Login
close
Login is restricted to DCN Publisher Members. If you are a DCN Member and don't have an account, register here.
Search

Digital Content Next logo

Menu

Tags containing: "ad tech"

Advertising | Supporter Spotlight

Oracle’s ad tech exit is a wake-up call for data agility

Oracle’s announcement that they are shutting down their ad tech division came as a surprise to their clients as well the industry at large. For media companies heavily reliant on Oracle’s data solutions, it served as a stark reminder: the ability to adapt to unforeseen changes is paramount in today’s data-driven landscape.

This isn’t just a concern for large enterprise companies. Media companies of all sizes need to prioritize data agility. But what exactly is data agility, and why is it so crucial for success in the media world?

Data agility: adaptability in the face of change

Data agility goes beyond simply having a lot of data. It’s about the ability to access, analyze, and leverage your data quickly and efficiently in a constantly changing environment. It’s the freedom to pivot strategies, swap data sources, and adjust workflows with minimal disruption when faced with unexpected challenges.

Since media businesses rely on their data as the backbone of their revenue generation strategy, it’s even more important for them to think about the agility of their data. Agile data can bring many benefits, including:

  • Enhanced Transparency: With readily available, accurate data, media companies gain a clearer picture of audiences, campaign performance, and overall business health.
  • Informed Decision Making: Agile data empowers media companies to react swiftly to market trends and audience preferences. Accessing and gaining real-time insights from  trusted data across the organization can inform campaign optimization, content strategy,  and resource allocation.
  • Competitive Advantage: Data agility enables media companies to adapt to changing trends and audience behaviors, respond effectively to competitor moves, and maintain a competitive edge.
  • Streamlined Collaboration: When data is readily accessible and easily shared across departments, collaboration flourishes. Agile data fosters better communication between marketing, sales, and finance teams, leading to a more unified approach.
  • Resource Allocation: Even the most efficient data operations and engineering teams often struggle to field dozens of daily requests from across the company. Executives that prioritize data agility as part of their budgeting and staffing process can help relieve the  burden placed on their teams. 
  • Future-Proofing Your Business: Data agility allows media companies to be prepared for the unexpected – whether it’s a new technology disruption, a regulatory shift, or a change in audience preferences. Companies that can adapt their data strategy and infrastructure to navigate these changes can avoid derailing their plans.

Building a foundation of data agility

So, how can media companies cultivate data agility? The first step is to invest in a flexible data platform that scales with your needs and offers seamless integration from all the sources that are important to run the business. Choose a data platform that allows non-technical teams to ingest and customize their data with proprietary business rules so they can perform independent analysis. Also consider cloud-based solutions for scalability and flexibility.

Next, make data governance a top priority. Establish clear policies and procedures around data collection, access, and security. This helps maintain data integrity and compliance with internal and external regulations. 

When strong systems are in place, work on developing a data-driven culture where data is readily available across the organization. Provide training and resources to empower even non-engineering members of the team with the skills to understand, analyze, and utilize data effectively.

When both your data platform and teams are up and running, don’t give in to the temptation to “set it and forget it.” Embrace continuous improvement by regularly evaluating the data strategy and infrastructure. Be prepared to adapt your approach as your needs and the media landscape evolve.

A proactive approach always wins

The Oracle situation demonstrates that even established giants can make decisions that disrupt their partners. That’s why taking a proactive approach to data management is essential. Here are few things to look for and some questions to ask when when selecting a data operations platform:

  • Data Source Agnostic: Can the platform easily integrate with data sources across different parts of the business to avoid creating silos? Can it swap in alternative sources,  if needed, to minimize workflow disruption?
  • Streamlined Data Management: How does the platform reduce complexity for your team? What is the process for data ingestion, transformation, and analysis? 
  • Domain Expertise: Are they the right strategic partner? Do they bring relevant domain expertise and best practices into your organization? Can they provide the proper levels of support? 
  • Modular Solutions: Does the platform have modules that are tailored to your specific use case such as campaign analytics, inventory forecasting, and revenue insights? 

Change is inevitable, but preparation is a choice

Thousands of years ago, an ancient Greek philosopher observed that change is the only constant. But change doesn’t have to derail your business. No matter which platform you choose, be sure to plan for the unexpected. By prioritizing data agility, media companies can build a resilient foundation that is adaptable, responsive, and empowers data-driven decision-making in the face of any future change.

About the Author

Ju-kay Kwek is a leader in creating enterprise-scale data analytics products. Before co-founding Switchboard Software, Ju-kay launched Google BigQuery and was a founding product executive for Google Cloud Platform. Ju-kay uses his expertise in media and audience data to help companies like Spotify, Target, DISH, and Dotdash Meredith.

Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

Putting the value back in our industry’s opaque VAT

As 2020, without a doubt the most challenging 12 months in our lifetimes, stumbles to the finish line, one undeniable lesson learned for all publishers is the need to focus on the sustainability of revenue streams. The turbulence of the market, the unexpected upheaval from factors that are unanticipated and entirely out of our control may well have become the new normal. So now, more than ever, publishers need to choose AdTech partners wisely and select those who can demonstrate the ability to deliver a tangible contribution to the bottom line.

Value chain drain

Earlier this year the UK’s ISBA (the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers) released their Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study in association with the Association of Online Publishers and conducted by PwC. This groundbreaking examination of the digital industry’s programmatic advertising supply chain shines a bright light on the lack of transparency shrouding AdTech costs levied against publishers and advertisers. Estimates of these fees range anywhere from 15% to 51% of revenue lost by publishers and of non-media expenses paid by advertisers. Graeme Adams, head of media at BT Group, took part in the investigation and branded the lost cash “a big hole in the value chain.”

