As retail media expands, it becomes more complex and creates significant challenges for retailers, brands, and agencies. For instance, fragmentation within the space creates a cumbersome and inefficient buying process, hampering the widespread adoption and growth of retail media networks. There is a pressing need to develop multi-retailer, multi-channel, and multi-format platforms driven by ROAS to address this issue. 

These platforms would enable retailers and brands to fully capitalize on the opportunities within retail media, ensuring that advertising remains relevant and effective at every stage of the consumer journey.

In response to these challenges, companies like Criteo are forging strategic partnerships to simplify and scale retail media operations. For instance, Criteo’s collaboration with Microsoft Advertising aims to streamline the monetization of retail media inventory through a unified omnichannel platform. 

We spoke with  Brian Gleason, Chief Revenue Officer at Criteo and Lynne Kjolso, Vice President of Global Partnerships and Retail Media at Microsoft Advertising, about how their partnership can empower retailers to connect with meaningful demand and enhance the shopping experience by leveraging first-party data to deliver more relevant ads.

Andrew Byrd: What are the main challenges retailers face with platform complexity, and how can these be simplified to benefit omnichannel retail media programs?

Brian Gleason: As retail media continues to scale, platform complexity is creating an increasingly fragmented ecosystem for retailers, brands, and agencies. Currently, brands are buying retail media via multiple platforms, leading to a cumbersome buying process that, in turn, impacts widespread adoption and growth for retailers’ media networks.

The retail media ecosystem must prioritize the development of ROAS-driven multi-retailer, multi-channel, and multi-format platforms that allow retailers and brands to capitalize on the booming opportunity effectively. With shoppers increasingly returning to physical stores, ad tech providers must connect retailers to meaningful and relevant demand that allows them to speak to audiences at all stages of their purchase journey — wherever and whenever they shop. 

With Microsoft naming Criteo its preferred partner to serve the onsite needs of its retailer clients, the two companies intend to help retailers monetize their valuable retail media inventory through a simplified omnichannel platform and program management. 

AB: How can the advertising experience be improved to enhance relevance for shoppers and reduce marketplace inefficiency?

BG: Retail media is inherently consumer-centric by harnessing first-party data, but there are still inefficiencies that can be optimized to provide a better experience for consumers as they shop across the open internet.

For example, product-first retail media strategies reduce fragmentation in the market by allowing brands and agencies to scale their campaigns across multiple retailers. At Criteo, we’ve integrated SKU-based planning into our platform, which allows brands to promote their products on any retailer in our network where their product is sold in one streamlined campaign activation, management and optimization workflow with closed-loop measurement.

This, in turn, creates additional opportunities for brands to reach consumers with relevant ads. At the same time, they browse the open internet while ensuring the products they choose to buy are in stock and available for purchase at their desired retailer.

AB: How does the integration between Criteo and the Microsoft Advertising Network aim to simplify and scale demand access for advertisers?

BG: Our relationship with Microsoft Advertising builds on our strengths to drive scale, simplicity, and innovation in retail media. Specifically, our planned strategic collaboration would bring Microsoft Advertising’s extensive demand to Criteo’s global network of 225 retailers, empowering Microsoft Advertising’s 500,000+ global active advertiser clients to achieve stronger, measurable performance for their campaigns.

Overall, our collaboration would benefit all parties within the retail media ecosystem. Retailers would have access to increased global demand, while brands and agencies would have increased supply options that help them diversify their campaigns and reach shoppers with personalized advertising through a single point of entry, driving performance growth with scale.    

AB: Can you provide more details on the planned innovations with Microsoft Curate and the AI-powered Retail Media Creative Studio and how these will benefit advertisers and retailers?

BG: Through our collaboration with Microsoft Advertising, we’re exploring opportunities for our advertiser clients to tap into Microsoft Advertising’s generative AI and innovations, such as its AI-powered Retail Media Creative Studio. Harnessing tools like the Retail Media Creative Studio would make it easier for Criteo clients to create and optimize their ad creative at scale with the power of generative AI while providing retailers with creative advertising formats to drive engagement on their owned and operated properties.

AB: Considering current trends and challenges, what do you envision as the future of retail media in the next five years?

BG: Over the next five years, retail media will progress through greater unification to unlock the full potential of the $150 billion retail media market, focusing on efficiency, integration, and growth. As the industry scales, retailers will increasingly operate as media companies, using their valuable first-party data to enhance customer engagement and drive transactions. 

As we continue to address platform complexity and fragmentation issues, solutions like Criteo’s Commerce Media Platform will drive the adoption of multi-retailer, multi-channel, and muti-format campaigns. The industry will also embrace a full-funnel approach, combining onsite display with offsite ads to create a unified consumer journey and leveraging closed-loop measurement for enhanced performance.

Increased investment will prompt brands to scale their retail media efforts and optimize return on ad spend, highlighting the need for advanced tools like AI that will drive agile optimization. As this investment increases, industry-wide standardization will become crucial, with collaboration among key players like the IAB and MRC helping to reduce fragmentation.

AB: Your blog post alludes to retail media still being in its teenage years. What steps need to be taken to prepare it for adulthood?

Lynne Kjolso: There is a lot of promise in retail media, but evolution and maturity are required to fully take advantage of the opportunities.

Specifically, there is platform complexity with so many point solutions flooding the market. Retailers would benefit from more simplicity in their options and the ability to activate omnichannel retail media programs. 

Additionally, ad buyers pay a heavy operational tax due to fragmented buying challenges. With more unified ways to access retailer supply, like in our collaboration with Criteo, buyers can access retail media supply seamlessly and at scale.

Lastly, the advertising experience is often poor for consumers due to a lack of a cohesive approach and standardization. We can address this marketplace inefficiency by putting the consumer at the center of the equation. For example, retailers can use Microsoft Curate to extend and monetize their onsite audience with curated deals available in any DSP. This makes it easier for advertisers to seamlessly buy off site retail media in the same place as their other digital media buys. 

