Last October Yieldmo hosted a client summit in Park City, Utah. I was fortunate enough to kick off the first day with a trip down memory lane… privacy memory lane. Often I find myself acting as Internet historian since I’ve been enamored with the thing since the late 80s, logging on to the local BBS and playing Trade Wars 2002 late into the night.
At the summit I traced back online advertising’s rise to the creation of the humble cookie in 1994. It was a seminal moment for the web as it allowed a browser to maintain state between web pages. I rambled on through a series of events, highlighting each milestone’s impact on advertising as well as noting the privacy implications. As the years went by, society at large took notice of the wealth of information being distributed across the globe and eventually cried out loud enough to force governments and large companies to address their concerns.
I documented swings between discrete tracking and privacy safeguards in a post on The Drum called The Privacy Pendulum. I’ll eventually post the unabridged text here, but for now you can pop over there and take in the broad strokes.
A couple weeks ago I was looking over geographic location data to inform the return on investment of an advertising campaign. A significant portion of metropolitan data was showing a large percentage of the users sitting in the exact same location. It was as if they all checked-in on their apps while they were standing at the center of the city. That seemed unlikely. Was there something wrong with the data? Well, yes and no. More importantly: was it fraud?
Everyone is talking about the promise of header bidding, but what does it really mean to the future of publishing and mobile monetization? Header bidding is leveling the playing field by allowing sellers to make more intelligent inventory allocation decisions between traditional and programmatic demand. For advertisers, header bidding allows for better campaign delivery and optimization by providing more access to audiences at scale.