These unattributable “taxes” are slow leaks in the plumbing of our ecosystem. They expose both the opaqueness inherent in the marketplace and the lack of trust in advertising technology third-parties. Certainly, we all agree there needs to be a greater level of transparency and accountability throughout what has now become the world’s largest advertising segment. And studies such as these are necessary to facilitate adoption of broadly applied standards and practices. However, painting all AdTech providers with the same negative broad brush runs the real risk of our “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

ROI vs. ROWe

Clearly there are technology vendors out there whose contributions to the efficacy of your programmatic advertising investment or a publisher’s bottom line are rightly suspect. Indeed, there are companies whose primary goal is self-serving. While they may promise to do no harm, they often fall short of guaranteeing measurable results and fully transparent visibility into their operations.

Their compensation is not directly tied to your ability to generate incremental income. Their tools are available for you to activate without the guarantee of a return on your investment. On the other hand, there are a select group of AdTech software providers who receive compensation only when their solution delivers measurable incremental revenue and income. That’s the ultimate measure of accountability.

Vendor or partner

Therefore, working with the right AdTech third-parties can make the difference, not only on your ability to “make your numbers,” but actually become the deciding factor between the survival of your business or its demise. We would modestly suggest that one way to decide who your best options are is to understand the nuanced differences between a vendor and partner:

Vendor: A party in the supply chain that sells goods and services to companies or consumers.

      A vendor is a general term used to describe any seller of goods or services.

Partner: A person or organization you are closely aligned with in some way.

                To partner is to join with another organization in a shared activity.

In summary we recommend a very careful evaluation among the myriad of third-party solution providers. Seek partnerships based upon full transparency, a shared commitment to mutually beneficial results, incremental revenue and income contribution to your bottom-line, and a guaranteed return on your investment.

About the author

Bruce Brandfon is Chief Media Officer of Duration Media. Prior to that he was Executive Vice President of Webspectator . He was Vice President and Managing Director at Publicitas. Prior to joining Publicitas, Bruce was Vice President of Sales for the Philadelphia Media Network. He has also held leadership positions at Scientific American, Newsweek, and Time Inc. Brandfon is Director of the Board of Advisors at Planet Forward. And he’s an Adjunct Professor of Media Studies at Westchester Community College. He contributes frequently to industry publications.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue

Latency: the devastating tax that publishers are ignoring

In recent years, the industry has focused a great deal of attention on the “tech tax” on programmatic spending. This refers to the fees being paid to the various DSPs, SSPs, exchanges, and other parties that sit between publishers and advertisers. Unfortunately, that’s only part of the story. Publishers are losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year to another hidden tax on their sites: latency.

Due to the volume of ad tags on today’s sites—and the slowness they inject into the site experience—publishers are losing untold impressions to ad technology that’s supposed to improve their monetization. Unfortunately, unless publishers actively address this problem, the latency tax is only going to go up. Here’s why.

Latency begets countless other ills for publishers

The true scope of the latency tax on publishers encompasses many sub-taxes. One of the most notable in this regard is viewability. Viewability measurement doesn’t start until an ad has been fully rendered on a page. Thus, laggy load times on a website have a direct impact on viewability. This, in turn has a direct impact on revenue. After all, today’s advertisers are increasingly relying on viewability metrics. This is only when selecting publishers with which to work, but also when determining the impressions for which they will pay.

With regard to latency, the viewability conundrum for publishers goes even deeper. Whether or not ads are viewable—and whether they’re appearing on brand-safe content, for that matter—is gauged by third-party ad tags on publishers’ sites. These tags, ironically enough, contribute to the latency on a publisher’s site, which in turn reduces viewability. On top of it all, thanks to ad tags that fire late or incorrectly, there’s typically a discrepancy between what’s happening on sites in reality and what these third parties say publishers can charge advertisers for. That’s another ding to publisher revenue that’s rarely considered.

And then, of course, there’s the user experience. On average, most publishers see several seconds of latency on their sites before the content loads and then ads begin to populate. The late incoming ads tend to shift content around on the site while users are already in the process of trying to consume it. That’s a bad user experience—and it has a real, tangible effect on a publisher’s bottom line. Latency results in user abandonment. Overtime, it contributes to wholesale ad avoidance, either actively (via ad blockers) or passively (via chosen platforms like iPhone and Safari). This is a direct result of the poor experiences being created by today’s ad tech and the resulting reaction on the user and browser side. 

And yes, it’s going to get worse

The latency tax is already taking a heavy toll on open web publishers’ already-razor-thin margins. And this isn’t a problem that’s going to correct itself. On the contrary, technology advances on the near horizon promise only to exacerbate the issue. Take 5G, for example. As 5G networks and devices gain greater traction over the next two years, consumer expectations for speed in their mobile experiences are going to skyrocket. Unfortunately, faster speeds are only going to call more attention to legacy ad technology on publisher sites that drags down site performance and, correspondingly, monetization via ads. 

For publishers, now is the pivotal time to be seeking new opportunities to streamline site experiences and reduce legacy latency issues within the ad experience. All the ad tech in the world isn’t going to help publishers better compete in the digital landscape if it’s ultimately contributing to a poor user experience and countless lost impressions. Publishers today need a new site-serving paradigm that removes the latency burden of today’s ad tags from their pages and accelerates the overall site experience, ads included. 