AB: How does Microsoft Advertising plan to address the fragmented buying challenges caused by the proliferation of retail media walled gardens?

LK: Our collaboration with Criteo is an important step in addressing fragmented buying challenges. As a company, our goal is to empower the entire ecosystem to achieve more. In retail media, this equates to bringing scale, simplicity, and innovation to the market. By bringing our scaled demand to Criteo’s retail media supply, we’re breaking down walls and helping advertisers access a rich array of retailers through a single entry point.

The post Microsoft and Criteo’s Unified, ROAS-Driven Retail Media Strategy appeared first on AdMonsters.

As we just recently crossed the fifth year anniversary of GDPR, one thing has become clearly evident — regulators will continue their tough stance on violations. I noted as much in my 5 Data Privacy Trends to Watch in 2022 article written for AdMonsters.

Well, just last week, while everyone in ad tech was traversing La Croisette for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2023, the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) levied a hefty fine against global commerce media company, Criteo.

The revised fine of €40M ($44 Million), dates back to complaints filed by None of Your Business (NOYB), an Austria-based nonprofit, and Privacy International in 2018, stating that Criteo did not have a legitimate legal basis for behavioral targeting. CNIL’s initial investigation in 202o found the ad tech company in breach of GDPR, slapping them with a €60M fine. Criteo attests that their actions were not deliberate, nor did they cause any harm. Criteo also argued that the initial fine represented half of its earnings and 3% of its global sales, which is “close to the legal maximum” allowable under GDPR.

I took a deep dive into Criteo’s 40M GDPR fine from the CNIL (one of the highest fines for cookie-related violations). Below are three highlights that jumped out at me:

Proof of Consent Required – Although the collection of consent for cookies was the responsibility of Criteo’s partners, who are in direct contact with their website users, Criteo was still required to verify and be able to demonstrate that these users gave their consent. The CNIL required Criteo to incorporate a new clause on proof of consent in its contracts. Partners must “promptly provide Criteo, upon request and at any time, with proof that the consent of the data subject has been obtained by the partner.” I am interested to see whether the CNIL will come back to Criteo to see if this clause has been exercised. Accountability is the new king. Adtech companies will need a solution for auditing and demonstrating accountability in the U.S. and EU, as regulators in both jurisdictions are no longer willing to allow companies to rely on paper assurances.

Consent Can Be Given and Taken Away – The CNIL alleged that when a person exercised their right to withdraw consent, the process implemented by the company only stopped the display of personalized advertisements to the user; it did not stop all processing activities. Criteo addressed this by putting in place a procedure to allow individuals to exercise their right to withdraw consent directly by clicking the button “Deactivate Criteo Services” in the company’s privacy policy.

Joint Controller Agreements work for Ad Tech – The CNIL did not challenge the joint controller agreements Criteo had in place with partners, but they got dinged for not specifying all of the respective obligations of controllers under the GDPR, such as the exercise by data subjects of their rights, the obligation to notify the supervisory authority and data subjects of a data breach or, if necessary, the carrying out of an impact assessment under Article 35 of the GDPR.

This is a huge fine (2% of turnover), but most of the issues raised seemed solvable to me.

The post A Deep Dive Into Criteo’s 40M GDPR Fine From the CNIL appeared first on AdMonsters.

Obviously, marketers want to avoid such placements. But that’s just a start. In an ideal world, your ad will be seen by real people alongside content that makes sense for your brand.

Marketers everywhere want to know, how do we achieve these goals? Fortunately, we asked Criteo to share their best practices for getting the kind of placements that move the needle for brands.

Multiple Aspects to Quality

First and foremost, it’s important to recognize that there are multiple aspects to quality and it differs from brand to brand. Let’s break this down.

Brand safety is a broad approach to quality. The goal is to ensure that all ads meet industry standards, as well as comply with local and global regulations (e.g. don’t show cigarette ads to kids, or fail to include mandated disclosures in ads for specific products).

Brand suitability takes this concept down a level and is customized to the individual brand. It asks: what is a brand’s appetite for a variety of issues? Some brands have a low tolerance for certain types of content, while others are comfortable with topics many consider risky, e.g. COVID-19 and social justice issues.

Quality also entails ensuring that ads are seen by real people who have a genuine interest in what a brand has to offer. The fight against invalid traffic (IVT) has seen many successes, and gone are the days when campaigns saw as much as 40% IVT. IVT detection and removal are particularly important in retargeting campaigns, where high CPMs are an irresistible lure for fraudsters, and in campaigns designed to build the upper funnel.  

Finally, there’s ad safety, which seeks to ensure that the ads are safe for publishers, meaning they have no malware or other egregious content.

Best Practice #1: Work With a Partner That Has Close Relationships With Publishers and Has Built Strong Internal Quality Controls

Programmatic buying has evolved into an incredibly complex ecosystem, and it’s no surprise that the complexity has led to huge challenges. Key among them: how do buyers know what they’re really buying when they purchase inventory on the open exchanges?

The industry has worked together to address some of these challenges; ads.txt and sellers.json are good examples of these efforts. In addition, individual companies have pioneered advances in supply chain optimization. While these initiatives are critical, they alone cannot guarantee the level of quality that brands demand, which is why it’s a good idea to work with a partner that goes to great lengths to vet its supply sources and has a dedicated team and rigorous quality-assurance policies in place. It’s also a good idea to work with partners that have built a dedicated IVT-detection team. 

Specific questions to ask a potential partner:

• How do you vet direct publishers to ensure policy? For instance, Criteo requires publishers to declare their domains so that they can be properly vetted. They also have supply partner guidelines to which all publishers must adhere, such as content-related policies, regulatory policies, and best practices.
• Do you have dedicated teams for IVT detection, ad safety, traffic quality, and do they work closely together to create a cohesive and coherent approach to advertiser and publisher quality?
• What types of education and training do you provide your teams? Do all teams worldwide receive the same level of training?
• What are your inventory controls? For instance, do you have a global block list of publishers that tend to violate your supply partner guidelines? Can this be refined to your brand? 

