What do you think is the biggest problem in ad tech? 

Some might say the loss of revenue, others might say privacy concerns that create increased signal loss and more difficult audience targeting, and I’m sure there are a host more issues to list off. However, many problems in the industry are linked to a lack of transparency in the supply chain, says Claire Atkin, Co-founder and CEO of Check My Ads. 

Digital advertising, long been plagued by a lack of transparency, allows bad actors to profit from spreading disinformation and extremism online. In a recent keynote session, Atkin warned that publishers and advertisers should address these issues and restore trust in digital advertising.

“If advertisers are given the opportunity to have control over their ads, we will actually have a media system that works for you,” shared Atkin. 

Without more transparency, advertisers don’t know where their ads are showing up, often supporting the very things they want to avoid.

Beyond supply chain issues, Atkin highlighted how digital advertising hurts quality journalism by diverting funds to low-quality, disinformation-filled sites. To address this, she encourages publishers to build direct relationships with advertisers and boost their brand strength, aiming to restore trust and realign incentives in the industry.

Check My Transparent Supply Chain

The opaque nature of digital advertising has devastatingly impacted publisher revenue. As Atkin pointed out, many advertisers are blissfully unaware of their ad placements. “Our ads are off the asshole of the internet,” one executive confessed after Check My Ads audited their campaigns. 

This lack of visibility and control has allowed unscrupulous actors to profit at the expense of legitimate publishers. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars could be in your bank account daily, but it’s not — it’s going to fund chaos, not just disinformation, but useless stuff,” Atkin said. The systematic defunding of quality journalism results from advertisers’ inability to monitor and govern their ad placements effectively. 

Atkin urges publishers to build direct brand relationships to combat this trend rather than relying on intermediaries. If advertisers control their ad placements, Atkin believes publishers will have a media system that works for them. By strengthening their brand equity, publishers can attract advertisers willing to pay a premium to be associated with trusted, high-quality content — a strategy that could help realign incentives and restore financial viability to the news industry. 

Check My Disinformation

Unfortunately, digital advertising has inadvertently become a breeding ground for disinformation and extremism. The very structure of the ad tech industry has created perverse incentives that allow bad actors to profit from the spread of harmful narratives, explained Atkin.

“Around every politician that is politically advancing due to disinformation and hate, there is now a donut of Grifters making money off those same narratives,” Atkin said.

Since brands lack visibility into some of their ad placements, they have unwittingly funded websites and individuals peddling conspiracy theories, hate speech, and outright lies. Atkin’s organization, Check My Ads, works to identify and defund these malicious actors, successfully targeting prominent figures like Dan Bongino and Steve Bannon.

Addressing the root of the problem, Atkin argued that the ad tech industry must embrace a new era of accountability and transparency. She advocates for hourly log-level data and “know your customer” requirements to empower advertisers and help them monitor their placements, ensuring purveyors of disinformation are not co-opting their brand messaging. 

By realigning the incentives within the supply chain, publishers and advertisers can start reconfiguring digital advertising from a conduit for misinformation to a force for supporting quality journalism and democratic discourse. 

All in all, this will create a healthier supply chain that allows publishers and advertisers to get the most bang for their buck.

The post Check My Ads, Check My Transparency, and Check My Disinformation: Notes From AdMonsters Publisher Forum Boston 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.

Supply path optimization is a topic that has the industry buzzing right now because a lot of changes are happening, and not all of them are easy to understand. Whether you’re on the sell or buy side of the equation, tracking these changes and understanding how they may impact your business going forward is important. 

A panel at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O in New York City on September 26 titled “The SPO Squeeze” dove into this subject headfirst. The chat was moderated by Sarah Sluis, Executive Editor, AdExchanger, and featured Jess Breslav, Chief Customer Officer, Index Exchange; Will Doherty, VP Inventory Development, Publishers, The Trade Desk; Katie Evans, Chief Operating Officer, Magnite; and Lara Koenig, Global Head of Product, MiQ. 

Increasing Value and Efficiency in SPO

Koenig is on the buy side of the SPO journey, and she shared that SPO is a crucial problem for buyers to tackle right now. The current setup creates a slew of problems for marketers. 

For example, there are too many intermediaries in the supply chain. “About three years ago, we  got supply chain logs from our DSPs. We thought we were buying from six different supply vendors, but when we looked at the logs, we figured out that in reality 384 downstream vendors are participating in our auctions, which leads to so many safety, suitability and economic risks,” Koenig explained. 

Marketers can succumb to many pitfalls, and almost as many folks are trying to solve the problems with SPO. The problem is that with the multitude of emerging platforms the goal of programmatic – to simplify the process for buyers – is being lost. 

One potential solution to this problem is bidding through open paths. This eliminates some of the hops back and forth and saves time. Doherty says this also ensures you see the true number of avails, giving the buyer a more accurate depiction of a supplier’s inventory, which allows them to compare and contrast publishers. 

“What open path has allowed us to do and where the market is going is it’s starting to consolidate around the top. As that consolidation occurs, the economic benefits for both the publisher and the buyer become much clearer,” Doherty notes.

As an industry, we need to start redefining the word “value” in terms of partnerships. Breslav says, “Gone are the days where you add a partner and expect immediate outcomes, immediate ad spend.” The value may be in benchmarking performance and relaying that information to partners. 

Open path is future-facing, says Evans, toward new technologies like CTV, which operates very differently. “We’re trying to create an ecosystem that is going to be successful for the future, based on all the technologies that have developed over the last five or six years,” she says.  

Seeing Double: Duplicate Impressions Limit Value

Duplication in impressions is a concern when each publisher is partnering with 35-40 SSPs. SSPs are all sending the same things to DSPs, and the DSPs are not getting the rest of the picture, creating problems for buyers. 

From a buyer’s perspective, says Koenig, partner companies are largely doing the same thing – collapsing intermediaries to make buying more direct. The pressing question now is whether supply chain intermediaries add any value. 

Doherty notes there are two types of duplication – publishers working with multiple partners and within SSPs themselves, tuning up or tuning down traffic, which leads to intra-SSP duplication. Some DSPs will lean into solely getting their match traffic, possibly even only for what they historically bid on. This can reduce your bottom line and limit your reach.

Decisions based on a DSP’s customer portfolio and what buyers have bought in the past can limit pathways for new buyers and over complicate the process, forcing buyers to work with multiple DSPs to get the reach they’re looking for. Koenig believes there should be transparency in the process that empowers buyers to advocate for the pathways they want to pursue. The current process also hurts the SSP because they are sending avails that aren’t monetized. 

