Advertising Technology

Banner ads, for better or worse, got their fair share of the headlines this week. Some hate them, some still love them, but the expertier of experts agree that they're still quite effective. So effective, that fraudsters are still trying to cash in, these days via “domain laundering.” Lastly, despite what else you made have read, the only thing this week that actually came close to #BreakTheInternet was the DFP outage.

• Ad Blocking: Can Publishers Catch A Break? (MediaPost) – New data show that nearly 30% of U.S. web users are using ad blockers, and that number goes up to 41% for the much-coveted Millennial generation. When ads are blocked, ad buyers are left with the chance to spend their money on some other impression somewhere else. Publishers, however, see that impression gone forever and with it the chance to earn revenue from it. So it makes sense that 76% of publishers are worried about ad-blockers. But what can be done about it?

• In Defense of Banner Ads: Everybody Hates Them, but They Work (AdAge) – New York Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo blatantly declared the fall of the banner ad last week, protesting that not only are they ineffective but that “they have ruined the appearance and usability of the web, covering every available pixel of every page with clunky bits of sponsorship.” Despite the claims by Manjoo — just the most recent of many — the banner ad business remains alive and well today. The best defense of the banner ad's effectiveness came from a person whose job it is to make sure client money is spent in the method that will yield the highest return. Tim Goosmann, chief creative at agency True North, writes in AdAge that his agency continues “to design and serve online display advertising … as an integral part of any multichannel campaign.”

• Domain ‘Laundering' Is the Latest Fraud Threat (Wall Street Journal) – There wages a not-so-secret war on ad fraud, featuring players from all sides of the equation. Take a look at one of the latest favored fraud technique from the pilferers of the programmatic landscape. It's called “domain laundering,” and it can make marketers thing they're buying legit ads on proper sites, but what they're actually buying is still (somewhat) legit traffic but on site's they're rather have no part of in purchasing.

Also, Google's DFP went down, here's the fallout …

• Google's DoubleClick Outage Turns Internet Ad-Free For Over an Hour (Wall Street Journal)

• Google's DoubleClick Ad Server Went Down, Costing Publishers Globally ‘$1 Million An Hour' In Lost Revenue (Business Insider)

• DoubleClick Outage Cost Some Publishers Thousands, but Others Cashed In (AdAge)

• DoubleClick outage highlights Google's ‘single-point-of-failure' problem (Digiday)

The industry has been talking about fraud, viewability and measurement for a while now, and these days one thing is becoming crystal clear — it's going to take cooperation on all sides to get any of this solved. This week, we've seen promises of fraud-free ad traffic and a call to action for publishers to help advertisers move past the CTR as the top measure for success in digital advertising.

• Taking programmatic advertising from black box to glass house (VentureBeat) – It's a pretty widely accepted belief that no matter what the transaction, people want to know what they're spending their money on. They want to know how much they're spending and what they're getting in return. The programmatic ad scene can be no different, and advertisers are tired of “taxation without representation.”

• A Better Programmatic Supply Chain Will Root Out Fraud (Adage) – Fraudsters are thriving on the supply side because that's where its easy to get away with it. That being said, it's the supply side that needs to be cleaned up. The industry is starting to take steps to get this cleaning done, but that forward momentum must continue.

• “Fraud-Free” is Suddenly a Selling Point for Online Advertising (Wall Street Journal) – AppNexus and DataXu made headlines this week by offering “fraud free” impressions for advertisers. Going forward, that's something advertisers are going to be looking for and something the sell-side is going to want to offer as well.

• Publishers Need To Help Brands Move Beyond The CTR (AdExchanger) – Another of the growing pains our industry is working through is that of measurement. Of course advertisers want the best return for their investment, and for years that's been measured in how many people click through to their websites, landing pages, social pages, etc. Many on the sell side argue that CTRs aren't the best measurement of digital campaigns. Check out these clear examples of how CTR simply isn't the best measure of success, and what can be done about it.

• Fixing Programmatic Trading Models (Exchange Wire) – Big-time programmatic representatives were on had at ATS New York to discuss several fork-in-the-road situations currently facing the entire industry.

Thanks to some new uses for big data, there are going to be some different ways advertisers can retarget consumers. Mobile video is about to see some exponential growth in terms on inventory bought, but advertisers are still having trouble finding quality video in general available through real-time buying. Publishers are looking to move beyond impression-based pricing, and just what are some of the other challenges the programmatic industry faces going forward?

Here are some of the headlines we found interesting this week:

• Retargeting By Any Other Name Is Still Retargeting (AdExchanger) – Retargeting has long been a strategy of the programmatic advertising space, and ecommerce sites have been huge beneficiaries of the tactic. As big data becomes available to more types of advertisers, the possibilities increase for other industries, such as consumer packaged goods. They're even able to use offline-to-online retargeting to convert consumers.

• Mobile Video Advertising Is Taking Off, As Ad Buyers Pile Billions Of Dollars Into Small-Screen Ads (Business Insider) – Video currently doesn't take up a large chunk of the total spend on mobile advertising, but as handheld technology grows and mobile connectivity speeds increase, video is about to see some rapid growth. In fact, some projections see it as the fastest-growing segment in mobile for at least the next four years.

• Quality Online Video is Scarce, Rubicon Project Says (Wall Street Journal) – Taking a shift back to video in general — mobile and desktop — there is no shortage of advertisers wanting to buy mobile inventory. There's just one problem, and it's that many are saying quality mobile inventory is pretty scarce. Much of the best inventory is still being sold directly, and there's little left for the programmatic space.

• Survey: 80% of Premium Publishers Want to Sell Ads Based on Time (AdAge) – It looks like more publishers are looking for alternatives to impression-based metrics when it comes to ad pricing, and instead opting for a future that measures the amount of time ads are viewable to readers. AdAge reports, “60% are considering transacting based on time, 4% are already testing it, 8% will begin testing it in 2014 and another 8% plan to test it in 2015.”

• The biggest challenges programmatic advertising faces (Digiday) – Several industry executives weigh in on the subject, and bring up things like “moving beyond cookies to publisher cooperation to the hype surrounding it as the be-all and end-all when it's just a part of the media equation.”