Why the advertising industry needs to reprioritise ad quality urgently

Last year, eMarketer’s Geoff Ramsey highlighted the “crisis of trust” across the digital ecosystem: not only pointing to the need for better relations between brands and consumers, but also within the marketing community itself; covering advertisers, agencies, publishers, and ad tech players.

As 2019 begins, issues with misunderstanding and mistrust persist — especially in programmatic. One of the main talking points at this year’s dmexco was around...

11 January 2019 | Advertising

eCPA is dead: Long live the incremental eCPA

Every advertiser wants to spend their advertising budgets in the most efficient way possible. That’s why, in the digital advertising world, it’s vital to measure the results of all campaigns. Advertisers and agencies commonly analyse reports from various tracking tools in order to evaluate the ROI of each of their advertising partners, and these results determine which partners receive budget in the following months. This seems to be a wise approach but often that’s not...

11 January 2019 | Advertising

Bid caching: An innovation in programmatic or reopening the trust wound?

Last month, there was another brouhaha in the programmatic ad world. It was revealed that was a new ad-buying practice was happening and apparently very few people knew that it is going on.

Devised by the ad marketplace Index Exchange and hailed as the latest innovation in programmatic bidding we discovered a practice called ‘bid caching’. New technology that was designed to reduce latency, thereby creating faster ad serving. It was a supposed master stroke by the company,...

12 October 2018 | Advertising

How much of your ‘working media’ is actually working?

The “working media” debate, i.e. what percentage of advertiser programmatic budgets get spent on pure media (and what this percentage should be), has been raging for some time now.

It’s a contentious topic, fueled by a historic lack of transparency, but one that, I feel, has a simple solution:

1.   Work with partners who can give you full transparency of the programmatic value chain (yes, they do exist!).

2.   Identify which fees...

8 October 2018 | Advertising Technology

Five steps to avoid wasting your display advertising budgets

There is a myriad of advertising partners available to buy media and help mobile advertisers to reach their target audiences, and advertisers need to follow clear criteria to find the right ones. In the world of data-driven advertising, it is a common (and logical) practice to distribute advertising dollars based on the cost per conversion each partner is delivering, and those delivering the best price, or in other words, the best ROI, will get the bigger budgets.

And how do...

28 August 2018 | Advertising

Three solutions to the nonsensical ad viewability standard

In 2014, I wrote a piece calling out our industry for its pretty feeble definition of ‘viewable’. Little did I know I’d be saying the same things four years later. 

But the fact is, very little has changed. The Media Rating Council’s standard still stands: a digital advert is classed as ‘viewable’ if half of it is in vision for one second or more. Run that by anyone outside media-land and they’d laugh in your face.

I actually...

7 August 2018 | Advertising

Is SPO the silver bullet to programmatic’s transparency challenges?

The ongoing header bidding revolution might be bringing joy to publishers, but it’s giving the buy side of programmatic a bit of a headache.

While the technique allows demand-side platforms (DSPs) to help advertisers access a wider range of inventory, this amplified scale is creating issues. Not only does the bid duplication header bidding generates mean DSPs must deal with higher volumes of requests, but greater adoption is disrupting auction mechanics and leading supply-side...

6 August 2018 | Advertising Technology

US music-streaming giant Pandora opens programmatic audio marketplace

One of the United States’ most popular music-streaming services, Pandora has joined the programmatic audio arms race, opening up the largest set of ad-supported listeners in the country to targeted, audio-based advertising.

The announcement marks an opportunity for brands to access the largest addressable audience in the streaming audio space - the California-based music recommendation service owns the largest inventory of its kind in the US, while 92% of its audience is...

31 July 2018 | Advertising Technology

Benefit or buzz: IAB looks to gauge true value of blockchain in digital advertising

Few industries have escaped the hype around the transformational, nay, revolutionary, benefits of blockchain technology, and the digital advertising community is certainly not exempt.

Owed to its fundamental blueprint of distributed ledgers, enabling secure, public and decentralised transaction records data, documents, and of course, currency, blockchain has been widely touted as a transparent and less expensive solution to the “murky” world of ad-trading, among a host of...

20 July 2018 | Advertising Technology

MediaMath seals $225m financing for AI ad tech and tactical mergers

MediaMath, a long-time pioneer in programmatic advertising, has announced $225m (£170m) in new financing, courtesy of Searchlight Capital Partners.

The windfall brings the ad tech company’s total funding to over $607m (£458m), according to Crunchbase.

Delivered in two tranches, this will provide the “strategic growth capital” needed to accelerate the expansion of its DSP (demand side platform) - which allows brands to buy ads using automated...

11 July 2018 | Advertising Technology