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.

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.

In many industries, collaboration between partners is key to continued success of all players, and the digital media and ad tech industry is no exception. Publishers, SSPs, and DSPs need to work together to ensure all parties get what they need from one another. However, publishers often lament the lack of transparency and the slow evolution of SSPs. 

At PubForum New Orleans, AdMonsters’ Content Director, Lynne d Johnson facilitated a panel discussion to unpack this complicated topic. Panel speakers included Samuel Youn, Vice President of Programmatic, Chegg; Nick Coté, Senior Director, Supply, Madhive; and Peter Cunha, Managing Director, Ad Management, Sovrn.

SSPs Cater to Buyers Rather Than Publishers 

Publishers have expressed a desire for more SSP transparency, differentiation, and granular reporting among other things, and Cunha noted an evolution is beginning. 

“Changes started happening around the same time we started focusing a lot on the buy side, as a shift in where a lot of our engineering focus and investment went. I think we’re starting to see a lot of differentiation now in the SSP tier, and people making some interesting bets,” he shared. 

Part of this shift is due to where the money is coming from, noted Youn. SSPs make money by taking a rev share of the media sold on a publisher’s site but don’t have a say in where the money is spent. 

This means the control they have lies solely in trying to capture more of the proverbial pie, leading SSPs to prioritize buyers over publishers, and decreasing the incentive to evolve. 

“If I put myself in an SSP’s shoes. if I could build something with a finite amount of resources to get more budget from a buyer rather than get a publisher to say, ‘I really liked working with you,’ I would focus on the buy side,” Youn added. 

Changing the SSP/Publisher Relationship 

The question, says Coté, is how to build solutions that support the buy side and offer them insight into what they are buying. Then it becomes a question of where we can drive real value. 

“There needs to be a better way to communicate what buyers are looking for, and how things are performing. This information can be fed back to publishers, so they can understand how traffic is doing and where improvements can be made,” he proposed.

For example, if a publisher knew they were consistently coming in at only $1 under the floor price during auction, they could adjust their floor to garner more traffic. This could help publishers reach a larger audience and increase their revenue. 

Cunha shared that in April Sovrn eliminated its exchange rev share across all managed services. As of November, the company released a case study revealing this change drove increased efficiency for buyers and higher yields for publishers. This, he said, is the type of partnership Sovrn is pursuing for the future. 

“This was a recommendation from the steering committee we launched late last year, in pursuit of an alternative revenue model for SSPs to something that was more of a SaaS model. We charged Ad Management publishers a SaaS fee on a per-impression basis, eliminating the rev share. We saw more spend bias toward the Sovrn exchange path, now second only to AdX within that stack of 66 different SSPs. We also saw the publishers’ share of the media dollar increase by 16 percent,” Cunha explained. 

Innovating the Industry: Moving Toward a SaaS Model

Youn agreed that a SaaS model is preferable to how auctions typically run today where an SSP’s incentive is to look like a performance platform for a DSP. For the publisher, a Saas model…

• Provides a clearer view of how much of the media budget from a DSP is actually getting to the publisher
• Allows the publisher to assess SSPs based on contractual deliverables and SLAs rather than just where they rank in the publisher’s stack
• Provides budget clarity for the publisher as they have to pay for and budget for the SSP services rather than it just coming out of revenue share

Rather than focusing on getting the cheapest inventory, SaaS models help SSPs and publishers both understand the true value of inventory. It can also allow publishers to request specific deliverables from their partner SSPs, which will consolidate the space and lead to fewer, but higher-quality, partnerships. 

“Piggybacking off of that, on the DSP side, it’s the amount of bid requests we see where the floor pass to us for the same publisher is totally different between ten to twelve different names, and being able to leverage a SaaS business model to identify, ‘What is the source of truth here? Where is the actual price point? Who is running a dynamic rev share, who’s padding by a couple bucks on top of whatever they’re intending on selling it for?’” added Coté.

There is a chance to make a difference in the space and do things a new way, Cunha shared. “The opportunity here is innovating in a space that hasn’t really had that level of innovation in a long time. We’ve been so accustomed to rev shares after rev shares. That’s table stakes, but there’s an opportunity to differentiate from the gorillas in that sense,” he said. 

For SSPs to fulfill their purpose — offering value to publishers — they need to work in conjunction with publishers to find a solution that creates true partnerships. A rising tide truly lifts all boats; if all sides (SSPs, publishers, and buyers) work together on a solution, everyone can win.

The post Publishers Seek Strategic Partnerships With SSPs: Is a SaaS Model the Answer? appeared first on AdMonsters.