To combat this, Breslav recommends better communication between SSPs and DSPs. “Filtering done correctly helps our partners to be more successful and buyers on the other side of it. Part of that is about a conversation making sure that we are all aligned on what we are sending each other and using traffic shaping as a tool when it’s effective,” she shares. 

A View Toward the Future

Communication within the industry is crucial for making sure pain points continue to be addressed and that we remain on the same page. In the face of a shifting digital landscape with emerging technologies, ultimately we all want the same thing – to succeed. 

The complicated landscape makes it more difficult than ever for SSPs to drive positive outcomes for publishers. According to Breslav, there is a flight to quality and safety as well as a focus on sustainability, and all of these considerations are changing how the industry views strategy and innovation. 

She adds, “I think there’s an incredibly healthy dialogue happening in our ecosystem right now, and I really appreciate it. I think about what I read in the trades and the push towards sustainability. Our community feels incredibly active. I think that that’s a wonderful thing.”

Looking ahead, experts agreed that it is important to avoid letting new technologies like CTV fall into the same trap we’re currently in with duplication and intermediary traffic. In the coming years, there will likely be some consolidation of players, particularly intermediaries, in addition to greater efficiency and quality. The consensus was cautious optimism about what the future holds. 

The post Escaping the Trap: Supply Path Optimization Can Create Transparency and Increase Efficiency appeared first on AdMonsters.

Can we just call a spade a spade? All of the bloat in the supply chain has been caused by a lack of understanding that the internet and any website is an ecosystem. 

And like all ecosystems, as they become more complex their impacts are noticeable across the entire ecosystem rather than in one area. We have been building the web ecosystem in silos not realizing that when we make changes in one place it has an impact on the others. 

I was part of the early group of people who helped grow the advertising ecosystem. All you had to do was place a “snippet of code” in the header of your site and you’d be generating revenue. That worked and many digital businesses were born that are household names today. 

Today, there are thousands and thousands of ad-supported websites across the globe. However, as the technology advanced, mid to long-tail publishers found it harder to keep up. There is now an entire industry of companies that are focused on helping these publishers monetize their content. 

These publishers have relationships with every single SSP, which brings them scale with the ability to serve numerous ads to their visitors in a given month increasing their ability to bring in a higher revenue share than they would be able to obtain on their own. These ad tech companies they work with, offer first-to-market access to new tools and capabilities to make this all possible.

For publishers, it’s also beneficial to work with an authorized reseller to focus on growing their site traffic and their business. However, many of these companies manage the publishers who partner with them like an ad network, diminishing the ability of individual publishers to maximize their revenue potential. This also bloats the bidstream damaging the entire ecosystem. 

As Chris Kane, Founder of Jounce Media explains, “…the sell side of the market remains highly fragmented. Open Internet media companies are financially rewarded for building non-exclusive partnerships with sell-side technology companies. The resulting bidstream bloat degrades unit economics of programmatic advertising, distorting the allocation of DSP spend, and slowing the emergence of long-term winners in the SSP market.”

I am not even getting into the lack of transparency in the ecosystem or the high level of variability in the supply fees that publishers are charged. In a recent AdMonsters article about the MediaMath fallout and some SSPs leaning on sequential liability clauses, I said, “Publishers need to be aware of what’s happening in the market, within the digital ecosystem, to ensure its health and safety. We cannot turn a blind eye to understanding how revenue is generated, who the players are, what differentiates them, and which companies continue to support the ecosystem for the better.”

In theory, the way the ecosystem is set up everything should all work quite well but instead, by increasing the number of ads on a page or the number of partners, or the number of integrations to benefit the ad network rather than the publisher and user experience everything has gone sideways. 

Many studies have shown that consumers are willing to share their data in exchange for content that is meaningful and relevant, and that includes advertising. That’s why publishers need to get back to focusing on the user experience and maximizing the value exchange to bring about a future where ads and content can exist harmoniously for the benefit of publishers, audiences, and advertisers alike.

The post Musings on the Bloated Supply Chain appeared first on AdMonsters.

“Grouchy” Greg Watkins is the co-founder of AllHipHop.com, a website that has been doing successful business in the music space since its inception in 1997. The site’s mission continues to be the same as it was then, a place to share news, feature articles, and any other pertinent content for people who make and enjoy hip-hop. 

Most importantly, the site has an incredible reach, which it achieves largely thanks to Watkins’ knowledge and expertise in the online advertising space. Leading up to his talk at PubForum in Coronado Island, California, we caught up with Watkins to learn more about his career journey and how he is helping others learn the ins and outs of ad tech. 

Music & Technology Paved the Way for Watkins’ Career

Watkins says he knew he was destined to be a part of the music industry since he was only three years old, listening to tapes on his parents’ tape recorders at home. When he was just a kid, he also began tinkering with technology. 

“My dad had an old reel-to-reel machine in his basement that he listened to music on. He had transistor radios that I would take apart and look at,” he says. 

As he grew up and began getting involved in music, he started a recording studio. Then he went to the Art Institute of Philadelphia, where he received an Associate’s Degree in Music, Business, and Audio Engineering. 

By 1996, Watkins was pressing records and having success selling those online to people worldwide. That’s when he registered AllHipHop.com, which he originally conceived as a way to sell records but quickly morphed into the hip-hop news site it is today, with the help of his long-time business partner Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur.

Watkins Was an Early Adopter of & Believer in the Power of the Internet 

Witnessing the evolution of communication through the web via early programs like AOL convinced Watkins that the Internet would be the way of the future. At that time, he began reading trade publications to understand the ins and outs of this new communication tool. 

“By ‘96 or ‘97, I don’t want to say I was a veteran of the internet, but I knew my way around. At that time, I knew HTML, how to code, and how to make websites. I saw it as a logical step when I saw people buying the music online, and how it reduced my overhead by having a direct-to-consumer relationship,” he explains. 

That direct-to-consumer relationship completely changed how Watkins and his team sold music and connected with their audience. He knew then that the internet would change how we share news and information globally. 

Awareness of the Internet’s Advertising Potential 

If you asked Watkins back when he launched his website whether he would be so involved in ad tech today, he says the answer would be both yes and no. 

“I’ve been reading the trades since ‘94, 95. I visited San Francisco. I saw Yahoo in its early days before they were even a worldwide known brand – I saw cabs riding around with ‘Yahoo’ on top and billboards around San Francisco. That blew my mind that an internet company was marketing in that manner. That opened my eyes to see there is an advertising business here,” he shares. 

Even so, the urban advertising system was basically nonexistent until the year 2000, which is when AllHipHop.com began to dive into the world of online ads. Watkins notes, “I helped launch our first ad server. I bought it off the Internet, ‘software as a service.’” He began launching ad campaigns, doing the creative, HTML, and tracking codes with a small team of sales reps. 