 Best practice #2:  Take a Holistic View to Quality

Quality is often seen primarily through the lens of the advertisers, as they’re the ones with the budget. In reality, quality is just as applicable to publishers, which is why we need to take a holistic view.

2020 was a difficult year for publishers and their ability to monetize their inventory. COVID-19 led advertisers to deploy overly broad brand-safety solutions, which devastated publisher revenues. Digital advertising isn’t possible without a strong and vibrant publisher ecosystem.

Fortunately, new granular solutions, such as contextual intelligence solutions, take a more nuanced approach to content rather than reject inventory based on broad keywords. This ensures that the advertiser’s brand-suitability needs are met while allowing publishers to monetize more of their revenue.

The ultimate goal is to produce an advertising ecosystem that will build trust and performance among all parties.

Best Practice #3: Buttress Internal Controls with Industry-Leading Partnerships

Partnering with industry-leading fraud detection and prevention vendors is not just a best practice — it’s an absolute must. You can gain a higher level of quality by working with measurement companies that are at the forefront of detecting and removing IVT automatically across all inventory types, including desktop, mobile, video, and CVT, as well as vetting publisher and app quality. 

The best providers offer contextual intelligence tools that help ensure brand suitability. These tools will provide an additional level of bid filtering to remove bid requests that are out of compliance with supply partner guidelines, automatically and at no extra costs.

Best Practice #4: When it Comes to Brand Suitability Think Granular

Granularity is the key to driving brand suitability. The more granular, the more you can protect client campaign performance, as well as safeguard monetization opportunities of your supply partners. As mentioned above, brand suitability is very specific to the brand, and you should plan on spending some time and effort with your partners so they can ensure your ads appear near content that meets your standards.

Working with an external partner that offers contextual intelligence solutions can help protect your brand-specific content categories. For instance, it’s possible to create very specific controls that help brands avoid negative news cycles and to create granular custom content segments on a brand-by-brand basis, such as avoiding content that deals with COVID-19, fast-fashion or non-vegan content. These segments can be used to assess the impact of brand-suitability requirements on campaign performance, and still ensure that campaigns don’t defund the news.

Are these solutions perfect? In truth, they’re still evolving, and scaling brand suitability to the entire internet is incredibly difficult. (Be wary of any partner that promises 100% safety or accuracy, that does not exist). Other technologies, such as sentiment analysis and the IAB taxonomy/GARM brand suitability framework are just beginning to emerge and may deliver even greater granularity in the near future.

Best practice #5: Seek Certifications or Work With Certified Partners

Working with a certified partner, or seeking certification yourself, is a great way to ensure inventory quality. For instance, the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) has several certifications for reducing fraud, and campaigns that run through TAG Certified Channels have less than 1% fraud (proof positive that by industry leaders working together, tough challenges can be solved). 

TAG offers several certifications, including TAG Certified Against Fraud and TAG Brand Safety Certification. The certification process is rigorous and detailed, but it’s worth the effort, according to Criteo, which has achieved both.

Ensuring high-quality inventory and ads isn’t a static process. It’s an ever-evolving process that demands dedicated teams, technology, processes, and partnerships. This is a case of the ends justifying the means; companies that commit to quality will enjoy safe ads in brand-suitable environments.

The post Best Practices for Ensuring High-Quality Inventory & Ads appeared first on AdMonsters.

But SPO actually requires teamwork amongst all parties, especially those on the sell-side, as Criteo discovered when it decided to test various SPO strategies and measure the efficiencies that resulted. Done right, SPO offers increased transparency and accountability that is extremely beneficial to both publishers and advertisers. 

Criteo’s efforts offer critical insights and best practices that are worth emulating.

The Strategy Behind Criteo’s SPO

Prior to launching its SPO initiative, Criteo worked with more than 50 SSPs. An assumption in ad tech is that the more sell-side providers one works with, the more access one has to the best placements at scale. But within Criteo’s ranks, that assumption had come into doubt. 

Did the plethora of SSPs result in auction duplication? Was it leading to inefficiencies in its buying strategies? Was the company paying too much for inventory as a result of too many intermediaries? More strategically, were its buying strategies advancing its goals as the company prepares for a cookie-free world?

To answer these questions Criteo decided to launch a multi-pronged SPO initiative with three key goals in mind:

• The first was to identify and retain its most incremental supply sources, which Criteo defined as the SSPs in its ad stack that provide the most direct access to publisher inventory and cost efficiencies. 

• The second goal was to consolidate spending and to strengthen relationships with key partners in order to allow better access to inventory and to enrich its First-Party Media Network (more on that below). 

• The third goal was to increase transparency throughout the buying chain in order to ensure the inventory Criteo purchased on behalf of its clients was both legitimate and brand safe.

Let’s see how the company went about achieving these three goals. 

Best Practice #1: Identify and Prioritize Incremental Channels

The first challenge was to understand which of its 50+ channels provided the greatest benefit to Criteo and its advertisers. The company began by studying and ranking all of the channel partners against very specific criteria, including:

• Exclusivity and Access: Does this channel have exclusive contracts with publishers? Does it offer unique placements, a higher priority to the publisher, and more efficiency across the supply chain?

• Data Availability and Collaboration: Which data fields does each SSP pass along? Is it willing to develop new product features, such as transaction ID and s-chain object?

• Infrastructure Costs: How much does it cost to handle the requests in terms of data centers, user valuation computation, and other infrastructure resources?
  

• Operational Costs: How do the overhead costs (e.g. technical resources, business developers, data analysts, and so on) required to support the integration compare to those of other SSPs?
  