CTV consumption skyrocketed in 2020, and the growth is not slowing anytime soon. CTV publishers and advertisers have mined these growing audiences like a gold mine with much success. Although not all that glitters is gold, the CTV mine stores a few pieces of fool’s gold. 

During an Advertising Week New York session, The CTV Gold Rush, moderator Tameka Kee, Deputy Managing Director, CIMM, asked the panelists to introduce themselves and then tell the audience what they felt was the fool’s gold in CTV. 

The panelists had mixed opinions, but Michelle Aragon, VP, Head of Brand Marketing & Strategy, Spectrum Reach, responded that fragmentation was fool’s gold in CTV. Other panelists, such as Mike Fisher, Executive Director, Investment Innovation GroupM, asserted that “fool’s gold is thinking that advertisers can approach CTV the same way as traditional methods.” 

Despite the pitfalls, all panelists agreed that CTV has a wealth of gold, but publishers and advertisers must understand the space fully to mine it correctly. But, how? 

Redefining Premium Content

All CTV advertisers hope to display premium content to their consumers, but what does that mean exactly? Again, the panelists had mixed opinions. Mike Fisher, a buyer, emphasized that premium is not solely for buyers to define but should be influenced by the audience that advertisers aim to reach. 

“The perception of premium varies significantly among different generations, especially in the era of influencers and content creators like Mr. Beast, who have become major players in the media landscape,” said Fisher. 

Fisher’s explanation focuses on a user-centric concept, where what the audience values determines premium content. This understanding of premium content challenges traditional definitions within CTV advertising. Premium content is no longer confined to traditional networks, as consumers seek unique and personally relevant experiences, even in user-generated content.

This user-centric approach is a game-changer, allowing for personalized and engaging advertising strategies that focus on user preferences and priorities rather than adhering to a rigid definition of premium. The nature of premium content is fluid in CTV advertising, emphasizing that what is considered premium can evolve rapidly as new trends, viral content, and changing audience preferences come into play. 

“It’s time to step away from this whole premium conversation, in my opinion,” said Oscar Rondon, SVP, Product and Partnerships MiQ. “I know this is probably a little disruptive, but we’re thinking about it in the construct of linear TV. When we move to digital, where there are millions of websites, and so many ad opportunities, I think it’s time to redefine premium to be priority content.” 

Your Business Model Determines Transparency in CTV

As the industry shifts away from traditional linear TV toward CTV, advertisers must have better transparency about what they are buying. The transition from millions to billions of dollars in CTV advertising underscores the necessity for content transparency. Clients seek a similar level of understanding they’ve had for the past 50 years with linear. Some clients still request detailed information about content, such as show scripts and episode synopsis, to ensure alignment with their expectations.

Fisher acknowledged that complete program-level transparency may only sometimes be feasible due to privacy concerns. However, the industry is creating privacy-safe and compliant proxies for show-level transparency, making direct purchases from trusted sellers or resellers a safer option, free from fraud or non-premium content.

He also highlighted that there are diverse levels of transparency in CTV advertising. Different parts of the industry offer varying levels of transparency due to their business models. 

“Roku’s unique role as both an operating system and publisher allows for a higher degree of transparency with content they own, while certain agreements with other partners may limit transparency,” said Fisher. 

In the end, all panelists agreed that the industry needs more education about transparency standards. Aragon pointed out that data ownership positions companies uniquely for the ongoing transformation, highlighting the need for marketers and agencies to drive transparency efforts and collaborate with trade organizations and coalitions. The ultimate goal is to ensure a more transparent and sustainable space for CTV.

Rethinking the Buying Process and Pricing in CTV  

There’s a prevalent notion that buyers desire premium content and audiences at non-premium CPMs, which poses a critical challenge for the industry. All panelists agreed about the need for better metrics and industry-wide understanding and suggested that standard currency measurement doesn’t adequately reflect the nuances of CTV advertising. CTV advertisers must consider various components such as attention, push vs. pull dynamics, and verified viewership. As well, measurement must adapt accordingly.

It doesn’t help that the industry creates challenges by categorizing programmatic as the “Wild Wild West,” expressed Rondon.

“Programmatic is merely a transaction mechanism, offering a range of deal types that can be customized to suit the desired relationship with publishers. Direct relationships with publishers remain essential, and upfront and scatter marketplaces persist, offering different buying modes to align with diverse inventory types and desired outcomes,” he said. 