At first, the advertisers were direct-to-consumer marketers, but AllHipHop.com landed a campaign with the anti-smoking organization The Truth. The money from that campaign helped the website hire more writers and salespeople who did brand cold calling. This eventually led to some big fish advertisers like American Airlines and Pepsi. 

“I did know that the advertising business would be big on the Internet and that this would be a way to directly speak to consumers in a way that possibly had never happened in media history. When you’re dealing with television, it’s usually a one-way transaction. When you’re dealing with the internet, especially at the time, you could develop actual relationships with these consumers, depending on what type of ad campaign you’re running,” he notes. 

Understanding the Supply Chain Leads to Success

Watkins says his biggest advice for publishers looking to succeed in this industry is to understand the supply chain we are all a part of. 

AllHipHop.com started as a direct selling business, then it began dealing with ad networks. When programmatic started, the supply chain became more complicated and less transparent. 

Ten years later, the supply chain has become even more complex and even wasteful, up to the billions of dollars in terms of waste spent by brands and agencies. This is what Watkins says he will be speaking to at PubForum. 

“There are a variety of headwinds impacting our industry right now that will probably be issues for the entire ecosystem in the supply chain for advertising over the next two years. Those are going to be some of the things I’m talking about and telling publishers: what to look out for, and how to avoid bad actors in the space. I’ll also be giving some actual testimonials,” he says. 

Making Ad Tech a More Inclusive Space

The lack of diversity and inclusion in the ad tech space confounds Watkins. “One thing that has always surprised me is the fact that Black, Latin, and other minority-owned businesses still have this difficulty in the 21st century having their audiences respected. We have huge audiences, yet only 1 percent of ad budgets go to Black and minority-owned and targeted websites.” 

For his part, Watkins makes it a point to take time out of his busy schedule to speak to college students and mentor minority owners of small businesses.

“I speak at HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and colleges, in general to encourage the students to understand ad tech, one for the impact that it has on society and how we see ourselves, but two, there has to be human capital available for these companies to hire for change to happen,” he states. He believes it’s important to make sure these students know how low lucrative ad tech can be.

He also is involved with BOMESI, the Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute, which assists publishers with resources, grants, and training to help serve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the publishing industry. “I mentor a variety of these brands and some of their executives on what’s happening in the business,” Watkins says. 

To hear more about Watkins’ journey and his advice for publishers looking to succeed, make sure to attend his keynote speech, “Lessons From the Trenches: 25 Years as a Publisher Navigating Ad Tech,” at AdMonsters’ upcoming PubForum in Coronado, California on August 7. 

The post Ahead of His Time: How “Grouchy” Greg Watkins Leveraged the Power of the Internet Into a Successful Publishing Career appeared first on AdMonsters.

Of course, the advertising supply and demand ecosystem isn’t quite so simple. Under the surface, advertisers and publishers rely on the delicate relationship between DSPs and SSPs to make sure the right ad gets to the right audience at the right time—ensuring publishers maximize ad revenue and advertisers maximize ROI. Yet, despite record ad spend and a booming ad tech market, the advertising ecosystem is increasingly showing signs of its age.

The Problem: Ad Opportunities and Bid Requests Are No Longer Synonymous

Across the advertising supply chain, rusty ad tech pipes and a lack of transparency continue to breed distrust from both publishers and advertisers. For example, one 2020 report by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) and PwC found that a large, and growing, ad tech black hole is causing ad spend to dry up before it ever makes it to the publisher. Publishers currently receive only 51% of advertiser spend and one-third of supply chain costs go unattributed, according to the study.

While there are multiple reasons for the growing inefficiencies in the ad buying process, one of the fundamental reasons can be traced to the widespread adoption of header bidding. When publishers first began using header bidding strategies in the mid-2010s, it immediately led to rapid growth in the number and frequency of bid requests.

Header bidding suddenly allowed these publishers to create simultaneous auctions for the same inventory across multiple SSPs and exchanges at the same time. But this new header-bidding approach harbored one key inefficiency: 

It created widespread duplication of bid requests, as multiple SSPs and exchanges peppered DSPs with the same ad opportunities over and over again. 

Fast forward to the current header bidding climate and more than 90% of bid requests now result in wasted traffic that does not receive a single bid from DSPs and their advertisers.

As if that wasn’t enough, the ad tech consolidation arms race has intensified in recent years—driven by an overcrowded market and rising tech infrastructure costs—which has led to fewer DSPs and an even more strained relationship between SSPs and the DSPs that remain.

DSPs have responded to the bid request explosion with queries per second (QPS) limits designed to streamline the bid request process and reduce the high costs associated with trillions of requests. But this is far from a perfect solution, and it introduces new problems—namely, who should really be in control of filtering bid requests: the supply side or demand side?

Getting Back to the Basics: Delivering the Right Ad, at the Right Time, to the Right Audience

Ultimately, what both DSPs and SSPs were looking for was greater bid request relevance. For the SSPs, this meant finding a way to limit bid requests to the inventory that a specific DSP would actually bid on. While, for the DSPs, it meant reducing the overall bidstream and filtering out costly bid request duplication.

DSPs sought to solve this problem first by developing supply path optimization solutions that would help them to identify bids that were more likely to win an auction. However, these solutions sometimes made it difficult for SSPs and their publisher partners to understand how and why their bid requests were performing.

Enter traffic shaping. Traffic shaping is an automated process in which programmatic auctions are filtered to expose the relevance of each auction. Traffic shaping seeks to solve the wasted traffic problem by selecting a subset of bid requests that are more likely to result in bids when passed on to DSP partners.

“It’s simply acknowledging that exchanges cannot send 100% of ad opportunities to DSP buyers,” said Chris Kane, Founder and President at Jounce Media, a programmatic advertising consultancy. “And so, the shaping part is: Well, if I’m not going to send every part, what am I going to send?”

The theory behind traffic shaping strategies is that by sending only the most relevant advertising opportunities to each DSP, the infrastructure costs associated with waste can be greatly reduced without having a noticeable impact on SSP and publisher revenue.

According to research executed by Rivr—a traffic shaping solutions provider—traffic shaping can result in a reduction of bid requests by 30-60%, while still maintaining nearly 100% of existing revenue for SSPs and their publisher partners. Additionally, the infrastructure savings from this type of reduction in bid requests can drive massive profit gains for SSPs and their DSP partners.

So, What’s Holding Traffic Shaping Back?

Given the clear benefits, it would be easy to assume traffic shaping is a solution publishers, SSPs, exchanges, and DSPs should all be able to get behind. But that simply hasn’t been the case—as pent-up distrust across the advertising ecosystem harbors lingering concerns about the goals and use cases for traffic shaping. Not to mention, SSPs continue to view traffic shaping as a low priority initiative—far below their focus on consumer privacy and identity resolution. 

