Writer frustrations about modifications to the digital promoting ecosystem are beginning to boil over – and there have been loads of grievances aired on the Prebid Summit earlier this week in New York Metropolis.
The occasion was the first-ever gathering of its sort hosted by Prebid, which is the group behind the extensively used open-source header bidding software program.
What occurs while you get a bunch of good, technical, pissed-off publishers and SSPs in a single room?
They offer you an unvarnished glimpse of the spirited discussions happening inside Prebid’s working teams.
Listed here are a few of the spicier issues AdExchanger overheard on the occasion.
Nobody is prepared for the Privateness Sandbox
Feels like third-party cookies have one thing in widespread with The Fonz.
“The third-party cookie jumped the shark a very long time in the past,” mentioned Garrett McGrath, Magnite’s SVP of product administration. “We have to transfer away from that and provides extra management to publishers and customers.”
However what Magnite hears from publishers is that they’re simply starting to check Google’s Privateness Sandbox and are available to grips with the numerous modifications that DSPs and SSPs should make.
So, whereas the ecosystem appears to assist the intent behind the Privateness Sandbox, in terms of the nuts and bolts of creating it work, “we’re not tremendous shut proper now,” McGrath mentioned.
Is sustainability screwing over publishers?
Throughout a workshop session about SPO and demand-path optimization, Stephen Johnston Jr., founder and CTO of PubWise, talked about that Prebid is engaged on demand high quality.
The aim is to look into what resellers are doing throughout programmatic auctions and whether or not they’re really bidding on impressions with the intent to win auctions. Conveying this info to publishers might help with their sustainability efforts.
The point out of sustainability prompted Jordan Cauley, senior director of product at Mediavine, to quip: “You don’t suppose sustainability is simply an arbitrary catch-on to make SPO appear extra palatable?”
Cauley admitted he was “simply dropping a bomb for shits and giggles,” and conceded that higher environmental sustainability and cheaper costs for consumers usually are not mutually unique. However conversations about sustainability additionally want to think about the scale of advert creatives and the variety of tags that get included in artistic, he mentioned. “We’re attacking the smallest floor space of bid request dimension moderately than the massive floor space of served advertisements.”
Cauley’s remark prompted different sell-side gamers who attended the workshop to weigh in on how efforts to create a extra sustainable digital promoting ecosystem have been too targeted on bid density, particularly provided that publishers are incentivized to ship a excessive quantity of requests.
“You make extra income if you’ll be able to get extra requests to the DSPs since you usually tend to get by marketing campaign pacing,” mentioned Nils Lind, CEO of Assertive Yield, a income administration platform. “From the writer’s perspective, there’s no incentive to solely have one direct path.”
Some within the room instructed that with the ability to attribute income to particular line objects in a writer’s Advertisements.txt file would make it simpler for publishers to chop resellers that aren’t really shopping for stock. However one attendee joked that this sounds just like the intention behind Patrons.json, which “no one makes use of.”
An awesome quantity of different choices
In the meantime, publishers are going through the prospect of testing all types of third-party cookie options, and the sheer variety of options is daunting, mentioned Paul Ryan, CTO at OpenX.
Since Prebid helps dozens of different IDs, new shopping for mechanisms and a number of analytics modules, the very fact is that publishers and SSPs need to be very savvy about what they’re testing within the coming months, Ryan mentioned.
For its half, writer tech firm Freestar is at the moment testing round 14 completely different ID modules, mentioned Matt Burgess, EVP of demand.
However what consumers inform Freestar about their preferences isn’t all the time borne out within the testing. For instance, some consumers say they don’t need to do viewers matching utilizing probabilistic IDs, nonetheless, they’re nonetheless transacting on offers that use them.
How SSPs curate writer stock may also impression how advertisements are bought. For instance, Freestar seen SSPs curating stock into deal IDs with out Freestar’s information, Burgess mentioned. However moderately than combating that observe, Freestar is leaning in to attempt to maximize the income its publishers get from these offers.
Programmatic assured (PG) offers are one other various shopping for technique geared toward giving entry to particular writer stock. However PG gross sales are down this yr, in response to Ryan Maynard, VP of programmatic gross sales operations at Raptive (previously CafeMedia), prompting Raptive to marvel if consumers actually do need to transact this manner.
Is contextual concentrating on catching on?
Along with the necessity for testing various options, the approaching demise of third-party cookies has additionally prompted a pivot again to contextual concentrating on.
However consumers seem to belief content-based contextual concentrating on on the URL stage greater than audience-based contextual concentrating on, like Vendor Outlined Audiences (SDA), “since you really need to imagine the viewers, and it needs to be licensed,” mentioned OpenX’s Ryan.
The issue with SDA is that the majority publishers use the IAB’s Content material Taxonomy to categorise viewers segments, however “no DSP listens to that,” Ryan mentioned, since they like to make use of their very own content material taxonomies as a substitute.
Nonetheless, that doesn’t imply the business can throw its fingers up and admit defeat on SDA, mentioned Stephanie Layser, international head of writer advert tech options at Amazon Net Companies. As a substitute, organizations like Prebid and the IAB have to concentrate on making requirements workable and certifiable as a result of that’s what the purchase aspect needs.
However creating requirements doesn’t imply they’ll be adopted.
“You possibly can promulgate all types of loopy stuff as normal,” Ryan mentioned. “But when they don’t get applied by the folks with the cash, then it actually doesn’t matter.”