With enhanced data, technology, and measurement tools, advertisers can strategically target different inventory types to drive various outcomes. Relationships with publishers will continue to play a pivotal role in CTV, especially given the select number of publishers with the inventory and scale to make a significant impact. Overall, the CTV buying process requires a holistic approach tailored to specific goals and outcomes. That’s how you get rid of the fool’s gold and properly mine a lucrative CTV advertising gold mine. 

The post Gold Rush or Fool’s Gold? The Meteoric Rise of CTV Advertising appeared first on AdMonsters.

The Senate-led bill is spearheaded by Sen. Mike Lee ( R- Utah) and co-sponsored by Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act will have many stipulations that will subliminally contribute to the breakdown of Google’s extremely prosperous ad tech model.

Of course, this is seemingly all about money, and the bill considers revenue to be the number of dollars a demand-side platform DSP or a sell-side platform SSP transacts or the total of the clearing prices bought and sold through a digital ad exchange.

What Are Some Terms of The US Senate Digital Advertising Act?

The bill includes regulations that will continue to trigger an already erupting volcano. The lava represents all the publishers and advertisers who constantly scramble to keep up with these rules and regulations.

Some of the terms and conditions of the Digital Advertising Act are as follows:

• No business with over $20 billion in digital ad revenue can own a digital ad exchange if that business already owns a DSP or an SSP or if it also monetizes off of digital ad space.
• No business can hold both a DSP and an SSP.
• Any company that makes over $5 billion in revenue must act in its customers’ best interest and be ready to take on new transparency requirements.
• The bill requires ad tech companies to anonymize consumer info and states that pubs and advertisers may only use the data if they need to verify the company’s legal compliance.
• Any ad tech company covered by the law must inform customers of “the source and nature of any compensation paid or received in connection with transactions.”

How Will the Digital Advertising Act, Affect Google & Pubs?

Since the Big G has regularly faced scrutiny over how it conducts its online ad auctions, we’ve seen them putting more measures in place to provide a level of transparency. For instance, as they apply more automation to ad campaigns they’ve promised to provide advertisers with insights about conversation and campaigns.

But even a blind man can see that this new US Senate bill is a blatant jab at Google’s ad tech business as it owns the largest demand-side platform, sell-side platform, and exchange used in programmatic auctions. Google is one of the largest publishers to grace the Internet, projected to acquire 28% of US digital ad revenue in 2022, according to emarketer.

This is the second time the US has attempted to police Google’s ad tech doings; in December 2020, a cluster of attorneys led by Texas’ Ken Paxton brought an anti-trust objection against Google in the southern district of New York. The suit compares Google’s grasp on the digital advertising exchanges to the New York Stock Exchange.

Experts revealed that even if the government twisted Google’s arm, making them sell their ad tech business, the company would still be able to thrive off its marketing power in digital advertising since it has already dominated the search and browser world and found a way to combat cookie depreciation.

“In short, this is the wrong bill, at the wrong time, aimed at the wrong target,” said a Google spokesperson, who cited the real problem as being low-quality data brokers.

In terms of smaller pubs, Google has tried to portray this idea of smaller pubs needing them, but industry experts know this to be BS.

read the law, it doesn’t break any tools. quite the opposite, it puts best interest and execution obligations in place for arguably dominant adtech firms to only serve their advertising or publisher customers (good for civil society). G is introducing noise here in the red. /4 pic.twitter.com/2VeA8izLfh

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) May 20, 2022

What Does the Transparency Layer Entail?

So it looks like Google has been on thin ice for years now. It was only a matter of time before something like the Digital Advertising act came into fruition.

The transparency aspect would demand DSPs or SSPs to share detailed bid-level data with advertisers and pubs. So that includes Google too.

I know most pubs will be jumping for joy now that there will be a new transparency layer in place. Pubs have voiced their concerns for ages because Google does not give them access to log-level data, thus stunting their ability to audit their digital ad businesses. Google claims that they refrained from sharing the data because it would violate user privacy, but U.S. lawmakers see it differently.

The post What Is the Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act? appeared first on AdMonsters.

That’s exactly what attendees learned at our recent webinar — No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World — as Dana OMalley, National VP of Sales at Ranker and Lauren Kroll, Customer Success Manager, Permutive, talked about their partnership and how it helped Ranker realize 4X revenue increase YOY and  25% increase in RFP win rate within six months.