Publishers have been quietly paying their latency tax for far too long already. In doing so, they’re ignoring a fast path to revenue that’s already there. It’s time to take a hard look at their current tech stacks. Then they need to make the changes required to get back to a place of speed, good user experience, and profitability. 

Industry-Research | Perspectives

WebRTC is the newest, trickiest front in the fight against redirects

One of the great challenges in digital ad security is the fact that the bad actors always start this race in the lead. Whenever the legitimate ad industry gets to work eradicating one security threat, malvertisers find another point of entry to deploy their sinister wares.

For the past couple of years, the industry has had its sights on auto redirects, which can abruptly end the user’s session, prevent the affected publisher from monetizing that session, and potentially damage that user’s trust in the publisher’s site. The fight against redirects is ongoing. And now it’s complicated by a new attack vector—vulnerabilities in the commonly-used web WebRTC protocol. Those vulnerabilities are now responsible for a quarter of all identified redirects.

Exploiting a vulnerability

WebRTC is a framework that facilitates audio and video calls and chats across different web browsers and mobile apps, including VoIP tech (i.e., web phones). It’s used by a large number of major digital companies—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera. Back in 2015, media outlets reported WebRTC had a security flaw that could expose users’ real IP addresses. At that time, this was treated as a risk for users who wanted to browse anonymously. Now, malvertisers have gotten in on the game, using that same point of entry to unleash redirects on users.

This rash of redirect attacks is particularly sinister because they take advantage of WebRTC, which is a distributed peer-to-peer service. Blacklisting doesn’t work here as a security method, because there’s effectively no server or domain to blacklist. The perpetrator of the attack will send the request for a redirect to a STUN server, which itself can’t be blocked because it’s used by legitimate companies (Google, Microsoft and so on) running legitimate scripts. If you were to block these attacks, you’d block any data from major cloud-based services.

Targeted and tenacious

The scammers’ strategy gets sneakier from there. WebRTC allows bad actors to identify whether the user already has a public IP or is outside of the targeted range for their attack. It even allows them to identify whether the “user” is likely to be a real person or merely an emulator set up as a security measure. If the user does not seem to be a real person within the desired range, they’ll simply be shown a legit ad from a third-party programmatic ad platform. If they “pass muster,” they’re served a redirect code. And now the perpetrator also has logged their VPN, IP and local network addresses.

In short, blocking any one entity launching these redirects is nearly impossible. Their code is written to evade at several possible security points, using channels that are already difficult to moderate because of their decentralized nature. In researching this problem, GeoEdge found some of these bad actors will evade detection even if it means leaving revenue on the table that they could potentially hijack.

The trouble with header bidding

Technically, any form of malvertising could sneak through WebRTC. But so far, the attacks we’ve identified have been redirects. The bad actors are exploiting vulnerabilities in the programmatic marketplace. In particular, they use header bidding, which has been exploited in 87% of redirects through WebRTC. All told, our research has shown that redirects are costing the digital ad industry $325 million per year, and 24% of those redirect attacks exploit the WebRTC loophole.

GeoEdge studied how these malvertisers operate by reverse-engineering scripts, discovering the malicious code, and using it to launch trial attacks. From that point, researchers could investigate how to block attacks via WebRTC without also breaking WebRTC’s functionality. Ad blockers, they found, were one possible method. However, at times, ad blocking technology can prevent WebRTC from working properly.

The real-time approach

A more effective strategy is one that is already becoming industry standard—analyzing code, recognizing when an unfamiliar script show similar characteristics or behaviors to a known threat, and blocking the problem code before it reaches the publisher’s page. This real-time approach has been embraced by a growing number of publishers in the fight against redirects from other vectors. It’s proven similarly effective in guarding the WebRTC entry point, without impeding the user’s ability to communicate with others across various browsers and devices.

The fight against malicious and low-quality ads will always find its way to new fronts. As it does, all legitimate digital companies, including ad security providers, must find those fronts and engage. When the bad actors manage to evade security methods the industry has relied on in the past, it is time to develop new technology. We may not know what risks we’ll face in the future, but for now, the industry’s best bet is to move toward real-time risk detection and blocking as table stakes in the digital security game.

To learn more, download the GeoEdge white paper. WebRTC Malvertising: fighting a new form of obfuscated attacks.
Industry-Research

Research reveals that ad tech is reducing reader trust

Advertising is a fundamental part of news publishers’ revenue model. Within the digital advertising marketplace, programmatic and advertising technology are a large part of ecosystem. According to eMarketer, more than four of every five US digital display ad dollars is a programmatic transaction. Simply defined, programmatic is the automation of the buying and selling of desktop display advertising using real-time-bidding. Included in the programmatic is the usage of ad tech to collect and aggregate user data. A new research report, Guide to Advertising Technology from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, looks into programmatic advertising and the influence of ad tech on the practice, distribution, and perception of journalism.

User experience

The Tow report suggests that news publishers’ reliance on ad tech for user data is threatening both a positive user experience and trust in a news brand. News sites. like other sites, collect user data and tracking codes to offer advertisers targeting campaigns. The data is collected by the ads’ tracking cookies (i.e., Javascript and HTML code) and embedded inside ads. Digital ads also send data to and receive instructions from thousands of servers. The data embedded within these ads creates a heavy load on web browsers, often slowing down the site and negatively impacting the user experience.

Further, even though publishers require that ads on their sites contain no malware, the current ad tech setup can serve malicious codes to reader often compromising user security and privacy.