In order to effectively move past these concerns, it’s time for the industry to address them head-on—and turn greater issue transparency into mutually beneficial solutions. Let’s take a look at three of the primary concerns holding the ad tech industry back from realizing its traffic shaping future:

Concern #1: Traffic Shaping Will Damage Publisher Revenue Streams

It stands to reason that when you start selectively sending bid requests to just a few demand sources, publisher revenue might be the first thing to suffer. After all, publishers have been conditioned from years of header bidding success to believe that the more SSP plug-ins they use, the higher their revenue will climb.

By shutting off supply from SSPs and publishers that generate high QPS with low returns, DSPs have changed this balance. In this emerging environment, publishers may find that peppering the buy-side with bid requests could get them blocked from critical sources of advertiser spend.

It’s a well-documented fact that modest bid requests and high margins are two things DSPs love—and they love them, even more, when they come together. At its core, traffic shaping seeks to optimize for both of these things. Traffic shaping results continue to suggest that traffic shaping can preserve nearly all existing publisher revenue.

Even better—once QPS limits become less of a guiding factor—publishers will be free to build competitive differentiation in powerful new ways.

“It’s exciting to us, [publishers], that we might be able to compete with other publishers on the quality of the ad experience and other aspects rather than QPS,” said Patrick McCann, Senior Vice President of Product/Data at CafeMedia. 

Concern #2: Traffic Shaping Is Not a High-priority Investment

In a complex industry that also has evolving brand safety, identity, and ad fraud challenges to contend with on a daily basis, it’s often the same DevOps team responsible for tackling all of these issues. As a result, traffic shaping tends to quickly fall down the to-do list.

“Traffic shaping is not a high priority for an SSP, because—let’s face it—they don’t view it as an existential crisis,” said Benjamin Hansz, Vice President of Strategy at Rivr. “If an SSP doesn’t have the best traffic shaping, a DSP will still buy from them. But the moment an SSP fails to account for a growing fraud or brand safety concern? Revenues will dry up within 24 hours.”

However, this is a risky approach. Why? Because it risks devaluing bids over time, which could quickly lead to a fallout with publishers who wish to maximize the return on their available inventory. For this reason, waiting until traffic shaping becomes a bigger issue may mean waiting until it’s too late—when publishers have already moved on to someone else.

Concern #3: Traffic Shaping Is a Product Challenge for SSPs

This final concern stems from the previous one. If an SSP doesn’t have the bandwidth to tackle traffic shaping challenges right now, but also can’t afford not to, what can they do?

When the team at GumGum encountered this very problem, they didn’t like the options. Skipping out on traffic shaping altogether seemed like a good way to anger their DSP partners, but finding the internal staff hours to solve this complicated challenge wasn’t an option either. In their case, finding the expertise and bandwidth they needed to get traffic shaping right required turning to a third-party solution.

“A product like Rivr, even though we could spend a lot of time internally building a traffic shaping solution—as a lot of other SSPs have done—we didn’t feel like that should be our core competency,” said GumGum CTO Ken Weiner. “We could have built it if there wasn’t an option, but this seemed like a more efficient use of our time and capabilities.”

Pushback to a third-party traffic shaping solution tends to revolve around the belief that SSPs should prioritize investment in proprietary competitive advantages. But traffic shaping’s role in the ad tech ecosystem is too fundamental to the ecosystem’s future success to continue to ignore. As the industry hurtles toward its brave, new, less cookie-dependent future, the nature of programmatic trading and auction dynamics will only grow more complex.

 Traffic shaping is an investment in a more productive and profitable future for the advertising ecosystem—one that meets DSP needs for reduced bid requests and maximizes publisher revenue. For that reason, it’s also a challenge that is perfectly tailored for a third-party solution that benefits publishers, DSPs—and every step in between.

The post The Future—and Present—of Bidstream Efficiency Lies with Traffic Shaping appeared first on AdMonsters.

Ad platforms spent the 2010’s rapidly innovating new ways to target, personalize, and measure advertising, largely based on third-party (3P) tracking. Money poured in from advertisers and agencies looking to shed the waste and uncertainty of traditional media and optimize campaigns right down to the user level.

However, during this exuberant period, advertisers, agencies, and tech platforms were unknowingly digging themselves into a debt that will take years to repay. And this debt can’t be settled by signing a check and swapping out for new tech.

Finding ways to manage the complexity of digital advertising without 3P tracking is putting urgent emphasis on people and process over tech, resetting the tech/agency/client relationship, and generally acting as a forcing function for the industry to clean up long-ignored problems.

3P Tracking—Ad Tech’s Miracle Drug

Digital marketing and advertising are currently running out of easy answers to old problems. One of those “easy answers” was 3P behavioral tracking. I don’t think it can be overstated the extent to which digital advertising molded itself around 3P tracking and the idea that tech platforms could freely collect and access data on user behavior across websites and apps.

The “God’s eye view” that 3P tracking enabled was hugely powerful. It gave birth to retargeting, multi-touch attribution (MTA), audience onboarding (e.g., LiveRamp), dynamic creative optimization (DCO), data management platforms (DMPs), and performance-based media machines like Criteo, Rocket Fuel, and Conversant (to name a tiny handful). Basically: most of 2010’s ad tech.

People and Process Must Rapidly Shore Up Growing Gaps

The convenience of tech masked deficiencies in two other areas: people and process. As 3P tracking breaks down (and for other reasons I won’t get into here), the importance of people and process is going to get increasingly obvious. To illustrate what I mean, let’s consider the example of basic measurement and reporting.

Time was, 3P tracking could measure digital advertising events (impressions, conversions, etc) at a user level, saving everyone a lot of hassle. Campaign setup, ad trafficking, and underlying data (e.g., ad server logs) could all be a complete mess, but as long as user IDs were present for purposes of de-duplication and tallying, brands and agencies could gain a basic understanding of audience reach, frequency, and overlap, as well as performance attribution (remember: cross-site/app/device view-through attribution is only possible via 3P tracking).

However, if you dig deep enough, you find that growing gaps in measurement and reporting caused by the death of 3P tracking are going to require people- and process-based solutions as much as tech-based ones.

If You’re Reading This, Your Data is Probably a Mess

The underlying data for digital ad campaigns indeed was (and still is) a complete and total mess. In May 2020, the UK’s ISBA released its Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study conducted with the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Problems with programmatic media data access, quality, and standardization meant that over the course of fifteen months and massive budget overruns, PwC could only match and audit a shamefully low 12% of ad impressions (to be clear: the “shameful” part is not directed at PwC).

