many companies join this important organization and get involved in these working groups. 

AdMonsters: Don’t you co-chair one of the Ad Net Zero working groups?

BM: Yes, I co-chair Working Group 1, which focuses on measuring and reducing emissions from the business operations of advertising companies. This working group tackles the fundamentals of any corporate climate action strategy. We bring in guest speakers and address questions such as: how does an advertising agency or media company conduct a greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory? Why is third-party verification important? What is the best way to report emissions data? And what are the steps required to set and validate a science-based target? And of course, how can companies in the ad sector make real progress against reduction targets and become more environmentally sustainable businesses?

AdMonsters: Is setting a target to reduce carbon emissions a requirement for Ad Net Zero?

BM: The leadership at Ad Net Zero has asked that all supporting companies set a science-based emissions reduction target and validate it with a third party such as the Science Based Targets initiative, and provide regular updates on progress against these objectives. 

Setting a science-based target takes work. It requires at least one year’s worth of GHG emissions data, so the company has a baseline year from which to reduce its annual Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions across its business operations and value chain. One of the topics we cover in Working Group 1, is how to begin that process and what standards to follow so it’s being done the right way.  

AdMonsters: According to the ANA, carbon-heavy sites like MFAs are on the rise. We also know that generative AI is pretty carbon-intensive. What do these trends do to the greenhouse gas inventories these companies have reported?

BM: It’s an interesting question of where those things will show up in a company’s GHG inventory reports. The good news is that the ad industry doesn’t need to start from scratch. The GHG Protocol provides a reporting template for any company to disclose its scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions data. But, the reporting template was designed for companies from “heavy” industries that might have factories, warehouses and delivery vehicles. Ad tech companies typically don’t have these types of assets. But we do have office buildings, data centers, business travel and commuting, etc., all of which will appear on a GHG inventory. 

If an ad tech company is using AI, the energy to power will have significant emissions associated with it.

If an ad tech company is using AI, the energy to power will have significant emissions associated with it. But how it gets reported can be tricky based on whether the tech runs on data centers (typically scope 2)  or with a cloud provider like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or  Amazon Web Services (AWS) which would usually be reported under the scope 3 subcategory 1: Purchased Goods & Services. 

Ad tech companies that move their tech infrastructure from physical data centers to the cloud are seeing a massive reduction in their emissions numbers. In addition to just being more efficient, GCP and AWS in particular,  are doing a lot of work to power their platforms with renewable energy. Both also provide dashboards to let their clients measure the emissions that come from their usage of these platforms. In addition to helping with reduction strategies, this also makes the GHG reporting process a lot easier. 

Without a doubt, AI is a major contributor to the overall electricity use of the broader digital economy. At the same time, AI is really good at solving problems. I believe that AI will play an important role in helping to solve the climate problem in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. But it’s too early to tell if the carbon reduction solutions we see from AI will outweigh its broader carbon impact.

AdMonsters: Last year Google and Boston Consulting Group released a report saying that AI has the potential to mitigate 5-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

BM: That’s right. We can’t assume that these new technologies will be all bad for the environment. It’s important to go to the source and ask the right questions, which brings me back to ad tech. We hear so much talk about how the industry needs to cut out MFA, and unnecessary ad-tech integrations, and that’s true. But at the same time, there are more and more platforms that have moved their infrastructure to the cloud, and then within that, optimized towards data centers that are powered by wind and solar. If more companies did that, we wouldn’t be talking as much about the carbon footprint of MFA sites.

I’m not saying that the industry should ignore things like data waste, advertising waste and non- viewable ads. These things absolutely need to be addressed. But if more DSPs, SSPs and other ad tech platforms start operating on cloud-based platforms that are powered by renewable energy, data waste becomes less of an emissions problem.  

But if more DSPs, SSPs and other ad tech platforms start operating on cloud-based platforms that are powered by renewable energy, data waste becomes less of an emissions problem.  

