I’ve shared some of my expectations on the collateral impact of deprecating third-party cookies. This post is currently published on The Drum’s Open Mic section.
The exact date upon which the 3rd party cookie vanishes is tough to pin down. What we are reasonably certain of is that sometime in the second half of 2024 the Google team will release a version of Chrome that will have them turned off by default. Read the rest on The Drum.
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’m finally posting the unabridged text here, enjoy.
The year was 1994. I was a student at the Illinois Institute of Technology and had switched majors to Computer Science. The Internet, with a capital I, had me in its grasp. I was enamored with all things web. Looking back I think I must have been easily impressed, because gray backgrounds with blue and black text don’t seem all that impressive today. The promise of the web was readily apparent, though. It just needed a few more features to really take off.
1994 was also the year Lou Montulli, a Netscape engineer, invented the cookie. He wasn’t trying to open the door to an industry to revolve around audience tracking and targeting. He just wanted a shopping cart to work properly on the web.
Read moreYou may have heard of this being referred to as Stack Class. These white-board sessions originated in the early days of Real-Time Bidding (RTB), before the dark times… before The Empire, er.. Header Bidding. Before Header Bidding.
This video is a little dated, but it covers the technical basics of RTB. I’ve been toting it around for years privately. I figured it’s about time to set it free.
I called it Stack Class in the beginning because I was describing all the components of Real-Time Bidding, you know… the stack upon which everything is built. In this video you’ll find SSPs, DSPs, user synchronization (cookies?!%$#@!), bids, responses, PMPs, ad markup… you know, all the things.
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?
Was it fraud? Welcome to the gray area of ad-tech. eMarketer shows that display advertising fraud loss is hovering around $6 billion worldwide. They likely derived this data from very black and white definitions of what is and what isn’t fraud. In this post I’ll be lining up not only explicitly fraudulent behavior, but also some marginal tactics of media owners, supply side companies, advertisers and demand side companies to illuminate the fringes of acceptable behavior.
Read on for geo stuffing, bid caching and more…
Whether you think it’s a fad, a “hack,” the new standard, or the latest shiny object, header bidding has had a significant and disruptive impact on the advertising technology ecosystem. It may only be a matter of time before Luma Partners adds header bidding wrappers as a new box to their (in)famous landscapes.
The promise of header bidding with multiple exchanges has yielded positive results for advertisers and publishers but it has come with a cost that, over time, might be too much to bear. Whether it survives the fray, or evolves into something new, header bidding has changed the game forever.
The movie stars Clint Eastwood. As The Good guy, he is not necessarily altruistic in nature, but he’s really good at capitalizing on opportunities.
Header Bidding brings those opportunities by providing premium inventory into the programmatic marketplace. No longer are the best impressions locked away in the tower of publisher ad servers. They are now accessible via the myriad of sophisticated Seller-Side Platform (SSP), Exchange and Demand-Side Platform (DSP) technologies. This gives sellers more articulate controls over the rules of engagement for every transaction.
Retargeting, made easier by RTB, can now be applied at all inventory priority levels, improving yield for commerce sites. Elusive audiences could be more readily captured by private marketplaces and the open auction, inviting new advertisers to test, refine, and commit to new deals with new partners.
Meanwhile, demand side systems are given the opportunity to bring more premium buying contracts to their platforms. This could be why some publishers started seeing higher revenue with header bidding in play. During Advertising Week in New York, one publisher cited header bidding as being responsible for 50% lift in CPMs. These types of statistics have been echoed by several others in the industry. While this might not be the panacea that saves the online newspaper, it certainly helps keep a few more lights on.
Next: The Bad