• Traffic Acquisition Costs: Are the SSP’s fees and intermediary costs higher than other SSPs? Is Criteo spending more than necessary to acquire quality traffic?

Once Criteo ranked all of its channel partners based on the above criteria, it then tested its lowest-ranked SSPs focusing mainly on performance. 

As a result of this exercise, Criteo was able to reduce costs by removing more than 10 SSPs without any negative impact on campaign performance.

Best Practice #2: Consolidate Spend on Direct Channels and Key Partnerships

Criteo had several goals for consolidating its media spend, including removing intermediaries wherever possible in order to boost advertiser ROAS, as well as reducing the number of duplicated requests so that it wouldn’t compete against itself in auctions.

More strategically, Criteo was keen to shift its spending towards its direct channels and preferred supply partners­­ for several important reasons. 

First, with third-party cookies going away, Criteo wanted to unify and enrich its first-party data by growing its First-Party Media Network, a proprietary solution that integrates commerce data and AI so that marketers and media owners can connect, enhance, and activate their first-party data.

Second, Criteo wanted to strengthen its partnerships with key supply partners by developing mutual collaboration agreements, such as guaranteed spend deals, improved priority or rebate deals, among other initiatives.

With these goals in mind, Criteo sought to decrease the gap between its direct channels while increasing coverage and priority for its buyers. The company also selected the key partners that could help it achieve its strategic first-party data goals.

Outcome: Increased direct Share of Voice by ~seven percentage points

Best Practice #3: Leverage Industry Standards to Promote Transparency 

Brand safety and suitability are growing priorities for all advertisers, goals that can only be achieved with full transparency into media quality. To this end, Criteo took a multi-pronged approach.

First, to guard against domain spoofing, Criteo opted to use only those channel partners that agree to deploy the IAB standards that block blind or semi-transparent traffic (i.e. ad requests that fail to fully disclose the domain).

The decision to block less-than-transparent traffic protects Criteo from malicious actors that hijack the domain of legitimate publishers in order to serve ads from unsavory ones, such as those that hawk violent or adult content. Criteo further verifies domain legitimacy by checking the ads.txt file of each publisher to certify that the ad request is coming from the declared channels. 

Ads.txt has another SPO benefit: enabling Criteo to identify instances when inventory is sold via resellers. Knowing when resellers are involved helps Criteo uncover the most optimal path to the publisher, thus reducing excess resellers and their fees. 

Supply chain object (s-chain) and source origin (OpenRTB 2.0 standard) both accomplish the same goal and help Criteo find the most direct path to publisher inventory, including instances when identify inventory is sold via Google’s Open Bidding

With a full, transparent view into its supply, Criteo can now trace the full buying chain up to the publisher, find the most optimal path and make buying decisions based on that insight. As a result, just .3% of traffic is blind or semi-transparent traffic; Criteo has full visibility into 99.7% of its traffic.

Criteo’s Testing Process

The first step in designing its test is to define what success looks like. Are these efforts serving advertisers’ interest in the long run? 

Success, to Criteo, focused on yield, which was composed of two components:

• The first is the value that Criteo generates for its advertisers, which is calculated using several variables, including the advertiser’s budget, Criteo’s margin, and the probability that users will interact with the ads.

• The second is the cost of traffic acquisition inclusive of all transactional/SSP fees.

Criteo optimizes this yield metric for SPO, which accounts for both short and long-term impact for its clients.

As the goal of these tests is to reduce the number of channel partners without losing yield, the decision to keep or drop a channel partner is made based on whether or not yield was gained or lost.

When several intermediaries sell the same inventory, buyers may receive multiple requests for the same ad opportunity. If undetected, this leads to side-by-side bidding, or buyers bidding against themselves.

While matching Transaction IDs (tid) should, in theory, help Criteo detect such scenarios, low adoption and high inconsistency in reporting remain an issue. To bypass that limitation, Criteo built internal proxies that leverage fields available across all supply partners (a combination of timestamp window, placements IDs, matched user identifiers, and others) to detect side-by-side bidding (tests show that these proxies capture up to 90% of side-by-side bidding).

The SSPs identified as potential culprits were deactivated for a subset of randomized users (test group) within our AB testing platform, and will remain so unless they prove incremental.

Tool Adoption

Criteo adopted an SPO tool (an analytics managed AB testing/inventory management tool) that follows a four-step process: 

• A dry run, which is an offline estimate of the maximum loss of an SPO strategy in case there is no spend transfer.
• AB testing, incrementality testing of the SPO strategy.
• Traffic shut down: if traffic is not incremental, Criteo will stop processing those requests.
• Feedback-loop: Criteo allowed 5% of the cut traffic through to monitor whether traffic becomes profitable again

This tool has improved Criteo’s overall SPO process on several fronts. First, it has eliminated complex development work so that Criteo’s local analytics teams can run the tests themselves, allowing for the faster implementation of tests. 

Second, Criteo can build any combination of the tool’s dimensions to identify an SSP to shut down. Third, exclusion lists now come before requests are processed, lowering infrastructure costs.

Criteo is onto something big here: SPO benefits a lot of players in the ecosystem, especially publishers who want to earn the highest CPMS for their inventory. The more direct the path to the buyer, the less money that’s lost on intermediaries.  

On a higher level, the industry progresses when it works together to solve challenges. Often this begins when an individual player, like Criteo, undertakes the systematic stuff of an issue and shares their insights so that others can implement them. 

Clients have complained for a long time about too high intermediary costs; Criteo has found a way to optimize the supply chain in order to lower them.

The post A Publisher’s Guide to Supply Path Optimizations: A Case Study appeared first on AdMonsters.

That would be a big mistake. 

There’s actually no time like the present for all of the cookieless alternatives to start stepping up to the plate and showing what they’re really made of, and for pubs to get to testing right away. 

Single Sign-On solutions are one such open web tool that’s gaining massive ad tech support. But one of the major barriers to any of these solutions reaching scale is consumer consent fatigue. 