Check out the webinar on-demand now:

In this webinar you’ll learn:

• How to identify your audience without knowing their identity
• The value of collecting rich first-party data and how to activate it
• Why you need to safeguard your business for a privacy-first world
• Why a multipronged approach is the best path forward — marrying contextual, first-party data and zero-party data
• The difference between publisher cohorts and FLoC
• Why edge computing is better, faster, safer than cloud computing for processing data in a privacy-compliant way
• How Ranker saw a 4X increase in revenue year-on-year and a 25% increase in RFP win rate within six months of partnering with Permutive

The post Webinar Replay: No Third-party Cookies, No Problem: Ranker on First-party Data in a Privacy-safe World 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.

As we get deeper into Q4, we’re starting to experience a rebound but publishers are still concerned about payments nonetheless. Pubs are looking for assurances (and insurance) from their SSP partners that they won’t be the ones left holding the bag when there’s a default somewhere along the chain that links the relationship between advertiser and publisher.

“A distinction between SSPs, if they have demand or not, is how likely are they going to pay on time, and is there a risk that they would default? Because if you’re an SSP that doesn’t really have their own demand, that’s just one more middleman that could fall through the chain with delayed payment,” said one publisher speaking with us at a recent Think Thank with Sovrn. 

Publishers need more transparency into their partner’s financials to better determine who they should do business with. And they need contracts that won’t leave them out to dry once they’ve already filled their end of the contractual obligation.

Transparency is Key

If the pandemic causes a DSP to go bankrupt or default on payments, it could leave an SSP in a very tricky spot since many are mitigating risks by fronting payments to their publishing partners for booked inventory. Here’s where we find an SSP having to make an arduous decision between taking an L on those payments they already fronted or demanding clawbacks from publishers 

In this particular climate, it’s becoming increasingly important for publishers to credit check all of their partners, especially the ones that are privately held. There’s no transparency into a private DSPs’ financials, which is very problematic for publishers when their SSP isn’t guaranteeing payment. 

While it might be common practice for a publisher to run a credit check on new partners, not many are going back and looking deeper into their financials. Having been stiffed quite a few times on payments, one publisher explained that their financial team consistently credit checks all of their existing partners every quarter. 

This credit check practice probably wouldn’t catch something like the Sizmek fiasco, but it’s a method that helps pubs keep confidence in their partners, especially those whose financial information isn’t public.

But should the onus fall on the publisher’s shoulders when the SSP is next in the chain linked to the DSP? 

Clawbacks Make a Comeback?

More often, pubs find that their SSPs are protecting themselves from a DSP who defaults but not the publisher.

When an SSP includes language in a contract with a publisher like sequential liability, it provides a buffer throughout the supply chain should the advertiser fail payment to the agency, who then fails payment to the DSP, who then fails payment to the SSP, which ultimately rests the burden on the publisher. As you probably already guessed, sequential liability is no friend to a publisher. 

“We try and understand if we can negotiate that. Because our legal team is going to redline that,” shared one publisher about sequential liability clauses in SSP contracts.

And with the sequential liability, clawbacks are now being called out more prominently in the contractual language, which pubs view as empowering the SSP to clawback as they see fit. 

“I’ve noticed clawbacks have come into the contract language a lot more recently,” said another publisher. “It wasn’t there two or three years ago and now it’s like a lot more prevalent and pretty vague and somewhat scary.”

Publishers want SSPs to do a better job of vetting their DSPs so that clawbacks and sequential liability won’t even be an issue in their agreements.

“We rely on our partner for that. So if the SSP chooses to clawback and not insure against their receivables, that damages our relationship with them,” explained one publisher. “We don’t know if the DSP is paying the fees on time. We don’t know which fees are getting paid preferentially by The Trade Desk or by DBM.  We have no transparency into that.”

Does Your SSP Have Insurance?

With the decreased scalability of revenue teams making it impossible for publishers to fight for every penny they’re rightfully due, publishers are turning to their SSP partners to fight the good fight on their behalf.

SSPs like OpenX, TripleLift, and Sovrn have begun to alleviate publishers’ payment concerns with the addition of insurance policies that would cover defaulted payments by DSPs.

But publishers are cautious about going into these types of arrangements with their SSP partners. Pubs fear that either the comprehensive service protection just won’t be there or the insurance companies won’t be able to formulate a viable plan that would enable them to cover their bottom line if there was a default.

On the whole, third-party insurance does not provide publishers with 100% comprehensive protection. Typically, due to limitations of credit insurance, only about 90% of demand sources are covered, meaning a portion of publisher’s earnings will not be insured. . For this reason, Sovrn takes extra measures to reduce the exposure of their publishers..