AdMonsters: That’s totally fair. An analogy I’ve read is that if you’re heating your house with a heat pump that’s powered by solar panels, upgrading your insulation isn’t really a carbon imperative.  What would you like to see happen in 2024 within the ad tech sector?

BM: Really, I’d like to see more companies do what Duration Media is doing, which is reducing inefficiencies in programmatic advertising to create “greener” media solutions. Full disclosure, I’m working with Duration Media on these projects.

Duration Media focuses on understanding and reducing data waste in digital advertising and there are three key sources of this. The first is bid requests. According to Jounce Media, a single digital display ad impression requires upwards of 135 bid requests. That’s a lot of data transfer just for one impression! On top of that, we have cookie syncs (for now) and up to 30% of ads that are never even viewed by an end user. 

Duration Media has done what I hope others will do, which is build green media solutions that help publishers reduce data waste in a way that helps them generate more revenue and helps advertisers buy more viewable, effective, and efficient advertising. Reducing data waste can actually make advertising more effective, helping both the demand and supply sides of the industry – all while reducing emissions from the media supply chain.  

AdMonsters: How can brands and agencies measure the environmental impact of their media spend? 

BM: That’s a very important and timely question. Right now, as an industry, we’re in what’s commonly referred to as the “pre-competitive collaboration” phase. This is where people from various companies within a specific industry collaborate on finding a common framework for emissions measurement, so we’re not all doing it our own way and creating confusion for our economic buyers.  

There is great work being done through a collaboration between Ad Net Zero and The Global Alliance for Responsible Media to create a framework by which we can all quantify the environmental impact of all forms of advertising, from TV to print, and of course, digital. We are expecting a series of announcements on that later this year. Once we’re all following the same framework, advertisers will have a much clearer understanding of the emissions that come from their various media investments. And some brands and agencies have said publicly that the carbon footprint of various media options will influence how they make investment decisions. 

AdMonsters: We hear a lot about greenwashing in advertising when brands make false or exaggerated claims about how environmentally sustainable their companies or products are. Is greenwashing a problem in ad tech? 

BM: Greenwashing is a real problem in ad tech. We’re obviously not marketing our products and services to consumers but we still need to deliberate in how we make public assertions about our sustainability initiatives. And there are plenty of ad tech companies making clams that are textbook greenwashing. 

A good rule of thumb to follow: make sure every claim is verified, validated, or certified by a well-known and trusted 3rd party. If you report your GHG emissions data, make sure it’s verified by an emissions verifier, accredited under the ISO 14065 standard. If you set an emissions reduction target, get it validated by an organization such as the Science Based Targets initiative. And if you make a claim like “Our company has reached Carbon Neutral status”, certify that by following something like the CarbonNeutral Protocol. If you’re doing business with a company making claims about their sustainability achievements, follow the old mantra: “trust but verify”.

In Ad Net Zero’s Working Group 1, we provide supporting companies with a Communications Guideline to ensure we’re all using the right terminology and backing up with the proper verification, validation, or certification. 

AdMonsters: Is there a message you’d like to send to the entire industry?

BM: I’d like to see our industry solve the carbon challenge both for the campaign and the company. What I mean by that is that we can’t just talk about making advertising production or media buying more sustainable. We need to be running more sustainable companies. 

Right now there is a lot of talk and focus on the campaign. There’s the IAB Tech Lab Sustainability working group as well as Ad Net Zero’s Working Group 3 which focuses on media buying and planning. There are a lot of conversations happening in these groups, on stages, on podcasts and in articles around how we can make media, and digital media in particular, more environmentally sustainable. That’s great. These conversations need to happen.

What we’re not talking about enough is how to make advertising companies — agencies, ad tech platforms and media companies — more environmentally sustainable businesses. The Chief Sustainability Officers at many of the world’s biggest brands require their supply chain partners to disclose their emissions data and reduction targets. When those brands start to ask their ad tech and media partners for the same level of transparency— which they will — we need to be ready. And with new rule changes from the State of California, the SEC and the European Union, some ad tech companies will need to disclose emissions data as a regulatory requirement.