In that vein, Criteo, Prebid, and other industry leaders have set out to help solve this issue through Prebid’s Project Management Committee (PMC) which is responsible for establishing, prioritizing, and building industry roadmap items.

The goal of this PMC is to align with industry leaders and create an open-source and interoperable single sign-on (SSO) solution, helping to reduce the friction between consumers and publishers in the cookieless future, while supporting logged-in and logged out scenarios. 

We spoke with Jordan Cauley, Director of Product at Mediavine, who co-chairs the SSO PMC (alongside Criteo Chief Product Officer, Todd Parsons) within Prebid about opportunities for pubs over the next year and a half and why Prebid is central to the open web’s future.

Lynne d Johnson: Mediavine has O&O sites and also helps thousands of publishers successfully monetize their sites as well. What opportunities are you seeing for publishers over the next 18 months and what do you think some of their biggest challenges will be?

Jordan Cauley: The next 18 months are going to be crucial for publishers. First, the great news: Demand has rebounded from lows during the pandemic and programmatic ad prices are surpassing pre-pandemic comparisons.

Also on the opportunistic side, we’re seeing advertisers begin to trust video from the Open Exchange almost as much as they’ve historically trusted deal IDs. Outstream video is becoming as trusted as instream. Mediavine is continuing to prioritize innovation of video products, which is why we’ve built our own instream and outstream video players. The SSO committee is working to build an open solution that will enable buyers to have enough scale to purchase open video inventory and empower publishers to tap into that demand through a more direct and consolidated way.

The biggest challenges publishers can expect over the next 18 months are the same, in my opinion, as the whole advertising ecosystem: addressability, frequency capping, and attribution. With the deprecation of the third-party cookie, we must provide alternatives to help publishers and advertisers better understand and serve their audiences. Solutions like contextual and first-party data will be key to addressing audiences accurately.

LdJ: Speaking of identity, you co-chair the Single Sign-On PMC within Prebid where stakeholders from all across the advertising ecosystem are working to bring an open-source SSO technology to market. Can you share why you see Prebid.Org as a valuable community and why you wanted to invest in taking a leadership role?

JC: The ad tech ecosystem contains unique stakeholders and pressures, so it’s important that ad tech companies at every corner of the market work cohesively through the complexities that come with the territory. A group like Prebid has a low barrier to entry and allows for vital industry collaboration. 

My goal for joining the SSO committee was to share the knowledge gained from Mediavine’s unique position in the industry. Because Mediavine operates across eight thousand domains, we have a valuable perspective of the problems facing the industry and are motivated to offer a seamless SSO solution to publishers.

More than two years ago we began developing our own SSO/proprietary toolkit, Grow.me, to help address the evolving industry landscape. In turn, I can use the feedback from our internal efforts to help guide the Prebid SSO project into a product supported by large and small publishers, owned-and-operated publishers, and publishers who have an outside company managing their identity solutions.

LdJ: As a global leader of Prebid.org you’re starting to test this new SSO, what are the greatest challenges you expect the SSO working group to solve?

JC: I think the greatest challenge the committee is helping address is to encourage collaboration. Traditionally, advertisers, DSPs, SSPs, publishers, and other players in the ecosystem have operated relatively independently. 

There’s a push toward vertical integration in this evolutionary time for the web. Groups like the SSO Committee and Prebid as a whole have to bring the disconnected parts of the ecosystem closer together and view the space more holistically.

The end solution aims to bring the entire ecosystem together to deliver better relationships between users, publishers, and advertisers with opt-in-based experiences for both content and advertising.

LdJ: There’s been a lot of interest developing around both authenticated and unauthenticated traffic for publishers. But initially, it seemed, the industry was primarily focused on authenticated traffic, where the user shared their email directly with the publisher. What are the key differences between the two experiences for users and their use cases?

JC: Authenticated traffic is traffic that the publisher has been able to verify by a reader logging into their site. A reader understands they have provided their email address and then verifies that email address in exchange for access to an exclusive feature or service. The partially anonymous ID or unauthenticated traffic asks less of readers and users. 

In this case, readers accept an agreement that doesn’t require them to supply their full email address or another piece of personally identifiable information (PII). Instead, it provides a cross-domain common identifier that can be used for many of the same cases as a third-party cookie, but with clearer controls in the hands of the users. 

A user with a semi-anonymous ID can manage some preferences for privacy, can be frequency capped as needed, or even retargeted in some cases. This creates opportunities to build trust in the relationship with a publisher, an advertiser, and ultimately with the proposed entity that is managing an SSO.

I believe the key is developing both options together and in doing so, creating a “good, better, best” mentality. “Good” being contextual signals, “better” being semi-anonymous traffic and “best” being fully authenticated traffic stemming from relationships with the users. This mentality can improve efficiency for advertisers and revenue for publishers without being dogmatic about an all-in strategy that is being actively combated by browser vendors and a public concerned with privacy on the web.

LdJ: And do you see a flow between authenticated and unauthenticated traffic? How will it work?

JC: I think the flow between fully authenticated and semi-anonymous traffic is going to depend very much on publishers and in many ways, advertisers. The committee is still working through the options on the table, but if a semi-anonymous ID user develops the trust to elevate to a fully authenticated relationship? There is a great deal of value in this flow, potentially improving things for all parties.

The post Can SSO Bring the Advertising Ecosystem Together? A Q&A With Mediavine’s Jordan Cauley appeared first on AdMonsters.

The advertising ecosystem has a huge opportunity to create a more transparent programmatic supply chain, where SSPs, brands, ad tech vendors, and agencies alike can commit to using new tools and tactics to improve how they work with publishers. By enhancing the control and transparency in the programmatic supply chain, we will ultimately be able to create a better, privacy-centric, seamless user experience.  