The ad industry was rightly scandalized over the 15% “unknown delta” in supply chain costs that PwC could simply not account for, but having spoken to PwC directly about the study, I can tell you that the team involved was somewhat surprised and disappointed that the industry and trade media seemed to overlook a fresh reminder of how deeply broken advertising data is.

In other words: forget about the “unknown delta”—practically any kind of meaningful direct analysis is still near-impossible for most brands because the data sets aren’t standardized and in many cases are extremely difficult to access in the first place.

Clean Data is Going to Matter a Lot Going Forward

Let’s revisit the problem (or one manifestation of it): without 3P user IDs to reconcile ad impressions and events across time, users, websites, and apps, a brand could show an ad a million times to one person or once each to a million different people.

This is an exaggeration, but without 3P tracking, brands won’t know precisely; they’ll need to model it based on available data and make educated guesses. This is totally a thing. AppsFlyer is doing this, as is Google’s Display & Video 360.

But you can only build reliable models on top of clean data. Because brands’ tech stacks won’t be able to reconcile user IDs, suddenly a brand’s walled garden, publisher, agency, and tech partners will need to adhere to some new set of shared data standards; a “common currency” to take the place of user IDs.

And here’s the rub: this common currency does not exist yet (just ask PwC), so brands will need to create these new data standards, get agencies to use them, and make sure they’re implemented in tech stacks.

Resetting Campaign Data Back to a Baseline (and Repaying the Debt)

Now that we’ve established what “broken” looks like, we can start to sketch out what it would take across people, process, and tech to reset advertising data to a new baseline that’s adapted to a world without 3P tracking:

1. gain access to your digital advertising data (process)
2. develop new data standards and instructions on how to use them (process)
3. get all your media buying agencies to use these standards consistently (process)
4. make sure anyone with “hands-on keyboard” (agency or in-house) knows how to use the standards consistently (people)
5. make sure all your tech (agency or in-house) reflects the standards (tech)
6. collect your now-standardized data in one place for reconciliation, analysis, and reporting (tech + process)

Beyond Step 6, you can use your imagination. Once an advertiser can reset to a new baseline, many of the same use-cases formerly enabled by 3P tracking still apply, including media planning & targeting, creative optimization, and performance measurement.

Two caveats: This was over-simplified for purposes of illustration and 3P tracking is only one factor among many forcing change in the digital advertising industry.

My point was not to pinpoint the death of 3P tracking as the sole catalyst for change or the sole source of “debt.” Instead, my aim was to explore why and how brands, agencies, and tech ought to follow the “domino effect” as far as it takes to build genuinely durable solutions to industry-wide challenges.

The post Third-party Tracking Got Advertisers Deep Into Debt; Now It’s Time to Repay appeared first on AdMonsters.

1) Who was getting most adversely impacted along the waterfall—focused primarily on publishers receiving 51% of advertiser spend on average, and;

2) The mysterious “unknown delta”: unattributable costs making up 15% of advertiser spend.

While these are certainly interesting data points, given my current focus on tech stack architecture for enterprise clients I was taken aback by another issue—how difficult it was for the data to be accessed in the first place.

The Spend Waterfall

My opinion is that the breakdown will be bespoke to the customer, and that “ad tech tax” is an oversimplification (MightyHive CEO Pete Kim also wrote about this at length on our company’s blog). Since each element is necessary for the ecosystem to function, optimization of this breakdown should be set up to improve ROI—starting with transparency into where exactly media spend is going.

The Unknown Delta

I prefer to take a more hopeful view on the importance of the scandalous 15% figure because the potential causes were outlined in the study (below)—meaning we have a jumping-off point for continued investigation.

• Limitations in data sets
• DSP or SSP fees that aren’t visible in the study data
• Post-auction bid shading
• Post-auction financing arrangements or other trading deals
• Foreign exchange translations
• Inventory reselling between tech vendors

As PWC has confirmed in numerous interviews, there is no single smoking gun amongst these. However, without access to data, advertisers, agencies, publishers, DSPs, and SSPs will be hard-pressed to start identifying where these scenarios occur and begin to make the unknowns known. Data collection for the study occurred for three months and overall the study ran a full nine months longer than planned due to difficulties accessing needed data!

Next Steps for the Industry

After the study’s release, Phil Smith, Director General of ISBA, stated, “The challenge now is for the industry to come together, as they will in the new taskforce…to allow companies and consumers to benefit properly from online advertising.” Subsequently, Nigel Gwilliam, director of media affairs at The IPA, proposed The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) as “the obvious body to facilitate this collaboration.”

JICWEBS is comprised of four UK trade bodies: IPA, ISBA, AOP, and IAB UK. The inclusion of IAB is encouraging, especially since Trustworthy Digital Supply Chain is a longstanding pillar of the IAB Tech Lab. However, there has been nothing publicly released about specific next steps for a new taskforce to take actions directly influenced by the study data.

Of course, these things take time. One of the potential causes of the unknown delta is inventory reselling between tech vendors, which is now addressed by the continued evolution of ads.txt, first launched in June 2017. The latest release from July 2019, sellers.json and the supplychain object, validates the complete financial path with the ultimate goal of “transparency into the origins, paths, and legitimacy of ad inventory.” It has yet to reach widespread industry adoption; this illustrates the lead time required to solve just one of the elements of the unknown delta.

That said, I do have some thought starters for publishers and platforms in the near term.

Immediate Areas of Focus

1. Data Aggregation. MightyHive works with many brands looking to offboard media buying operations from agencies and bring them in house. A step in this process that often seems to require an inordinately heavy lift is piping data into whichever data visualization tools and/or cloud environments are necessary for performance analysis. One example is lack of transparency into changes to the data format with little advance notice, e.g. API calls that have been utilized previously being rendered irrelevant due to a product update or changes to the fields available in log files. Taxonomy was addressed numerous times in the study, and it’s my perception that many tech companies are in the dark as to whether data is coming back “null” for the advertiser unless the advertiser pushes for changes. My guidance would be increased proactivity and visibility into the roadmap as it pertains to data formatting, as much as privacy concerns will allow.

2. Data Availability and Freshness. Some challenges in this area are lag times in receiving data that make the data set unreliable, e.g. receiving log files from one partner every 24 hours versus every 12 from another. It’s entirely possible that one partner could appear to outperform the other if data isn’t represented equally, thus jeopardizing the credit assigned to the partner with a lag time. Similarly, there is a lack of consistency in data retention. Publishers and platforms should be asking relevant questions to ensure they’re at parity with the competitive set and if not, perform the cost-benefit analysis necessary to assess whether or not to make investments in their product.