So it’s time for all companies in our industry, big and small, public and private, to take the first step and measure, verify, and report their emissions data so the real progress towards reduction can begin.

__

Brian Murphy is the founder of Alpine Project, a climate consultancy that helps advertising and technology companies create and implement their sustainability strategies so they can future-proof their businesses and create new revenue opportunities. He is also a working group co-chair of Ad Net Zero. Brian is a 25 year veteran of the ad tech industry. He launched the international sales operation at DoubleClick and went on to various leadership roles at Yahoo!, AdMob and Google. He also led Buyer Development at OpenX, the first company in the advertising, technology and media industries to achieve the SBTi Net Zero standard. Brian’s work on this important initiative inspired him to launch Alpine Project as a way to help other companies in the ad sector launch their climate action plans. He is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and The Yale School of Management’s Corporate Sustainability Management Program.

The post Greener Companies, Greener Campaigns: A Dirty Industry’s Quest to Change appeared first on AdMonsters.

In 2023, AdMonsters spoke with industry experts about the feasibility of green digital advertising campaigns, and the steps required of all players for our industry to achieve net zero. As Earth Day approaches, we revisited the topic to assess progress, identify new threats to carbon reduction goals, and explore critical issues facing our industry players.

This Is Personal

Every year, it seems, is the hottest one on record, and 2023 was no exception, according to The World Meteorological Organization. In fact, the WMO says last year “smashed” all previous records, with annual average global temperature approaching 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. If the average goes up any higher the world’s coral reefs and the Arctic ice will be threatened.

The impact of climate change isn’t theoretical; many of us have felt it directly. Last summer heavy rainfall in the Northeastern U.S., particularly in Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, led to widespread and destructive flooding. Where I live, massive flooding wiped out homes and businesses and in some cases, entire neighborhoods. 

Across the Southeast and Southwest residents sweltered in record-breaking temperatures (Phoenix, AZ experienced 111 days where temperatures crossed 100 degrees). Worryingly,  United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

And the crises kept coming. Canada experienced its worst wildfire season, with over 18 million hectares burned (one hectare equals 2.47 acres). Those fires spewed some 480 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere and created dangerous air quality conditions for people in the U.S.

The summer of 2023 also saw unprecedented wildfires across Europe, with several countries experiencing their worst wildfire seasons on record, burning over 118,000 hectares of land and releasing 20 million tons of CO2. No part of the world was spared; even the Arctic burned. 

Just last week, heavy rainfall battered the Middle East, leaving more than a dozen dead. 

We could go on but you get the idea: our dear old world is in a crisis, and we’re all suffering for it. This is personal.

Digital Advertising Industry Faces the Music

I remember the early 1990s when digital publishing was beginning to emerge. Back then we hailed it as a green alternative to printed media. Yes, paper was supposed to be recyclable, but at the time recycling was often aspirational (NYC Mayor Bloomberg cut recycling in his first year in office, saying most of it ended up in landfills, although two terms later he had a change of heart).

Rather than reducing pollution, the internet has turned into a carbon hog, generating greenhouse gasses at a level that’s on par with the airline industry. The digital advertising sector — with its competitive real-time auctions and AI applications — is a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. 

According to The Shift Project, by 2025 7.2% of global carbon emissions will be due to the internet. Of that 24% – or 1.7% of global carbon emissions – is directly attributable to digital advertising.

What’s more, the energy required by digital advertising continues to rise. MFA sites, which account for 21% of ad impressions in the open markets, generate 26% more carbon than non-MFA ones. And while the industry celebrates the advent of generative AI, new research is emerging that it is a carbon-heavy technology that massively complicates our goals to lower GHG emissions.