Social media fallout

The report also examines the impact of the plethora of user data collected by social media platforms on the advertising ecosystem. Unfortunately, publishers cannot compete with the unprecedented ability of Google and Facebook to collect data and in order to provide the same level of targeting opportunities and offerings. And, as stated above, publishers’ drive to collect more consumer data may have the undesired effect of negatively impacting their experience.

The exploit of fake news on social media has also had a significant impact on impacts news publishers. Of specific consequence is Facebook’s change to its News Feed algorithm, which de-prioritizing news articles and content from media brands in favor of content shared by friends and families. Unfortunately, as consumers are exposed to less trustworthy content, their overall sentiment around content being trustworthy declines.

Digital filter bubbles are also a concern as search engines and social media algorithmically tailor content recommendations according to a user’s consumption histories. The research found that this can get to the point that the users are only shown information that conforms with their preexisting biases. Thus, data collection – in the name of better targeting information – may actually lead to less-informed readers.

Advertising still fuels the media economy. That’s why it’s important for media professionals to understand the advertising infrastructural and the role ad technology plays in digital media today. We must keep a close watch on advertising technologies, data collection, digital delivery and continue to weigh their impact on the reader experience and our ability to deliver the news they need.

Advertising | Perspectives

The Google monopoly that no one Is talking about

Most publishers are well aware of the control that Google has long wielded over the digital advertising industry, ever since Google’s acquisition of the now-rebranded DoubleClick back in 2008. The damages caused by Google’s anticompetitive effects are difficult to quantify. However, one of the most concrete manifestations of Google’s monopoly lies in the rise of header bidding — which is literally a hack that the industry has devised to circumvent Google’s powerful position in auctions.

With header bidding, rival exchanges like AppNexus worked with publishers to increase competition for their ads — competition that was previously suppressed by Google. The higher yield that publishers have seen by implementing header bidding represents the quantifiable damages of Google’s hegemony.

The rise in header bidding was heralded as a win for publishers when it came to taking back some control for themselves. Unfortunately, header bidding represented merely a temporary victory. And, ironically, the latency that header bidding introduced may be the leverage Google will use to deliver its next blow against publisher independence. Unless publishers do something about it, that is.

Innovation Stifled, Control Lost

Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick set the stage for its monopoly in the realm of digital advertising. In order to maintain control over each ad impression, Google set up two moats around this business: It made ad serving a low- to no-cost proposition, and it ultimately tightly coupled the use of its ad server and Google’s AdX demand. The ability to even consider adoption of another ad-serving platform was virtually eliminated for the majority of online publishers, which could not afford to lose a steady stream of AdX revenue.

OK, so Google gave publishers a free ad-serving tool and a revenue stream to go along with it. What’s the problem?

The problem, as with all monopolies, is that Google gained an inordinate amount of control. In this case, that control is wielded over the independent publishing landscape. Google’s power stifles innovation and restricts publishers’ options for controlling their own destiny.

Google’s “Solutions” Represent More Control Over Publishers

Prior to header bidding, publishers loaded third-party JavaScript tags in a very slow waterfall after loading DoubleClick. With header bidding, third-party bids arrive beforehand and compete against other line items inside DFP. Unfortunately, this hack of implementing bidding outside of the ad server slows down publisher sites, introducing more latency on top of an already not-so-fast DFP.

Many in the industry (like Amazon) are championing server-side bidding as the antidote to header bidding’s latency. But there are problems: Server-side bidding — no matter whose solution — isn’t a comprehensive cure for header bidding’s latency. It still represents a slow two-step process: retrieving the bid and calling the ad server.

Google’s “answer to header bidding” is Exchange Bidding, which integrates the auction and ad serving so the two-step process is eliminated. This truly is a solution from a technology standpoint, but Exchange Bidding puts publishers right back under Google’s thumb.

Forward-looking publishers are skeptical of Exchange Bidding, as they should be. But they face a tough choice: Give in to Google and forfeit control. Or don’t give in and risk Google seizing control under the guise of solving the site latency problems for them. That’s because Google’s monopoly empire also includes Chrome and search. Google can and will enforce ad format and latency rules in Chrome and press its search monopoly on publishers via Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Via Chrome and AMP, Google has the tools to keep tweaking its approach until it becomes just good enough and easy enough to drive capitulation among publishers. Over the long term, it’s a no-win situation.

Time to Put Up or Shut Up

Publishers must not give up the ground they’ve gained in breaking with Google through header bidding. But to keep moving forward, they must solve for user experience issues caused by the site latency they’ve introduced in a way that decreases their reliance on Google.

Publishers must seek and place value in alternative solutions. No longer can they embrace every potential cure that Google offers for their ills no matter how much easier that path may appear to be. Publishers must solve their user experience problems on their own — before Google steps in and solves them for them, again at the expense of publisher independence. There are alternatives, and there are paths forward that don’t rely on putting all of a publisher’s eggs in the Google basket.

It’s time for publishers to take control of their own destinies, once and for all.

Advertising | Featured Post | Perspectives

Duopoly dystopia

Google and Facebook’s dominance of the digital advertising market is well documented. Pivotal Research’s Brian Wieser estimated at the end of 2017 that these two companies “accounted for 73% of all digital advertising.” In the same report, he also estimated that the duopoly accounted for 83% of all growth, which means their grip is only getting tighter.