3. Thought leadership. I find that these elements are often undersold in comparison to “shiny new objects.” From a thought leadership perspective, I always want to hear about ways in which someone my client is considering for partnership has a proven track record of early adoption as it relates to industry best practices. To harken back to the sellers.json example, TripleLift used it to teach buyers how to find exchanges that add value, while The Trade Desk gave exchanges an ultimatum to either post a sellers.json file or get dropped as a partner—with only two months of lead time. In a similar vein, any instance where tech was modified based on client need in the form of case studies or whitepapers are increasingly valuable sales collateral.

Ideally, these small steps can help make the industry more transparent and effective as we await larger-scale changes from industry bodies. With continued effort from every corner of the industry, the necessary changes may manifest more quickly if there is increased focus on making improvements from all participants in the supply chain.

The post Making the Unknowns Known: A Media Buyer’s Guide to Supply Chain Transparency appeared first on AdMonsters.

The chorus’ chant is something that pops in my head every now and again (notwithstanding Flava Flav recently being fired from the group) when I revisit one of the very first articles I wrote as Senior Editor of AdMonsters back in 2018—”From Hype to Reality: How Blockchain Is Already Bringing Transparency to Advertising.” I’ve been a day one stan of blockchain’s promise for advertising, but not without blowback from some of the technology’s staunchest critics.

As I reported back then, there were many blockchain for advertising projects in play, working to test and prove what blockchain could do to make the advertising ecosystem work better. Many of those projects have yet to realize any sort of disruptive impact on ad tech at the levels they were being championed back in 2018.

Gartner’s 2019 Hype Cycle for Blockchain Business shows that blockchain for advertising won’t realize its greatest impact for another five-10 years.

Is it possible that I fell for the old okey-doke back in 2018?

To get a grip on where blockchain for advertising is headed in 2020, I reached out to the people actually working on real, live projects that are making a difference. You’re probably thinking, “But it’s their job to keep gassing up the hype.” Let me I assure you, they kept it totally .

From the conversations I had about what’s happening with blockchain for advertising in 2020, it became quite clear that the idea that blockchain is a panacea for all of advertising’s woes has definitely become the stuff of legend. Those theoretical ideas are more naturally being replaced with tried and true solutions that solve for efficiency, transparency and tackling fraud. Applications that solve for identity are becoming more real every day.

You’ll hear views from Richard Brush, president of NYIAX; Nikao Yang, COO of Lucidity; Marc Guildimann, Founder & CEO, Parsec; Christiana Cacciapuoti VP Partnerships, MadHive & Executive Director, AdLedger; Will Luttrell, Founder & CEO at Amino Payments; Vanina Ivanova, CMO, AdEx Network and Luke Mulks, Director, Business Development, Brave Software.

Richard Bush, president, NYIAX

NYIAX provides advertisers and publishers a platform to buy, sell, and re-trade premium advertising contracts in a forward/futures methodology.

Richard Brooks, NYIAX

In 2018 there was indeed a lot of promise for blockchain and its ability to clean up digital, transforming businesses. And the reality is that there’s still much promise. Once the initial excitement of blockchain subsided, the industry continued to focus on developing against solid business use cases and began to see traction.

What the sector discovered is that there is no such thing as a “blockchain solution.” There are solutions to business problems—transparency, supply chain, data integrity, etc.—that benefit from use off DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology), Cryptography and other associated blockchain technologies. But the idea that “Blockchain will save advertising” has been replaced by tactical excitation against supply chain transparency, Identity and automation use cases.

Nikao Yang, COO Lucidity

Lucidity is a digital advertising blockchain protocol bringing transparency and trust to digital advertising. They are the only ad verification company using blockchain technology for digital advertisers and publishers to mitigate fraud, transact with trust, and maximize ROI.

Nikao Yang, Lucidity

Blockchain was first hyped as a kind of “cure-all” solution for digital advertising’s problems. But that was never realistic. The things blockchain are quite good at, however—namely codifying rules and auditing transactions between multiple parties—has certainly found a place in digital advertising.

The IAB just last quarter released its own guide for assessing blockchain applications in adtech, in which it specifically references how “shared ledger technology” can be used to minimize waste and improve programmatic operational efficiencies. That’s where we can expect to see the greatest amount of progress in 2020.

Blockchain tech isn’t going to replace the verification, brand safety, and anti-fraud solutions we already have. Those work great. Rather, blockchain’s strength is tying those different signals together to ensure the ultimate consistency and reliability of data between them. The challenge then, for 2020, is cooperation. In order to work best, blockchain systems must communicate with other programmatic technologies. Will those technologies play along?

Marc Guldimann, Founder & CEO, Parsec 

Advertising Futures and Options Exchange—AFOX—is Parsec’s distributed system for the issuance, trading, and settlement of upfront media contracts. 

Marc Guildimann, Parsec

After executing several controlled tests with Parsec acting as a media seller, we’ve spun out AFOX into a separate company to focus on creating a marketplace for futures contracts.

I’m glad the whole “write log files to a permissioned ledger” to stop fraud nonsense has fizzled. The only authentic applications of blockchain in most markets involve creating digital assets—and even those don’t necessarily need the true decentralization offered by POW-based consensus algorithms. Our own project, AFOX, is built on r3 Corda, a permissioned ledger.

Identity is one area where cryptography, if not full blockchain, could see some interesting developments. For example, the stuff Comcast is working on seems to be more cryptographic proofs than digital assets.

Longer-term, there’s a potential use for blockchain where consumers sign requests for media (and the accompanying advertising), and potentially pay for it with currency or data, in such a way that it will act as “proof of attention/consumption” without threatening their privacy.

Christiana Cacciapuoti VP Partnerships, MadHive & Executive Director, AdLedger

MadHive is an end-to-end advanced advertising solution for digital video that leverages cryptography, blockchain, and AI.

Christiana Cacciapuoti, MadHive

A lot of the solutions that were in the market in 2017-2018 were trying to slap a blockchain on openRTB and really not use the technology as intended. Those solutions won’t be effective, because if we all wanted to write openRTB data to the same location, we could do it with a traditional database—no blockchain required.

The use cases that live up to the hype are going to be more creative and will involve marrying blockchain with cryptography. The common critique of blockchains not being able to support the massive QPS of the ad tech ecosystem are true (for now), but with the correct architecture, they don’t have to be. Putting every query on a blockchain is not the most effective way to architect a system involving blockchain. That would be like taking a traffic ticket to the Supreme Court.

I think blockchain gets all the attention, but cryptography is arguably more important. Blockchain is arguably just a subset of the field of cryptography, which is the study and practice of disguising information in such a way that only your intended receiver can decode it. I think this is the most immediate use case; leveraging cryptography so that companies that are participating in an advertising transaction know for sure—just like you know for sure that you’re shopping on Amazon and not an imposter—who they’re transacting with within the advertising ecosystem.