According to MIT, creating an image with generative AI requires as much energy as fully charging a phone. The bigger the model — i.e. the more inference models to fire — the bigger the carbon output. Meanwhile, the industry is preparing to deploy AI to generate personalized images and ad copy at scale.

Climate activist Bill McKibben said we’re not going to solve the climate crises one Tesla at a time, meaning we need bigger actions than a single consumer opting for an EV over a gas-guzzling SUV. We need actions taken on an industrial scale to hold global temperatures steady and then begin to lower them. In this respect, we can celebrate some good news.

A Reason for Hope

Although we like to talk about data and operations being “in the cloud” the reality is that data creation, processing, and storage are very much Earthbound, running on huge machines in climate-controlled data centers. A single data center generates  50 million kg CO2e, equivalent to the emissions of over 10,000 cars. 

Fortunately, data centers are going green. In 2023, data sites leasing renewable energy increased by 50%. Today, they use some 40 gigawatts of renewable energy (for perspective, one gigawatt equals 2.469 million solar panels or one billion watt hours).

Those green data centers allow digital ad-tech companies to move their operations to the cloud, and achieve Net-Zero, as OpenX has proved possible.

“We all have to take responsibility for what’s in our own backyard, and that over which we have control within our own circle of influence. I am very hopeful because I’m seeing a lot of really positive change in that area,” Brian Murphy, Founder of Alpine Project told AdMonsters.

He continued: “As it happens, our backyard is pretty big and it accounts for as much as 1.7% of global GHG emissions. By measuring and reducing the environmental impact of our own business operations and value chains, we can make our broader industry more environmentally sustainable over the long term and lead the way for other industries.” 

From the Green Media Summit,  to Mediavine’s partnership with Climate Success platform 51toCarbonZero (51-0), we see the digital advertising ecosystem taking steps to curb climate change. We have a long way to go, but at least we’re on the road.

The post Green Digital Campaigns: An Earth Day Check-In appeared first on AdMonsters.

It almost feels like Brian O’Kelley, CEO and founder of Scope3, just stepped off the operating table. While on stage at Green Media Summit, he openly shared his surgery experience with the audience, not hesitating to discuss his recent ordeal. He reassured the crowd that he felt great, especially considering that it had been only 30 days since his open heart surgery. 

There’s a major commonality between his heart and the ad tech ecosystem. They both have leaky pipes. “Advertising is the lifeblood of the internet,” O’Kelley explained to a packed room. Ad tech is the heart. The role of ad tech is to pump out those ads, just as the heart pumps out blood, but the harder we pump our ad tech heart, the more we damage the system.”

His heart surgery serves as a poignant metaphor for the resilience required in our industry. He shared a memorable moment from his recovery: upon waking up, he asked his doctor what he missed while he was under. The doctor reassured him that he fixed his heart with just three stitches, yet the miracle was in how they opened and closed his heart to make the repair. This story resonated deeply, mirroring the delicate yet transformative challenges we navigate in ad tech.

Like O’Kelley’s surgical repair, many of ad tech’s problems can be solved with just three stitches’ worth of ideas—straightforward solutions to complex challenges. But the real difficulty lies in effectively implementing and executing these great strategies. 

Brian O’Kelley’s Strategies for Repairing the ‘Leaky Pipes’ of Ad Tech

To fix the leaky heart of the internet, two things must be done.

1. Utilize the IAB Tech Lab’s Global Placement ID (GPID) to discuss inventory and enhance precision in ad placements. It’s time to shift the conversation from merely domains to incorporating specific ad placements. The GPID is a consistent identifier across ad tech platforms facilitating this expanded dialogue.
2. Derive a framework for identifying problematic ad placement behaviors. “Ads should render when they are on your screen; they should not render when they are at the bottom of the screen where you can’t see them. They shouldn’t auto-refresh where you can’t see them either,” O’Kelley explained. 

To identify the issue within ad placements, Scope3 conducted a study of about 700,000 instances and discovered that 14.3% of these placements were problematic. This revelation introduces new complexity for the industry, especially as it struggles with issues related to MFA and high-emission sites. 