Scale is the main reason these companies dominate. Facebook has a huge user base, particularly when you factor in its ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp. And let’s not forget its “like” buttons on more than 8.4 million websites, a number Facebook recently disclosed in its answers to lawmakers’ questions during the Cambridge Analytica hearings. Despite lingering legal questions, those “like” buttons continue to collect data about the sites visited by Facebook users regardless of whether those consumers are logged in to the platform. Even more concerning, the buttons also collect data about non-Facebook users. The result is a massive and rich database of consumers’ personal information and activity, which Facebook offers to advertisers for targeting ads to very specific audiences on and off Facebook’s properties.

Google also offers hugely popular consumer services including its search, Gmail, Chrome, and maps applications. Of course, it mines them for very sensitive information about consumers (e.g. personal messages, friend networks, interests, location). Oh, and let’s not forget that Google has a hand in every part of the digital advertising supply chain. Like Facebook, Google is ubiquitous and nearly impossible for consumers to avoid.

No competition

Some might be tempted to argue that these companies serve as competitors to one another. Except that they don’t compete on price. The fact that these services are offered free of charge has enabled their lawyers to shield them (so far) from any antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. What they really compete over is which company can collect more data about consumers. This unbridled competition for data is even more corrosive as it lacks transparency and they offer no effective choice mechanisms for consumers.

Consumer groups assert that this dynamic is bad for privacy. And, they might have a point: Consumer trust is at all time low while adoption of ad blockers continues to rise. Yet, Google and Facebook haven’t felt the impact of this lack of consumer trust. That’s because these companies don’t care where ads are served and they have virtually unlimited places to serve ads (meaning ads can appear near any content, which can create a negative impact by association). Instead, other tech companies, marketers, and publishers bear the brunt of consumer ire.

A dangerous game

But, there is more going on here. Facebook and Google have created a feeding frenzy in the vast, and expanding, data pool. Other companies recognize that have to jump in or risk their ability to compete for digital advertising dollars. Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo! solely to have more ad technologies and inventory. Combined with the significant information about the activities of their user base, this might give them an opportunity to compete for the duopoly-dominated digital advertising dollars. Not to be outdone, AT&T bought AppNexus, the largest independent ad technology company. It’s hard to fault these companies for joining forces given the world they’re competing in.

From my perspective, the duopoly is creating a giant game of musical chairs. If this dynamic is allowed to continue, it’s not hard to imagine that publishers will be forced to pair up with a telecom provider or to form giant conglomerates in order to ensure that they have a chair when the music stops.

Unfortunately, this will have profound effects on well-known premium publisher brands and an even more devastating impact on the ability for new voices to emerge. Ironically, the internet was supposed to increase the number and diversity of voices. Instead, the duopoly is quietly reshaping the web into a dystopian data collection machine.

Advertising | Perspectives

The shift towards context-based advertising

The 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica scandal, and GDPR represent a tidal shift in how the ad tech and digital media industry will monetize their audience moving forward. And it’s overdue. Demographic data doesn’t define a person’s identity. People define themselves by what matters to them, by their interests, hobbies, and values, and they show this in what they read about online.

As we talk about technology in the publishing industry, we should consider what kind of tech will move us towards monetization through context-based advertising. This protects data privacy, and has the potential to finally gain an advantage over the platforms where many digital advertising dollars have shifted.    

Consumer mistrust of platforms

When consumers found out that Russia played a role in the 2016 election via bots on Twitter, propaganda on Facebook, and even local events in the U.S., we were forced rethink the role social media played in our community. Were they purely a platform? If so, to what degree did they need to police the content and users? Further, if they had so much knowledge about their users, why couldn’t they prevent a malicious influence like Russia from infiltrating their platform?

The Cambridge Analytica scandal certainly didn’t help this cause, and weekly stories break about Facebook continuing to acknowledge privacy and data issues. This has planted the seed of doubt about whether these platforms and the underlying data could be trusted—not just by the general public, but by the marketers who provide the revenue stream for Facebook.

New privacy-conscious controls for consumers

GDPR was borne out of a general concern that consumers had a lack of control and transparency around their digital data—data that bore the monetary fruits of now enormous companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. That data also created the massive ad tech industry that developed complex methods to personalize and optimize ad targeting to the point where most experts in the industry still don’t quite know how the ecosystem works.

GDPR, in some ways, marks a boon for platforms and the end of an era for the ad tech industry. Any platform that collects its own massive amount of first party data (like Facebook, Google, Twitter), can relatively easily get the consent of the population. Ad tech, though, faces the burden of getting consent through 3rd parties, where the value of giving consent was not only unclear but potentially non-existent. The type of re-targeting and personalization that was prevalent before will start to change under GDPR as publisher-direct relationships with consumers become increasingly important.

Context-based advertising

So where does this all lead, in terms of current industry trends? There’s no lack of interest in moving from a programmatic model to more of a subscription-based model. But most of the innovation and investment in digital tech has been focused on ad-tech, data collection. We need to simply “do better” from an advertiser and consumer perspective given these trends.

From the advertiser side, the credibility of their 3rd party data is eroding with GDPR. There are some publishers that are large enough (or are building collectives) to create their own first party pools of data. However, none of them can reach the scale or targeting capabilities of companies like Facebook and Google. Marketers know this, and if they want the best targeting they’ll still go to the duopoly.

That said, because consumer privacy is becoming top of mind for more and more people, marketers are also worried about the experience around ad campaigns they run. They want to create an experience that doesn’t creep people out (for lack of a better term). Interest- or context-based advertising, as a result is coming back into favor for the privacy-conscious brands and marketers.