A great downstream benefit of this methodology is that a lot of fraud could be solved with a system like this, for example, domain spoofing. Domain spoofing is when one entity pretends to be another entity, usually a more recognizable one—like if Breitbart pretended they were The New York Times— in order to get the higher revenue associated with the other entity. If we had an immutable, cryptographically sealed identity for supply chain participants, that kind of fraud would be rooted out. We can lift and shift this validation methodology into other claims made within an ad request, for example, the device type, geo, screen size, etc. All of these are common fraud types that stem from misrepresentation.

Will Luttrell, Founder & CEO, Amino Payments

Amino is a payments company that combines technologies from blockchain, payments, and advertising to bring transparency to online advertising. 

Will Luttrell, Amino Payments

We’ve started to see progress in the market and expect others to follow the lead of industry trailblazers like Nestlé in 2020, especially as foundational and daily tools like MediaOcean integrate with blockchain-based solutions like Amino.

The core thesis of Amino Payments—that a transparent, cryptographically signed supply chain is the only valid solution to digital advertising’s most intractable challenges—is being proven and re-proven on a weekly basis. Educating buyers takes time, but as more ad fraud headlines and outrageous hidden fees come to light, the urgency for transparency continues to increase.

Vanina Ivanova, CMO, AdEx Network

Vanina Ivanova, AdEx Network

Three years ago, decentralized and blockchain were buzzwords. People thought they would solve the world of advertising management and the supply chain. We don’t’ think it’s a silver bullet to make the world a suddenly utopian place. It has its benefits, but there are disadvantages as well. Companies like ours are not a competition to Google and Facebook, but an alternative. We will never be able to compete with them because the amount of data they have about their end-user is humongous. What we want to do is create a better internet environment.

Recently out of beta, we managed around 300 campaigns from about 100 advertisers to optimize the advertising process by enabling a direct connection between buyers and sellers without the need for third-party intermediaries or ad agencies. Our decentralized platform, which runs on the Ethereum blockchain, also operates to reduce the amount of fraud by providing transparency with real-time tracking and reporting capabilities. We are solving real-time visibility with more accountability and optimization of the ad supply chain. Every ad impression equates to payment. Publishers get paid per impression as it is written on the blockchain providing another layer of transparency.

Somewhat like what’s being described in Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the platform uses tracking cookies, with the cookie being stored locally with the user and never leaving the browser. Users won’t be vulnerable to data leaks or their data being snatched. AdEx matches users with contextually relevant ads according to their preferences and content they interact with on a publisher’s site. There is a disadvantage of a user deleting local storage and then seeing the same ad again and again, so there is limited ability for frequency capping.

Blockchain for advertising is a work in progress and we are all learning from each other, exchanging everything we know and collaborating to improve the tech so that it can be more useful for all of us.

Luke Mulks, Director, Business Development, Brave Software

Luke Mulks,. Brave

The hype around blockchain in marketing began to fade at a time when we’re observing a global focus and movement toward privacy and technology that’s requiring marketers and advertisers to question how and where incentives and behavior have been aligned. Many challenges remain for marketers and advertisers that want to leverage the benefit of this new technology. 

The advertising game has shifted toward privacy. Privacy regulation, the amount of personal data broadcast as a business requirement, and the right to be forgotten have brought new challenges to blockchain projects. Storing personal data on an immutable blockchain becomes fundamentally incompatible in regions where people have the right to be forgotten. Browsers are having to step up and put some guard rails in place, as marketing and advertising do not have much of an interest in working against their own bottom lines, which have been fueled by collecting as much data as possible from as many endpoints as possible. Regulatory uncertainty and compliance have also been an inhibiting factor to growth and innovation. It’s improving with time, as regulators become more educated, but is still new.

For players that are trying to put “old world” marketing onto new-world blockchain protocols, there doesn’t seem to be much hope or interest without more disruption to the status quo. As a newer player in the space with a focus on utilizing blockchain-based technology to build alternative models for business to monetize with privacy by default, Brave has been able to separate itself from the supply chain hype that most of the marketing and advertising industry was focused on. We’ve balanced a pragmatic approach to blockchain with a focus on mainstreaming privacy and blockchain-based rewards into the first global private ad platform.

Over the past three years, Brave has grown to over 11.7M monthly active users, introduced blockchain-based rewards and advertising in nearly 30 countries, with most countries being supported by Q2 2020. The results to date show promise that we’re creating a lasting alternative, as we’ve run over 821 campaigns with leading brands such as Intel, Amazon, and Pizza Hut. We’ve reported over 284M ad confirmations and have a 12% clickthrough-rate across our platform (compared to the 2% industry average). As blockchain technology matures, competition will increase, but the only winners will be the projects that keep their heads down and build on this technology in a way that can compete with convenience that the dominant competition has delivered to the mainstream.

The post What Can Blockchain Really Do for Advertising in 2020? appeared first on AdMonsters.

What I heard mostly was: “We need to work on a solution to identity,” “We need more data scientists to help us structure and understand our first-party data,” “Privacy is good for customer experience (CX) and building trust,” “We need to rethink measurement,” “We need to stop saying there’s a tech tax,” “We need better collaboration,” “It’s all about the open web vs the walled gardens,” “The growth in this industry is coming from AI and blockchain,” plus a heck of a lot more ideas about how advertising will improve into 2020 and beyond.

Definitely the trends I saw coming out of the sessions yesterday at #AWNewYork. Heard that publishers should start thinking like walled gardens but not acting like them. Also that privacy will ultimately be a boon to business bc it focuses on CX. #AWNewYork https://t.co/ZzOJGZISkH

— Lynne d Johnson (@lynneluvah) September 24, 2019

Yeah, there was definitely a lot to absorb, but I managed to cull it down to five—no, um, six—major highlights.

1. Reengineering the Rails on the Supply Chain

Officially announced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Week, MediaMath has made a commitment to developing a 100% accountable and addressable supply chain by the end of 2020. With the launch of SOURCE, the ad tech leader is setting a new standard for media performance offering brands and agencies a new-and-improved supply chain that promises both accountability and addressability.

Hints of this major move were alluded to at #AWNewYork last week when moderator Joanna O’Connell VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research was joined on stage by Reshma Karnik Global Vice President, Amnet Audience Center, Amnet Programmatic Experts for Dentsu Aegis Network; Tom Kershaw Chief Technology Officer, Rubicon Project and Jeremy Steinberg Global Head of Ecosystem, MediaMath on a panel called “Building the Next Generation Media Supply Chain.”