Scope3 and Sharethrough have responded to the challenge by developing GMP+, a groundbreaking solution integrating placement-level data into Sharethrough’s platform. This innovative approach allows buyers to purchase green media products at the placement level. In addition to features like MFA blocking and high carbon website blocking, GMP+ also enables blocking previously unblockable problematic placements, enhancing control and precision for media buyers. Now available via Sharethrough, GMP+ will help marketers gain more quality with less carbon.

Driving Results Without Being Wasteful 

During an unexpected twist in his keynote, O’Kelley invited Kyle Vidasolo from Omnicon to the stage to provide a buy-side agency perspective. At Omnicon, the focus is on securing the best placements for brands, emphasizing the strategic importance of each placement. Performance is key, and driving those results is critical.

“There’s been no real solution for this, just a bunch of duct tape,” Vidasolo said. “The goal is to fix this once. Running ads that aren’t driving results is wasteful, but guaranteeing outcomes is how you drive results. Agencies take risks for their brands and put the money where their mouth is. So it’s really about honing in on our partnerships with publishers and making sure we drive those results.”

Vidasolo also suggested that purchasing strategies need to evolve beyond traditional CPM models to foster sustainability. It starts with outcome-driven results, but agencies must consider sustainable strategies before investing.

The Future is Green

ROI is as precious as gold. Marketers and agencies will invest where they see the highest returns. It’s about driving effective placements that work better, not harder. Even as publishers, we are all still marketers, we need to create compelling stories that connect and motivate us to take action. We are all interconnected in much deeper ways than the “ad tech craziness” that we convene over, according to O’Kelley. 

A recent Scope3 study revealed that 15% of brand spend goes to MFA sites. Following this, Jounce Media reported that nearly half of MFA traffic in the ecosystem had disappeared. Every bid request on MFA sites wastes advertisers’ money and also results in unnecessary carbon emissions.

O’Kelley emphasized the community’s role in fostering change using its collective power. “The goal is to get the entire industry to recognize that using global placement IDs makes the internet more effective and more green. We will see almost instant adoption,” he concluded. 

The post Scope3 and Sharethrough Partner to Combat Problematic Placements appeared first on AdMonsters.

We’d also like to thank you, our community, for your support. From clicking on and reading our content to providing us with story ideas  — you were there to help us grow. Many thanks to our Advisory Board as well for being a sounding board and inspiring us.

And, we definitely couldn’t have done it without our full-time content staff, News Editor, Andrew Byrd, and Content Manager, Yakira Young, as well as our freelancers — Susie Stulz, Emily Dalamangas, and Kacey Perinelli — and, of course, our many industry contributors who have written columns for us or shared their POV for an article or Playbook or two. Thank you!!!

Now on to the list…

Best of AdMonsters: Your Favorite Stories of 2023

What’s Hot in Publishing and Ad Tech: An AdMonster’s Q&A with Scott Messer

We interviewed Scott Messer, an executive media operator with a passion for creating, operating, and monetizing digital businesses. He first started in the digital media business back in 2006 and has held numerous leadership positions within the industry. Today, he is the Principal and Founder of Messer Media.

We spoke with him about the challenges of Seller Defined Audiences, Deal Curation as a Service, and the recent EU Study on the impact of recent developments in digital Advertising on privacy, publishers, and advertisers. (Read more)

Data Monetization in the Era of ID Deprecation: Best Practices to Pivot and Evolve Your Data Strategy

With ID deprecation well underway and consumer privacy legislation on the rise, publishers face more complex obstacles than ever before. Yet the consumer expectation for personalization remains, as does the extreme competition for engaged eyes and ears.

When it comes to evolving data monetization, publishers are positioned at various levels of sophistication and preparedness. Notably, each publisher possesses a unique composition of data signals. While some are blessed with substantial strong quality 1P signals, others rely more heavily on cookie-based identity, with limited access to alternative identifiers. Given these diverse circumstances, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Nonetheless, there are best practices and levers of control you can employ to shift your strategy and mitigate risk.