Targeting ads based on consumers’ interests or the context of what they’re reading instead of their personal data benefits everyone involved. Consumers maintain their privacy and build trust publishers. Publishers can then pass on this trust to brands who want their consumers to know that they care about their privacy. And, publishers who are armed with the right contextual data can still provide an advertising experience that’s targeted, but doesn’t violate consumers’ concerns.

Not only does data around interests protect anonymity, but it speaks to the core of who people are. Marketers who try to understand what matters to their audience through attention data—the topics and stories they pay attention to online—will have a leg-up on connecting that audience with content and products that they want.

Advertising | Perspectives

Will the tracker always get through?

(Note: I work for Mozilla. None of this is secret. None of this is Mozilla policy. Not speaking for Mozilla here.)

A big objection to tracking protection is the idea that the tracker will always get through. Some people suggest that as browsers give users more ability to control how their personal information gets leaked across sites, things won’t get better for users, because third-party tracking will just keep up. On this view, today’s easy-to-block third-party cookies will be replaced by techniques such as passive fingerprinting where it’s hard to tell if the browser is succeeding at protecting the user or not, and users will be stuck in the same place they are now, or worse.

I doubt this is the case because we’re playing a more complex game than just trackers vs. users. The game has at least five sides, and some of the fastest-moving players with the best understanding of the game are the ad fraud hackers. Right now ad fraud is losing in some areas where they had been winning, and the resulting shift in ad fraud is likely to shift the risks and rewards of tracking techniques.

Data center ad fraud

Fraudbots, running in data centers, visit legit sites (with third-party ads and trackers) to pick up a realistic set of third-party cookies to make them look like high-value users. Then the bots visit dedicated fraudulent “cash out” sites (whose operators have the same third-party ads and trackers) to generate valuable ad impressions for those sites.

If you wonder why so many sites made a big deal out of “pivot to video” but can’t remember watching a video ad, this is why. Fraudbots are patient enough to get profiled as, say, a car buyer, and watch those big-money ads. And the money is good enough to motivate fraud hackers to make good bots, usually based on real browser code. When a fraudbot network gets caught and blocked from high-value ads, it gets recycled for lower and lower value forms of advertising. By the time you see traffic for sale on fraud boards, those bots are probably only getting past just enough third-party anti-fraud services to be worth running.

This version of ad fraud has minimal impact on real users. Real users don’t go to fraud sites, and fraudbots do their thing in data centers and don’t touch users’ systems. The companies that pay for it are legit publishers, who not only have to serve pages to fraudbots—remember, a bot needs to visit enough legit sites to look like a real user—but also end up competing with ad fraud for ad revenue. Ad fraud has only really been a problem for legit publishers. The adtech business is fine with it, since they make more money from fraud than the fraud hackers do, and the advertisers are fine with it because fraud is priced in, so they pay the fraud-adjusted price even for real impressions.

What’s new for ad fraud

So what’s changing? More fraudbots in data centers are getting caught, just because the adtech firms have mostly been shamed into filtering out the embarassingly obvious traffic from IP addresses that everyone can tell probably don’t have a human user on them. So where is fraud going now? More fraud is likely to move to a place where a bot can look more realistic but probably not stay up as long—your computer or mobile device. Expect ad fraud concealed within web pages, as a payload for malware, and of course in lots and lots of cheesy native mobile apps. Ad fraud makes way more money than cryptocurrency mining, using less CPU and battery.

So the bad news is that you’re going to have to reformat your uncle’s computer a lot this year, because more client-side fraud is coming. Data center IPs don’t get by the ad networks as well as they once did, so ad fraud is getting personal. The good news, is, hey, you know all that big, scary passive fingerprinting that’s supposed to become the harder-to-beat replacement for the third-party cookie? Client-side fraud has to beat it in order to get paid, so they’ll beat it. As a bonus, client-side bots are way better at attribution fraud (where a fraudulent ad gets credit for a real sale) than data center bots.

Users don’t have to get protected from every possible tracking technique in order to shift the web advertising game from a hacking contest to a reputation contest. It often helps simply to shift the advertiser’s ROI from negative-externality advertising below the ROI of positive-externality advertising.

Advertisers have two possible responses to ad fraud: either try to out-hack it, or join the “flight to quality” and cut back on trying to follow big-money users to low-reputation sites in the first place. Hard-to-detect client-side bots, by making creepy fingerprinting techniques less trustworthy, tend to increase the uncertainty of the hacking option and make flight to quality relatively more attractive.

Innovation | Perspectives

The pros and cons of using artificial intelligence in ad tech

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used more and more in ad tech to solve a variety of problems. Between the high profile acquisitions and its rise as the industry’s latest favorite buzzword, it’s clear that AI is an extremely powerful tool. However, it’s definitely not a silver bullet. Let’s take a look into a few AI pros and cons.