That’s how Len Ostroff, SVP, Global Supply and Partnerships, Criteo told us he sees things moving forward. And the path ahead—for creating a more transparent, sustainable programmatic supply chain—relies on four major initiatives:

• Futures Buying: Allowing publishers to be paid upfront, providing revenue security critical for driving continued success. While publishers provide access to priority inventory, buyers benefit from flexibility to fund and purchase inventory in advance.  
• Contextual Targeting and Blocking: Advertisers are taking aggressive steps to block ads. Instead, how can they adapt the approach and shift strategies for the betterment of the industry? We started with URL blocking, then progressed to keyword blocking (which still lacked key context in many cases), and now we have contextual blocking. Making those types of blocking capabilities accessible is important because it provides the ability to be fluid and give more controls to advertisers. 
• Supply-Path Optimization (SPO): How can we leverage this concept to get buyers closer to sales, increase performance, reduce costs and maintain a safe and compliant environment? While reducing cost and cutting down hops is important from an economic angle, a key point is also knowing the origin of the inventory to ensure quality and brand safety. Advertisers benefit from the ability to buy from a source that has direct access to supply. 
• Embracing greater flexibility around native formats as advertisers look to shift their dollars away from Facebook to native environments that offer control over the content to which the ads will be adjacent. 

Improving Control and Transparency for Publishers in the Programmatic Supply Chain: A Conversation With Len Ostroff, SVP, Global Partnerships and Alliances, Criteo

Lynne d Johnson: How can all sectors of the advertising industry work together to create a more transparent programmatic supply chain?

Len Ostroff: Collaboration across all industry players is going to be crucial to develop privacy-safe solutions for the post-cookie world and improve transparency in the programmatic supply chain. Publishers and advertisers have an opportunity to take a more strategic approach by leveraging their programmatic partners that bring the most value to their supply path.

Publishers should investigate supporting private marketplaces, guaranteed deals, and reducing the number of demand partners to achieve an optimal number of bid requests per impression, while advertisers can commit to guaranteed direct deals with upfront payments to publishers to eliminate opaque supply and unclear fees.

LdJ: How can advertisers commit to new tools and tactics that will help them work with publishers more effectively?

LO: There is so much opportunity to reimagine digital advertising and publishers will play a crucial role in this evolution. Supporting great content creation is crucial to maintain a vibrant and content-rich open internet. Publishers and advertisers have a responsibility to make sure they are creating content that is valuable to users while displaying ads that are relevant and of high quality.

Advertisers would benefit from shifting their mindset away from this traditional practice to adopting new brand safety strategies and tools that allow them to drive performance and brand awareness while ensuring publishers maintain sustainable revenue streams.

Brand safety has become a hot topic over the past few years with many advertisers taking a blunt approach and using keyword blocking to control where their ads are placed. This limits monetization opportunities for publishers and can diminish a publisher’s ability to continue to produce high-quality content. Advertisers would benefit from shifting their mindset away from this traditional practice to adopting new brand safety strategies and tools that allow them to drive performance and brand awareness while ensuring publishers maintain sustainable revenue streams. For example, advertisers can leverage the power of machine learning to better monitor, detect and filter for invalid traffic. At Criteo, we have clear processes in place to ensure that our publishers adhere to content, regulatory, and traffic quality guidelines, which allow us to shape a more sustainable programmatic supply chain.

Beyond providing our clients with granular controls over where their ads run, Criteo is committed to working with the industry to drive the future of consumer identity and privacy on the open internet. This starts with consent, transparency, and control. We want to help marketers and publishers enrich, grow, and monetize their first-party data for a scalable path forward. We believe that we are one of the few platforms with scaled data assets on both the demand and supply sides of the ecosystem to truly bridge this gap, provide these consented connections and activate them at scale.

LdJ: By enhancing control and transparency in the programmatic supply chain, how can advertisers, publishers and ad tech band together against the walled gardens?

LO: All sectors of the industry need to center their goals around consumer privacy and consent to build the new future of digital advertising. With the deprecation of cookies and various other restrictions which have been brought on by the walled gardens and browser/OS’s, there is an incredible opportunity for the ad ecosystem to innovate on personalized advertising solutions for the open internet. Whether that is dependent on first-party data strategies, cohort or contextual-based targeting – or likely a mix of all three – cross-functional collaboration in the industry is essential to build something open and scalable.

LdJ: How can publishers leverage concepts like supply path optimization to get buyers closer to sales, increase performance, reduce costs and maintain a safe and compliant environment?

LO: Publishers are working with far more SSPs than they were in the past and we have seen a rise in duplicate bid requests, leading to an increase in infrastructure costs and multiple bids for a single impression. While there is typically value in seeing a few bid requests per impression, there is a point of diminishing returns which can cause a degradation in value and a drop in yield while also increasing fees and costs. Publishers should lean into their analytics team to develop an A/B testing framework to optimize the number of SSPs and bid requests per placement.

Along with auction duplication comes the many integration types that publishers have leveraged to maximize fill rates and increased CPMs. For example, multi-integrations allow publishers to use multiple wrappers which execute multiple auctions for a single ad impression, adding even more complexities to an already crowded system. We can see very quickly that with the addition of more and more partners comes the dilution of advertiser spend and publisher revenue. Supply-path optimization is that direct path to better transparency and performance.

7% of requests generate less than 1% of Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) for advertisers.

A recent internal study from Criteo revealed that on average there are 10+ distinct channels per publisher on web inventory. This translates to Criteo receiving many duplicative bid requests that generate very little value for our advertisers, or another way to look at it — 7% of requests generate less than 1% of Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) for advertisers. By first focusing on keeping only the most profitable supply sources and reducing from 10+ to no more than four channels per publisher, we have been able to realize the same performance for our advertisers and remove unnecessary requests.

LdJ: How can the industry create a better, privacy-centric and seamless experience for users?