The pivotal question emerges: What is the optimal place to start, and what are the best practices for privacy forward data monetization? (Read more)

A Path to Net-zero for the Digital Advertising Sector

The digital advertising sector has a dirty little secret: its carbon footprint is huge. How big?  About the size of the airline industry.

Collectively, digital ad tech accounts for 3.5% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emitted each year. A single campaign that fills one million impressions has the same carbon footprint as a roundtrip flight from Boston to London. (Read more)

Forget the Hype: How Publishers Can Safely Enhance Their Products with AI

The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) rolled out — then quickly took offline — a chatbot called Tessa. Tessa was supposed to offer callers guidance, but she urged callers to restrict their diets, assuring them they could safely lose one to two pounds per week. It’s a reminder that generative AI products must be rolled out with care.

But what does that “care” mean? What’s involved? Initiatives like BuzzFeed’s Botatouille are a great way for publishers to enhance their products to gain more subscribers and offer more value to their existing subscriber base.

To understand how publishers can deploy AI bots safely, we spoke with Kyle Alan Hale, a Solutions Architect at Rightpoint. Kyle holds an advanced degree in philosophy of mind and neuroscience and is currently working on a degree in computational linguistics, focusing particularly on language models. (Read more)

The State of Programmatic Advertising in 2023

According to a webinar hosted by Comscore, 2023 State of Programmatic, programmatic spend has experienced exponential growth, doubling over the past four years. Data shows that over 91% of $148 billion in digital display dollars are transacted programmatically. Where does this leave the state of programmatic? 

The short answer is that the automated supply chain is flourishing, but signs indicate an ad spend slowdown. The further context suggests that since programmatic accounts for nine out of ten digital ad dollars, the market is reaching a state of saturation rather than stagnation. (Read more)

Legit Black-owned Publishers Are Being Labeled MFA Sites, but Maybe There’s a Solution

In the wake of the media reckoning sparked by the tragic murder of George Floyd in 2020, advertisers funneled more ad spend toward Black-owned publishers. Ad agencies, driven by commitments to allocate a portion of their media budgets to these publishers, sought to address the longstanding disparities in media representation.

However, Black-owned publishers now face unique challenges, primarily related to declining referral traffic from sources like Facebook ever since the social network’s algorithms started deprioritizing news.

This decline has made it increasingly tricky to meet ad impression requirements stipulated in deals with advertisers. Consequently, some Black publishers felt compelled to buy traffic or partner with other publishers to extend their reach.

But here lies the conundrum: as Black-owned publishers seek to bolster their audiences and meet advertiser demands, they face the risk of being labeled MFA sites.(Read more)

The post Best of AdMonsters: Your Favorite Stories of 2023 appeared first on AdMonsters.

You should also check out the ANA’s Qualitative Report from August. It includes a wealth of interview quotes; everything the study participants were willing to tell the ANA under condition of anonymity. Together, these reports are real eye-openers.

These reports tell us quite definitively that information asymmetries (or “knowledge gaps,” which is a bit more succinct) are causing advertisers to unknowingly pour their budgets into lousy bidding environments, inventory, and audiences, not because they have access to bad information, but because they simply don’t know what information to ask for in the first place.

I want to dive into what’s gotten us here on a first-principles basis, as I find the topic fascinating (in fact, I explored “knowledge asymmetries” just a few weeks ago on The AdPod before the ANA report was released).

Reactive tactics are important too, but until you understand a few fundamental truths, you won’t understand what makes digital media so dangerous when you find yourself on the wrong side of an information asymmetry.

Specifically, I’m going to explore three principles:

1. Information asymmetries and lies are not the same thing
2. There’s no referee in digital
3. You’re not buying a commodity product

Information Asymmetries and Lies Are Not the Same Thing

Many information asymmetries are not powered by lies but by omission.