PROS

  • Workflow Efficiencies: One of the largest benefits of AI is how much time it can save on the user side. Without AI, proper campaign optimization takes a lot of time and is absolutely more art than science. Just consider how much data is available on each individual. Even with a target persona in mind, sifting through vendors and guessing at which attributes will perform best is a costly and time consuming exercise at best. Once that’s done, the ad trafficker then needs to toggle pacing, pricing, and potentially dozens of other variables. AI can automate much of that. At which point, the user just needs to pick a goal the AI can optimize toward and let it run giving directional guidance where necessary.
  • More Data Processing than Humanly Possible: Big data and AI go hand in hand regardless of the industry. JP Morgan even published a massive white paper on how they think those two trends will affect investing. When it comes down to it, programmatic trading isn’t all that different from programmatic advertising. It’s all about automated buying and selling to maximize value. AI can “see” and consider as many features as it’s been trained to, considering hundreds or even thousands of variables over the course of a campaign to determine significance. That’s just not something humans can do in any cost-efficient manner.
  • ROI: What happens when you put workflow efficiencies and maximum data activation together? Cost savings. Lots of it. Assuming your AI strategy is working (and your mileage may vary), adopters of AI stand to reap massive benefits. Since AI requires less human capital to operate, adopters stand to gain from not having to hire as many heads and the heads they do hire aren’t focused on tweaking knobs and levers manually. Additionally, since AI learns as it goes, performance constantly improves over time as it begins to distinguish between what’s important and what’s irrelevant.

CONS:

  • Black Box Algorithms: Unless you’re building your own, it’s pretty difficult to know exactly how an AI algorithm works. Two primary reasons for this: 1) The features an algorithm considers are typically a company’s secret sauce, and asking a company to publicize everything that goes in is like asking KFC to share their 11 herbs and spices. 2) Even if there is a degree of visibility into what features are being considered for optimization, oftentimes the amount of data being processed is more than what a human can parsethrough (see Pro #2). Which begs the question…what’s the point of performance if you can’t explain it?
  • Not All AI is Made Equally: If AI is a brain made to learn for a specific purpose, who’s to say whether you’ve chosen the AI equivalent of Einstein or your bratty seven-year-old neighbor? Every partner’s going to represent themselves like they’re Watson, but realistically, that’s impossible. Some partners are better for specific industries, some are probably pure vaporware. Choosing the right partner isn’t easy, and if everyone’s offering an AI solution it’s difficult to say which is the best one for you without at least some degree of upfront investment and a decent amount of research.
  • ROI: Similar to how properly implemented AI can generate huge savings, it can also be a massive sunk cost. The initial barrier to entry – either investing in developing your own algorithms or paying a partner to use theirs – is going to be fairly substantial for most advertisers or publishers. There’s also no guarantee that it’ll work in every scenario. As much as partners would love for you to believe that their AI will make it rain gold bricks every Sunday, that’s just not true. When choosing a partner, don’t just think about their historic performance, but also whether they meet your needs in terms of transparency in both costs and reporting.

As far as AI pros and cons go, it’s hard to say whether AI is right for you. That said, AI is becoming an increasingly important part of a greater shift in the digital advertising ecosystem, and I’m personally interested in seeing how it adapts to other trends. Will AI specced for second price auctions succeed in first price environments? How about in a post-GDPR world? Will the new data restrictions affect performance and will new strategies arise as a result? Who knows, but I’m looking forward to finding out!

Perspectives | Video

Vertical video, brand safety, consolidation, and Meredith: Four predictions for 2018

In 2017, the advertising industry — both buyers and sellers — experienced many changes that will shape the space moving forward. Some were related to the constantly advancing technology that has become so important in the category. Others dealt with an increased demand for greater transparency from partners.

So, with the New Year now underway, there are several areas that I believe are especially critical for the industry to pay attention to in the coming months. Here’s a closer look at four of them.

1. Sharp increase in vertical video.  

While Snapchat’s stock price is declining, at MediaRadar, we observe that the number of brands buying on their platform is rising sharply. One of the unexpected byproducts of Snapchat’s impact on the market is that those advertisers are now more actively running vertical video – everywhere. Simultaneously, we see more internet use of mobile phones than ever. As a result, we predict a continued, steady increase of vertical video as the vertical format becomes more common.

2. Brand safety becomes much more important.

In the beginning of 2017, it seemed like brand safety was a minor issue. However, ater repeated lapses at YouTube (and elsewhere), advertiser confidence is shaken. The scale of the problem is significant. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is taking no chances. She announced she had hired 10,000 people to manually watch videos. And the WSJ’s overview on the people doing the clean-up paints a bleak portrait of what they’re up against. We predict brand safety becomes an important part of 2018 campaigns.

3. Ad tech consolidation.

We believe there will be fewer ad tech companies at the end of 2018. Here are the headwinds the industry faces. First, MediaRadar observes more MSAs between agencies and ad tech players than ever before. Ad spend is being increasingly consolidated and concentrated. Second, high-profile brand safety failures from 2017 are decreasing the amount of buying on programmatic. Third, follow-on investments by venture capital has declined sharply into ad tech firms. And, finally, companies that sell direct are becoming more sophisticated selling against programmatic, as well as co-opting programmatic for their own benefit.

4. Meredith rises.

Industry pundits are quick to fret about the negative impact of disintermediation on traditional media businesses. But disintermediation doesn’t actually favor the new vs. the old. Des Moines-based Meredith Corporation is a wonderful example of this. In the past 10 years, they have been careful buyers, scooping up assets from Gruner + Jahr, Disney, Martha Stewart, Selectable Media, AllRecipes.com, and now Time Inc. They’ve also had big success launching new brands, such as their mega-hit, Magnolia Journal, in 2017. The result is a company that will have approaching $5B in annual revenue. The stock has gone up 6X in the past 10 years. Meredith is clearly a recognized leader in the new media hegemony.

As we look ahead, expect vertical video, brand safety and consolidation – as well as the growth of Meredith Corporation – to be top-of-mind among advertisers in 2018. Closely following any developments in these areas will be crucial to their success next year, and beyond.

Advertising | Innovation

Personalization without people: What happens when no one can track consumers?

