IAB:n uutena jäsenenä tämän vuoden alussa aloitti Netric, jonka toimitusjohtaja Daniel Ahlbert ottaa ensimmäisessä IAB Blogissa kantaa mm. prebid-ratkaisuihin ja niiden tuomiin hyötyihin julkaisijoiden mainosinventaarissa. Kannattaa siis perehtyä, ainakin jos olet median puolella duunissa.

Ja mitä ihmettä ovat ”sellers.json” ja ”schain”… taasko lisää enkkutermejä? Ei hätää, sillä Daniel kertoo näistäkin termeistä blogissa. Lue alta koko kirjoitus ja tsekkaa, oletko hänen kanssaan samaa mieltä. Kysymyksissä ja jatkokeskusteluissa, kontaktoi daniel.ahlbert@netricsales.com

For Publishers, Open Source Prebid Is Now The Standard

Hello IAB Finland,

We operate and run the Nordic business for Rubicon Project, which is the largest independent ad exchange worldwide. Rubicon recently merged with another publicly listed exchange, Telaria, a leader in connected TV.

We are thrilled to be a new member of IAB Finland.

Cov19 has changed so much – even our perception of the world. In this industry, we have probably all noticed how brands switched a lot of their storytelling to “story doing”. With sincere and honest efforts to help out the communities they serve. It´s been fascinating to see how quickly both the messaging and the creative have changed. Still, there is probably some limitation to how many good friends one can have. That space in our hearts and minds, will be a new battleground for many of our most loved brands.

On the other side, the effect of the crisis are serious and likely long lasting on businesses and society alike. Just looking at the change in media spend across the Nordic regions over the last two months, it´s clear that investments have declined some 30-50 per cent depending on region and media type. Many businesses, the media industry being no exception, have been forced to activate furloughs or and layoffs. In western EU economies, unemployment rates are forecast to double or triple or even beyond that. Any society that will see unemployment rates at those levels, is bound to experience change in the fabric of the society – affecting consumer behavior, housing and real estate, transportation, families and relationships, the political landscape, you name it.

Automation

Gearing society and business towards automation has been ongoing for some time. In our line of the media business, it´s been prevalent for more than a decade. Contracting economies, or if you will, recessions have historically led to shake outs of less advanced services and jobs and accelerated more efficient and automated workflows.

As the stock market has already shown us, big tech companies are seemingly quite well prepared for this reality, while other industries potentially find themselves up for a struggle. More specifically, one could raise concerns over local retail, which for many of our clients historically has been one of the largest advertiser segments. However, the change in consumer behavior here was already well on its way. Postnord, the Nordic logistics company, operating in Denmark and Sweden, has seen an increase in sent packages of 50 per cent during this period and the trend is likely to continue, as will the aim for further automation.

Open Source: One Of The Green Shoots?

Technology-related businesses as whole, and technologies mainly focusing on the media industry have managed to combat the last two months better than some other industries. Years of investment in creating efficiency offers some resilience. In a contracting market, media spend also tends to gravitate towards the places where buyers can measure outcomes closer to real-time.

Across the five Nordic countries, Finland included, the majority of our publishers went through many tactical changes over the last few years implementing Prebid and all that came with it. Header bidding started as an extremely hands-on solution which was quite complex, Prebid has resolved much of this laborious work

In the last two years the open source, industry standard Prebid header bidding has seen productization and community standardization, which continues to lessen that complexity. Very much of that work is done inside the community of Prebid where buy and sell side technologies and publishers has aligned to create better standards. Not forgetting the 500 developers contributing code to Prebid.js.

Prebid Is Allowing For Choice And Control

Prebid.org is fighting the good fight on behalf of publishers. Rubicon Project takes part in the vast majority of the committees and projects that exist which allow a great back and forth flow of information, including chairing many of the committees

It is an exciting time, as publisher involvement is at its highest point – and this is critical to driving solutions around all the industry challenges we face. Not only in the work being done around cookies and alternative identity solutions, but also around a universal floors solution which we believe will finally provide transparency and standardization across all Prebid.org auction participants.

We want publishers to be able to focus on their business and what they're best at. Rubicon Project has been involved in over two thousand header implementations, over the last years out of that process, built a toolset that both our clients and internal teams use to implement, troubleshoot, and optimize revenue streams. We know header bidding can be as complex to set up as it is to maintain and optimize. We want to provide publishers with the data to make business and technical decisions without resource implications being a factor. All the above is included in the Rubicon Project Demand Manager service.

We do still feel strongly that Prebid Server is the future of header bidding and we’re already seeing traction with mobile app and video. Solving the cookie issue is the mandate for 2020. All the tools being built today, both at Rubicon Project and within Prebid.org, are built to solve today’s client-side issues as well as easily translate to server when we’re ready.

Prebid Server, and Demand Manager, support many of the current identity solutions on market as well as the newly created Prebid ID solution, which allows publishers to create and transmit their own IDs or identity vendor IDs in a standardized way to everyone in the auction.

We expect the near future to remain heavily focused on client-side for display but mid-term future will have many hybrid set-ups with one to two client bidders (while 3rd party cookies still apply) and several server-side bidders.

Lastly, Don´t Wait To Activate Sellers.json And Supply Chain Object

Aside from Prebid, the latest industry initiatives form IAB Tech Lab, following on from ads.txt, go together, and are confusingly called sellers.json and schain, even though, in this case they don’t apply only to the seller.

As Digiday explains, these new additions are here to take transparency in media trading further – and apply to exchanges, SSPs and resellers on the sell-side – more specifically, allowing agencies and brands to differentiate between those that benefit the ecosystem and add value, and those that may be bad actors, or simply shouldn’t be there.

Sellers.json works similarly to ads.txt, where each partner lists which other services it works with. And this feeds into supply chain object or Schain, which is a transparent record, for every transaction, of all of the parties that were involved.

Stateside, the Trade Desk is, as you probably already know, one of leaders of the buy side and subsequently a DSP which is leading many of these changes. It was also notably the first to adopt ads.txt.

As you may have seen recently TTD called for sellers to choose between one of Prebid and its alternatives header bidding options, to reduce bid request volume and therefore its running costs, as traffic has rocketed lately.

It gave publishers a deadline for this of just a few weeks. And we understand a previous request, to incorporate sellers.json and Schain involved a similar sort of turnaround, during August last year. Good time is to implement both of these solutions sooner rather than later.

Very good meeting you here and looking forward to seeing you on May 28th.

Best
Daniel, CEO Netric Sales