If someone is making money off information you don’t have, not only are they disincentivized from giving you that information, they won’t even tell you it exists. And this is convenient because they can profit from the asymmetry without ever telling a lie or doing anything out of the ordinary from your perspective.

Consider MFA inventory: sellers of such inventory are never going to voluntarily add extra fields to their impression reports showing how many other ad placements were simultaneously loaded on the page, or how many ad placements didn’t meet viewability standards.

Such fields would add a great deal more context as to what the ‘Impressions’ reporting field actually means. But no, it’s more convenient to omit those other reporting fields and let the advertiser or their agency do a lot of extra homework for themselves (or enlist an attention metrics vendor).

Digital media is filled with such gotchas. It’s a real jungle out there.

There’s No Referee in Digital

Whether we realize it or not, we all carry around with us the nearly 30-year-old assumption that digital media is more rules-based and controllable than the “fuzzy” broadcast and physical media of yesteryear (e.g., radio and magazines).

However, thinking that digital media is inherently rules-based is an assumption that can get you into trouble because there is no referee enforcing these supposed rules.

The programmatic supply chain is so immense, diffuse, and complex that no one is “minding the store.”

Here’s an example:

The ANA report recommends that advertisers and buyers use inclusion lists instead of exclusion lists. The inferiority of exclusion lists is obvious once you know just one thing:

However fast you can spot bad publishers in your reports and exclude them, shady operators can launch new garbage sites and plug them into the programmatic supply chain 100x faster. You will never, ever be able to outrun bad actors.

Also, an ecosystem full of information asymmetries disincentivizes very many people from telling you this fact.

Case in point: the “website reduction” experience of JPMorgan Chase in 2017 as noted in the ANA report. The company was running ads on 400,000 separate sites and subsequently saw zero drop in performance after reducing that to an inclusion list of only 4,000 sites.

400,000 sites! If anyone along the food chain was minding the store, might they have raised their hand when JPMorgan Chase crossed the 100,000 site milestone, let alone 200,000 or 300,000?

If JPMorgan Chase left things on autopilot, how many sites might they have been allowed to spend across? Four million? Four billion?

In digital, there’s no referee who’s going to step in, so use inclusion lists and make sure the field of play is small enough that you can see the whole thing yourself.

You’re Not Buying a Commodity Product

This last principle is simple: the industry-standard nature of terms like “impressions” and “users” implies that these are universally-standardized commodities; that they are like eggs or barrels of oil.

Nothing could be further from the truth. An impression could be a bot loading an MFA site or it could be a high-net-worth executive loading the homepage of The Wall Street Journal.

When advertising broke the constraints of broadcast and physical media, it essentially entered the limitless world of the might-not-be-real.

That user? They might be a real human doing normal human stuff. They also might not. That click? Might be a real human genuinely interested in an ad, and it might be a real human fat-fingering a CLOSE button.

The industry has made valiant attempts (some successful; some not) to bring about standardization, but even the most rigorous standards can be thwarted and can even become a hiding place for bad actors who cloak themselves in the language of standardization.

This doesn’t mean that basic metrics like impressions deserve to be thrown out. Obviously, advertisers need ways of measuring audience reach. And obviously, genuine industry standards help a great deal.

Instead, what this means is not allowing garbage to “hide” inside ad budgets just because that garbage happens to use the same words to label its reporting fields as the legit stuff. Digital media is not a commodity and the terms we use every day have little intrinsic meaning aside from being industry shorthand.

Go Read the Report

That’s all I have to say for now. But go read the ANA report. If you’re on the buy side, get educated so you can begin asking the questions it recommends. If you’re on the sell side, get educated so you can begin answering those questions, because I expect this report will keep the industry talking into 2024 and beyond.

The post Information Asymmetries in Digital Media Will Eat You Alive. If You Let Them. appeared first on AdMonsters.