The alignment of new laws, reader advocacy, and technology has opened up a challenge to user tracking tools. While some express concern that an end to unbridled tracking will hinder the digital ecosystem, this is an enormous opportunity for publishers to take the lead in building the next generation of personalization technology. However, this evolution in personalization will need to be built on a foundation of editorial metadata, which will drive everything from video playlists to targeted advertising.

A new door opens

A new type of personalization that eschews user-based targeting is coming. In part this will be driven by the fact that many analytics, ad tech, and personalization-tech companies will be deeply affected by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An AdAge headline once proclaimed that the GDPR will “rip global digital ecosystem apart.” While that may be a bit alarmist, the GDPR will force companies operating within the EU, and the third party tools they use, to adhere to a strict opt-in for all tracking. It will also levy severe penalties on those companies within EU jurisdiction that fail to do so.

The omnipresent motivation behind the law, though, has failed to prompt the development of similar legislation in the U.S. Despite results and sentiment that suggest otherwise, targeting remains central to many marketing strategies. Brands have found user targeting programmatic campaigns less effective than they expected. Consumer groups have formed in protest of the functionality of user tracking in action (such as ads appearing with no regards to the content they appear on). Individuals on social networks find retargeting approaching some sort of uncanny valley — a point at which its very accuracy is becoming deeply discomforting. And we’re even seeing the start of a conversation around user targeting happening in Congress.

A victory for publishers

Publishers have a mission to treat their readers and viewers ethically. The good news is that smart publishers can (and do) run user-targeting related tools on that basis. The personalization of ads and news has become a significant trend, one that many are still chasing. However, the fundamental underlying technology is challenged by the GDPR. Even if publishers never conduct any business outside of the U.S., the vendors who power personalization tools do. We operate on literal reams of data but must face a future where comparatively little is available.

These oncoming shifts in the marketplace shouldn’t frighten publishers. They are likely to hurt the thousands of middleware third-party ad tech companies that have failed to deliver on user targeting for years now while skimming profits. A push to decrease both publisher and advertiser reliance on user targeting is an opportunity.

Metadata to the rescue

Publishers need to take a look at the new generation of tools that can provide the data needed for personalization on-page without ever tracking a user. Metadata standards are improving and adding detail. Our current tools consider article relationships mostly in keywords and categories but new ways of telling the story about a story could bring about a revolution in personalization.

Almost by accident, social media has pushed thousands of sites to adopt Open Graph, an RDF-based standard built to provide detailed site data. Search engines have long supported and rewarded structured data like hCard. Improvement in the Schema.org project, along with increased support of JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) by a variety of platforms, has made it an increasingly promising standard. Unfortunately, The Schema Project, which is complex and lacking good documentation and in-action examples, has been challenging to adopt. Publishers have also lacked a clear reward for use. However, that is changing with the announcement of support by Google for the use of structured data for fact checking.

Regardless of how successful the fact checking markup project becomes, it demonstrates that page-to-page relational metadata is joining other complex metadata systems as part of the future of publishing. With privacy concerns on the rise, it behooves publishers to start considering these systems as part of the future of personalization.

A structured future

Beyond keywords and tags, there is an embarrassment of new options for metadata that can create a unique experience on each webpage more tailored to the moment the reader encounters an article than following them with cookies ever was. While a reader might have been shopping for shoes yesterday, what they read today may put them in a very different mindset. And the reader of today is a more useful target for personalization than the reader of yesterday.

What can we build on using enhanced metadata? Geographic coordinates could drive a set of recommendations even more relevant than attempting to geotarget the user. Article authorship has worked well for media companies where the byline promises a particular voice. We can build playlist systems that find their next videos through more than title keywords, looking at producer credits, length and related affiliate offers. Types of content or referenced urls in the body of an article can allow personalization tools to recommend other articles that share a particular format, or ads that sell the referenced type.

Planning beyond keywords

Taking advantage of these opportunities will require different ways of thinking about what everyone creates and how it breaks down. It won’t just be up to an SEO expert to drop tags on a page. News organizations will find that optimizing for search, social, or ads will require taking advantage of all the opportunities that complex metadata provides and operating within a larger plan for how metadata should be handled. The editorial and business sides will need to work together to consider the whole of outlets’ output, prioritizing approaches, and building out tools that automate and suggest metadata structures.

Owners of this process will need to consider personalization on a variety of factors that describe form, format, key ideas and digital objects. They’ll have to build out a framework on how articles connect to each other that will describe small universes of content. A site that takes full advantage of metadata structures can promise a richer experience for readers, viewers and listeners than any provided through cookie-based tracking, an experience based on in-the-moment intent.

Our current generation of overly-targeted ads and recommendations don’t just fail to perform, they’re creepy and overpriced. Our audiences deserve more and our ethics require that we provide it. We have the technology and industry pressure to deploy successful alternatives. Understanding, expanding and adapting the use of detailed metadata across the web will build better media companies and a better open and well-connected internet.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is the Director for Ad Engineering in The Washington Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development group. He is also the lead developer for the open-source tool PressForward and a consultant on content strategy and newsroom workflows. He was one of Folio Magazine’s 15 under 30 in the magazine media industry. He previously worked as Salon.com’s full stack developer. His work has been covered multiple times in journalism.co.uk and he has appeared in The Atlantic, Digiday, Poynter, and Columbia Journalism Review. He has also worked as a journalist, a community manager and a journalism educator.

©2024 Digital Content Next. All Rights Reserved.