“We are constantly mitigating the risk from demand-side defaults on behalf of our publishers,” says Brian Bouquet, Senior Director of Product Management, Sovrn. “We continuously perform thorough credit reviews of all our current and prospective demand partners. We only work with those partners who meet our strict criteria and we establish strict credit limits for all of our active demand partners.”

While some SSPs offer fee-based insurance programs that guarantee 100% coverage against DSP default, publishers aren’t jumping at the opportunity, especially when many SSPs aren’t transparent about revenue share and how pubs might be paying for these services through hidden fees.

In the end, what publishers don’t want is for clawbacks to be a sequential liability for them. They want SSPs to do a lot more, whether it’s removing the sequential liability from their contracts once the SSP has identified an at-risk DSP or turning the DSP off from being able to bid in the exchange.

The post Pubs Want More Financial Assurances From SSPs appeared first on AdMonsters.

In late 2017 and early 2018, the buy-side made huge inroads against domain spoofing with widespread adoption of ads.txt. No longer is not knowing if a traditional display bid request is misrepresenting its domain a widespread concern, and sellers have begun to focus on transparency of the intermediaries in a transaction with the sellers.json standard and extending this transparency into the mobile application and connected television markets.

Unfortunately, sell-side participants—publishers—often have difficulty obtaining basic levels of transparency in reverse when using header bidding tools to extend demand.

Transparency Is Pubs’ Partner

Transparency is critical to sellers for several reasons. Top of mind for many sellers is not scaring away their audience or decreasing their engagement. This can happen if brands and content do not align—for example, a meat advertiser on a vegetarian recipe site or an online gaming advertiser appearing on a competitor’s site. It can also happen if malvertising is redirecting users to another site, or with invasive advertising for untrustworthy e-commerce platforms.

Transparency is also key in relationship management: perhaps the seller has a deal with an endemic advertiser and wants to make sure all buying from that advertiser goes through that channel. Sometimes sellers are looking to discover which advertisers prefer their inventory so they can pitch custom ad products.

Ad operations teams are particularly interested in transparency. Certain creatives may drive discrepancies between an SSP and a publisher’s transaction counts. Another reporting dimension would be very helpful for teams tracking down these discrepancy sources.

Often a wayward mis-categorized ad that sneaks through existing protections is reported by a reader and the ad operations team has difficulty discovering its origin. A high VAST error rate might be plaguing a video demand source without an easy way to identify the source creative asset.

Within Google AdManager, there exists rich protections, reporting, and creative review of AdX, and to a more limited extent Open Bidding demand. In the header, vendors have tried to fill this gap: Confiant, Clean Creative, GeoEdge, and others offer malvertising and creative content or advertiser blocks. While malvertising protection is well developed, the latter is certainly a work in progress.

Communicating Across the Aisle

Adomik, Ad-Juster, and others offer tools to see who is buying your inventory across your many header demand sources. The IAB provides some specifications for communicating buyer seat and domain, but they are only recommended. Adoption of the Ad Management API (which will provide the buy-side equivalent of sellers.json) is a work in progress.

At Prebid.org, much of our recent work has been around standardizing how buyers and sellers communicate with each other. In the past, prebid adapters have consumed information in very different ways, but as that type of information becomes common to transmit, publishers tire of configuring it for each demand source in a different way.

Examples include consuming video parameters from the ad unit and not the bidder parameters, consuming consent, identity, and floors from their respective modules, and reading from a common first-party data interface. Conversely, publishers are demanding a more standard and richer bid response.

With Prebid 4.0, much of the standard ways of communicating will become recommended behavior, with an eye towards making them required in future major releases. One of these recommendations is called the bid.meta object. It is the part of the bid response with information such as the advertiser domain(s), buyer seat, and disclosures on rich media formats. Prebid analytics adapter providers can report aggregations of these fields to publishers who have their adapter installed.

A header bidding key for advertiser domain(s) will soon allow publishers to set universal price rules and protections in their ad server. Publishers who define the ‘hb_adomain’ key and advertiser domains of interest as values will be able to easily obtain reporting on header advertiser impression count and price paid cut by demand source. Publishers with the ad server logs or analytics adapters will have full transparency into adomain and buyer seat when header demand partners are setting it.

Demand More From Your Demand!

Adapters setting this information remains the key; the bid.meta object in the bid response object currently only has limited adapter support. Your communications with your SSP partners to keep their adapters modern (eg supporting the floors module, the identity module, the bid.meta object, and reading video ad unit parameters) is critical to the success of the Prebid project.

Publishers with other header bidding integrations should be demanding their provider keeps up, with the end goal being full transparency of buyers.

The post Sellers Need Buy-Side Transparency 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.