LO: First, it’s worth noting that personalized advertising is still both effective and desired. Unless you work in the heavy machinery industry, do you really want to see an ad for a front-end loader? This recently happened to me when I was experimenting on what experience I would have in a non-addressable web. However, as an industry, we need to better communicate and educate consumers on how their personal data is collected and used for personalized advertising, the control they have over this data, and the value that they get for providing this data.

We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the ad ecosystem to rebalance the value exchange for consumers, advertisers and publishers – and first-party data is the key to this new advertising paradigm.

We can and should effectively articulate this value exchange and manage one-to-one relationships with consumers through building a transparent opt-in framework and enhancing user permission and consent solutions. Partnering with third-party neutral governance bodies such as Prebid will help AdTech and the wider industry become more consumer-centric as we head into the post-cookie era.

The post Cleaning Up the Programmatic Supply Chain  appeared first on AdMonsters.

Everyone wants to know: What will replace the third-party tracking cookie (which has outlived its usefulness) as the main tool for measurement and audience targeting?

Alternatives have been proposed to the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) and are currently being tested and responded to by the industry at large. Google has proposed the Privacy Sandbox—a series of browser APIs that are intended to secure users’ privacy while also enabling advertising tracking and measurement—which includes Two Uncorrelated Requests, Then Locally-Executed Decision On Victory (TURTLE-DOV). (We’ll be hearing lots more about that at our upcoming webinar with Google, Building the Privacy-Forward Future of Advertising July 15 @ 2PM. Register now, it’s free.)

In May, Criteo submitted its own proposal, SPARROW (Secure Private Advertising Remotely Run On Webserver), to the W3C in response to Google’s proposal.  The proposal was updated recently, in response to industry-wide feedback, to include reporting capabilities to further secure users’ privacy without compromising advertisers’ performance.

I caught up with Charles-Henri Henault, VP of Product, Ads Platform and Analytics at Criteo to gain a deeper understanding of SPARROW. One thing that’s certain, the industry is going to need to come together on shaping the post-cookie world.

Lynne d Johnson: What is SPARROW? 

Charles-Henri Henault: In February of this year, Chrome published TURTLEDOVE (Two Uncorrelated Requests, Then Locally-Executed Decision On Victory) proposing how interest group advertising could replace user-level advertising. Criteo’s SPARROW proposal (Secure Private Advertising Remotely Run On Webserver) aims to enhance Chrome’s proposal by providing more control and transparency while maintaining privacy guarantees for users.  

These enhancements include: 

• Audiences: Adding the ability to drive awareness or reengagement scenarios by creating more sophisticated campaigns based on interest groups (e.g. lookalike audiences).
• Technical execution: Instead of browsers executing real-time bidding, we recommend safeguarding users’ data by having an independent party, known as a gatekeeper, execute sophisticated real-time bidding strategies. A gatekeeper could be a cloud service provider or an SSP. 
• Measurement: Sharing of granular reporting to give more transparency into campaign management, billing, fraud prevention and brand safety while also providing more control over fraud detection, campaign optimization, and A/B testing.   

LdJ: How does SPARROW differ from TURTLEDOVE? 

CHH: We see our SPARROW proposal as an enhancement to TURTLEDOVE. In fact, SPARROW maintains many of Chrome’s objectives within their own proposal. For example: 

• People who like ads that remind them of sites they’re interested in can choose to keep seeing those ads.
• People who don’t like these types of ads can choose to avoid seeing them.
• People who wonder “how the ad knew” can get a clear, accurate answer.
• People who wish to stop being associated with an interest group can do so and can expect to stop seeing ads targeting this group.
• Advertisers cannot learn the browsing habits of specific people, even those who have joined multiple interest groups. Websites cannot learn the interest groups of the people who visit them. 

However, we’ve also added some improvements to make sure that: 

• Advertisers can retain campaign control and performance in privacy-friendly ways.
• All advertising use cases are covered by the proposition, not only re-marketing.
• Appropriate controls over ad safety, brand safety and transparency in billing is provided to both advertisers and publishers.
• User experience is preserved while browsing the web.

Finally, we believe our proposal is key to a healthy ecosystem—one that ensures a privacy-friendly experience for users, value for advertisers and revenue for publishers. 

LdJ: How will taking the logic out of the browser help the industry? 

CHH: Taking the logic out of the browser yields the following benefits: 

• Better user experience: Loading, storing and running all the components and logic in-browser would put a huge strain on the user experience.
• Better marketing: Campaigns would be executed on web servers with computing power vs. mobile-based browsers. SPARROW also allows for A/B testing, helping to improve marketing effectiveness, as well as better user engagement by delivering enhanced creatives that do not have to be stored in the browser. This lifts the constraint on their quality and allows for higher publisher monetization.
• Enhanced advertiser protection: An in-browser execution could, to a certain extent, allow Advertiser A to have access to Advertiser’s B strategy, and potentially even reverse-engineer its proprietary marketing approach. SPARROW ensures that the interests of Advertisers A and B are not at risk when engaging with online audiences.
• Improved spend auditability and budget management: Both the browser and the gatekeeper would have visibility on display volumes and prices and real-time spend reporting would be made available.  

We believe SPARROW still has room to address other topics, though, such as post-view reporting, multi-touch attribution, reach counting and fraud management.  

LdJ: How will the inclusion of a ‘gatekeeper’ broaden targeting and speed up reporting? 

CHH: SPARROW provides the system the ability to build elaborate and relevant audiences by building new interest group categories based on matching other interest groups together. 

By allowing a regular flow of information between browsers and gatekeepers, SPARROW enables fast reporting and precise management of budgets. In comparison, the in-browser logic shared in TURTLEDOVE only allowed for aggregated and delayed reporting.  

LdJ: Would publishers have to change much of what they already do to implement SPARROW? 

CHH: Publishers would not need to change much in that they would still send bid requests to web servers and get bid responses in exchange. SPARROW offers them the opportunity to create their own audience segments. 