We love when Tom Kershaw, CTO, @RubiconProject said: “We have weaponized identity.” Do you agree with Tom? Is everyone in the ad ecosystem using identity as a differentiator? Is a community-based approach the only path forward? https://t.co/NweRqKe6p6

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 26, 2019

The SOURCE ecosystem has partners across the spectrum including Rubicon Project, Telaria, Acoustic, Akamai, Business Insider, Crackle Plus, Havas Media, IBM Watson, Inscape/Vizio, IRIS.TV, News Corp, Octopus Interactive, Oracle Data Cloud, Publishers Clearing House and White Ops, who will all provide full visibility into supply path mechanics and costs.

This industry move seeks to bring back trust and eliminate wastage and fraud. The consensus across the board ad Advertising Week was that the industry needs stronger collaboration across the buy and sell sides.

2. Should the Open Web Think More Like Walled Gardens?

While the MediaMath initiative focuses on an addressable solution via a portable user-level ID across desktop, mobile, and TV to connect signals throughout the supply chain, other discussions around identity at #AWNewYork focused on the supply side leveraging identity better than the walled gardens—while also taking a page out of Facebook’s playbook.

“We’re still in the early stages. We’ve come a long way in the last three-five years and the narrative is mature. There’s still a Gaping hole. We still haven’t brought consistency to audiences across the open web with identity. There’s no way to look at me as a consumer and hold a history for me. That’s an advantage the walled gardens have to drive results. We need to simplify that from the publisher’s side,” said Todd Parsons Chief Product Officer, OpenX. Parsons talked about LiveRamp’s Identity Link, a cross-channel customer identity graph of advertiser, third-party and TV viewership data plugged into OpenX’s ad exchange as an example of how publishers can fight the walled gardens.

“Inherent value of consumer attention in certain segments of open web is higher than in the walled gardens,” said Tim Cadogan, CEO, OpenX on another panel called Open Parks v. Walled Gardens: Fighting to Restore Balance in Digital Advertising.

What we’re talking about here is a solution across publishers that creates a network effect thereby providing an end-to-end solution in the way that Facebook does.

3. Data Scientists are the Arbiters of Taking the Training Wheels Off First-Party Data (and setting new KPIs)

If we had a $1 for every time someone mentioned the growing importance of data scientists and their roles in taking every one out of silos and into more holistic operations/approaches at #AWNewYork these past two days, we just might be millionaires.

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 24, 2019

As the cookies crumble and access to third-party data becomes more limited, publishers and brands’ reliance on their own data will only increase. The problem is most brands and publishers’ first-party data is not in a clean or usable format. This is where the need for skilled data scientists come in. People who can properly structure and analyze data to better leverage it for improved reach, engagement and bringing greater transparency to measurement.

Hot topics at #AWNewYork, where the power of data science was lauded, included the rise of OTT and the need to address and maximize unduplicated reach, as well as conversations about audience-based buying and selling. Qualified data scientists will help to solve many of the issues we see in the complex advertising ecosystem related to audiences and measurement—even in developing better creative to drive engagement.

With talk of new measurement standards for viewers across all screens and devices, we can expect to see the role of data scientist ramping up.

4. Privacy is the Glue to Better Customer Experiences

Just like Jurassic Park, “Life Finds a Way,” says Jason White EVP & GM, Global Programmatic Revenue, @CBSi In the face of privacy regulations, “We will do better things to drive more trust.” #AWNewYork

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 24, 2019

As the countdown to CCPA moves closer, the anxiety around privacy is looming. Various consent-based options were presented over the course of the four-day conference that was #AWNewYork, including logins, paywalls, subscriptions, rewards-based systems and more.

Many of these solutions aren’t new, but hearing ad tech leaders and publishers talk about solving privacy together was refreshing. One theme that made the rounds was the idea of redefining the value exchange with consumers to rebuild trust. This is something that Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral likes to call Visitor Relationship Management (VRM), which is based on building consent-based relationships with consumers to increase revenue. On a panel entitled, “Kumbaya: Coming Together to Deliver a Better Consumer Ad Experience,” he talked about how important it was to really know the user when you engage them, “Optimize for whether they’re coming from Facebook or search, instead of treating them like a monolith, as if there’s only one way to engage them or one type of user.” He also talked about reaching ad-block users with acceptable ad formats and better ads standards.

5. Collaboration Across the Ad Ecosystem is Beneficial to All

Working together—the buy side and sell side, and brands and agencies, taking measures to consolidate further to simplify the ecosystem will make it a lot easier to shut down the bad guys. – @nbidon Global CEO @XaxisTweets

— AdMonsters (@AdMonsters) September 23, 2019

One track at #AWNewYork was specifically called Collaboration Models, but the idea of collaboration was sprinkled throughout many sessions as various industry talked about working together to solve such issues as identity and measurement. Just like the aforementioned MediaMath and Rubicon partnership that has spawned deeper collaboration across the ad ecosystem to bring transparency to the supply chain.

There was also a hint of Ominicom Media Group working with Facebook on a tool to solve for reach and frequency across the open web and walled gardens.

Also, a number of speakers lambasted the use of the term tech tax, advising that it be thought of as a value chain instead. Truer collaboration could eventually break down some of the walls and complexities that are experienced in the ecosystem today.

4As President @meknyc says we need to stop talking about the potential cost savings of programmatic and talk instead about what value it creates; the outcomes it drives. #awnewyork #outcomemedia @nbidon @XaxisTweets

— Philipbuxton (@Philipbuxton) September 23, 2019

Bonus: Blockchain (and AI) Will Power the Future of a Better Advertising Ecosystem

Technologies like blockchain and cryptography, as well as AI, were also being spoken about as solutions to identity, data sharing and cleaning up the supply chain.

At its core, MediaMath’s SOURCE, is AI-powered as a means to provide cleaner, richer, real-time data to publishers, brands and agencies.

There’s also Jonathan Steuer, Chief Research Officer at Omnicom Media Group, working on a blockchain-like depository tool that would use numerous databases to empower advertisers to create a standard for aggregating and measuring both TV and digital data. (Facebook might be working on its own cryptography technology to bridge over walled gardens that will make it easier to follow people, anonymously, across media.)

Ed Gaffney, Managing Partner, Director of Implementation Research & Marketplace Analytics, GroupM, also talked about a blockchainy, cryptographic solution to getting data in a privacy-compliant way across large segments to get better at measurement and reducing the complexity of the ecosystem. “We work better together than in individual streams,” he said.

Photo: Joanna O’Connell, Forrester Research; Tom Kershaw, Rubicon Project and Reshma Karnik, Amnet Programmatic Experts for Dentsu Aegis Network.

Photo credit: AWNewYork/Shutterstock

The post 5 Big Takeaways From Ad Week NYC 2019 appeared first on AdMonsters.