LdJ:  There were some questions being raised in the industry about whether SPARROW meets privacy standards. Does the updated proposal now meet privacy standards? 

CHH: We believe SPARROW provides similar levels of privacy as TURTLEDOVE, in the design space set forth by Google Chrome teams whereby users are addressed by their membership to cohorts. 

LdJ: How does the SPARROW proposal tackle transparency, which is one of the biggest issues within the ecosystem right now?  

CHH: Transparency is incredibly important to marketers. Thanks to constructive industry-wide feedback, we recently updated SPARROW’s reporting capabilities in GitHub the other week to further secure users’ privacy without compromising advertisers’ performance.  

The SPARROW update introduces three new reports: 

• A low latency aggregated report, whose purpose is to be used for campaign spend management and billing
• A delayed, personalized, display-level report, defined by the user, with privacy-preserving mechanisms, intended to be used for fraud detection, campaign optimization (machine learning), AB testing, etc.
• A delayed report listing all ad units served (without counting them precisely), for publishers to be able to audit publisher brand safety. 

LdJ: Is SPARROW more theory than real-world framework? 

CHH: The gatekeepers make the entire proposal realistically implementable and would not threaten the user experience browsing the web. Google recently acknowledged the seriousness of our proposal, proposing that SPARROW and TURTLEDOVE move forward along the track toward becoming a standard. Further discussion with the other browser vendors should ensue.  

It’s important to note that we see SPARROW as a continuous work in progress. We designed it to help kickstart ideas in the industry and propel the industry forward. Regardless of which proposal ends up being adopted, we strongly believe the entire industry needs to work together to find a solution, one that respects the end user’s privacy and gives them control or choice over their data. 

LdJ: Can you elaborate on the gatekeeper concept? How do you have a gatekeeper who is independent, unbiased and not self-serving? 

CHH: The gatekeeper is designed to act as an independent third-party between the publisher and the advertiser. It is essential that there is no coordination between the gatekeeper and other parties in the ad tech ecosystem. Gatekeepers would manage a lot of traffic and run the engines built by the advertiser. Thus, running a gatekeeper would be quite compute-intensive and quite low-tech at the same time. A lot of details remain to be clarified, but we think that cloud providers or current SSPs could be interested in stepping in.  

LdJ: How can we maintain privacy protection for users in this proposed ecosystem? 

CHH: At Criteo, we’re committed to maintaining privacy protection for users. All of our solutions are privacy-by-design and operate strictly under user consent. One way we can continue to maintain privacy protection in the SPARROW proposal is by de-coupling advertiser-side user activity and publisher-side one. This will ensure that any participant has limited information about users while still enabling them to serve relevant ads.

Don’t forget to sign up for our free webinar with Google Building the Privacy-Forward Future of Advertising to learn how you can actively participate in the construction of the next generation of solutions.

Register Now

The post What Is SPARROW? appeared first on AdMonsters.

AdRoll and Criteo specifically made the news–both of which had been serving messages to users as they were browsing. AdRoll’s message box encouraged users to click on the page to allow AdRoll to collect their data across different sites. Criteo’s asked users to click on any link in the message box to, as the message said, “use Criteo’s user-friendly, cross-site tracking technology to get relevant offers from reputable brands.” It’s wise that both companies are making moves toward gaining consent. User consent for being tracked across sites is good for user experience. And with GDPR coming, it’s going to be crucial to get that consent for any digital company with any audience in the E.U. at all.

To understand the sense of urgency here, let’s pull up some of AdMonsters’ coverage of GDPR. Experts have interpreted the regulation to hold that most digital marketing and advertising activities online that involve tracking user behavior will probably require user consent. And under GDPR, data processors and data owners—that is to say, both publishers and their vendor partners—are equally accountable if either makes a misstep with user data. Make sense?

When we start to get a handle on the takeaways from GDPR (not to mention simply an increasing understanding among users that their behavior online is being monitored by someone or other), it becomes clear that every tech company we’d refer to as an “intermediary” between publishers and advertisers should start thinking about becoming more visible to the public. It’s not an enviable task, which is why I’m not keen on finger-wagging here. Most people on the internet have no idea how many companies are involved in the digital ad supply chain. I can only imagine being an AdRoll or a Criteo and trying to make a polite introduction to users who not only have never heard the names AdRoll or Criteo, but who don’t really know what retargeting is.

Retargeters in particular are in an interesting position. Retargeting is kind of the Nickelback of ad tech. On the one hand, it seems like “everyone” thinks they’re annoying. On the other hand, they’re massively popular. As much as people on the internet claim they feel weirded out by seeing ads for products they just searched for, that advertising tactic has historically been quite effective. So retargeters need to communicate to users: “We’re collecting some of your data, and we think this is okay, and there’s a good chance you’ll think this is okay too, because it’s actually worked.”

I have to wonder about the language tech companies would or should use to make that introduction to users. Criteo’s opt-in/out message referred to the company’s “services.” I agree they’re services, and beneficial in the end (I’m a cheapskate, and I’ll spend months waiting for a good deal to buy pretty much anything aside from lunch). But I’ve been writing about ad tech for years. Other people who aren’t in my position might feel a little more dubious that they’re being “served” by being advertised to. Let’s be cautious about drinking any brand marketer Kool-Aid over here. Brands like to think about advertising as a service. Publishers are more inclined to think of it as a business necessity that their users didn’t ask for.

And that’s why this consent to be tracked should be a team effort between publishers and their tech partners. The message should come from the publisher, the name users know and trust. You know, from the thing they’ve invited onto their screen. Do users need to know the names of every tech vendor, or details about what they do? Not necessarily. (Although the option to click through to learn more about one company or another would be helpful.) It’s no small task, but the way the industry is evolving, everyone involved needs users’ trust. And if you want to gain trust, you might as well start with a name the user already trusts.

The post Targeting Consent Is a Publisher/Vendor Team Effort appeared first on AdMonsters.