Advertising Technology

It's simple auction economics — the more people bidding on and competing for an item, the higher the price the item will sell for. Why wouldn't publishers want this for their ad inventory?

They do, obviously. But they're not getting it under the current programmatic setup.

The current programmatic auction dynamic is a “members only club,” with many would-be buyers waiting outside to bid on what's left after the initial auction. The approach of ‘Advance Bidding' aims to fix that.

In an effort to shed light on this relatively new concept, here are five things you need to know about Advance Bidding.

First, just what is Advance Bidding?

Advance Bidding is a type of inventory bid management that allows publishers to offer first look and bid opportunity to multiple programmatic partners that is then carried through to the publishers adserver. The set up is powered by a demand partner's javascript tag that is placed on a publisher's page (usually in the header) which requests bids from the partner before the adserver is called. This is sometimes referred to as header tag integrations or tagless integrations. The demand partner passes their bid value (through a key value pair) into the ad tag(s) that call the adserver. A campaign with line items in the publisher's adserver are pre-set to target to those parameters. If the demand partner's campaign wins above all other opportunity, the partner is called to serve the ad at the price they bid to pay.

What is the key benefit?

At its root, the key benefit is Advance Bidding's core concept — it enables publishers to increase bidding competition on a per-impression basis, which can drive up the price and increase overall advertising revenue. By taking cross marketplace bids and placing them in the first auction/marketplace, all marketplaces can compete to win the impression.

What's the main drawback?

At this early stage of Advance Bidding integrations, it's not plug and play. Since we're talking about integrating multiple demand partners, the implementation has to be tailored to each specific partner. This type of custom coding isn't easy, and there are no standards yet defined. Publishers who are early technology adopters shouldn't shy away as effective functionality is achievable through proper setup. More importantly, there are concerns to address around data leakage (the browser exposes a lot about the user and the page to these buyers even if they don't buy) and page latency. Setting up time out limits across partners so pages aren't held up from rendering is super important to avoid hurting the user experience.

What do I need to set this up?

Advance Bidding integrations usually require help from your development team to get the code added to pages as well as support from adops to set up the corresponding campaign line items in your adserver and let's not forget a BD resource to set up the account and integration with the platforms that offer it.

So, who are some of the vendors offering it?

The concept of Advance Bidding is available through integrations from a number of demand/marketplace platforms. To list a few: A9 (Amazon), MediaMath, Sonobi, Rubicon, Index Exchange, OpenX, and Criteo all offer it.

Here at Technorati, we see value in this approach and have built management tools to address some of the key drawbacks to this bidding method.

Technorati, an advertising technology company focused on accelerating publishers programmatic revenues, has partnered with Forensiq, a leading advertising technology company that fights ad fraud, to provide a safe environment for buyers and sellers to transact programmatically with minimal risk of fraud. This successful partnership has helped Technorati achieve industry recognition from the IAB and Pixalate as a leader in quality assurance and seller trust.

In the programmatic landscape where nearly 40 percent of impressions are served to bots, ad fraud is costing advertiser billions in misspent campaign dollars. Technorati has long focused on combating the rise of fraudulent traffic and creating a network that truly benefits both advertisers and publishers.

As a result of these efforts, Technorati earned a spot among the top 25 on Pixalate's Global Seller Trust Index. The index rates companies based on various qualitative analyses to bring trust, transparency, and success to the programmatic marketplace.

“Maintaining network quality is paramount because Technorati holds a crucial role for programmatic publishers,” Technorati CEO Shani Higgins said. “Being transparent and creating trust in the system takes a major step in ensuring those on both sides of the equation know they can transact with confidence. We take our role in the effort to improve the value of digital advertising very seriously.”

Technorati partnered with Forensiq over the summer to further the mission of ensuring that only quality impressions were being served. Through this partnership, Technorati built on its commitment to quality by blocking additional suspicious publishers and millions of impressions in order to ensure that only the highest quality of the inventory was under its management.

“While we did forgo some revenue in the short term by removing all sources of non-human traffic from the network, in the long run our ability to monetize the quality inventory on our network has greatly improved,” Technorati Sr. Director of Network Operations Chris Hallenbeck said. “Forensiq's tools helped us improve the value and performance of our inventory, thereby increasing advertiser demand and quality publisher retention.”

Working with Forensiq and improving the quality of inventory has been one of the contributing factors to growing overall metrics for Technorati. Comparing average CPMs across the Technorati network year over year, Technorati saw an increase of 37% across average Q4 2014 CPMs vs. the prior year.

Showing the commitment to invest in the quality of the inventory helps buyers be more comfortable with the inventory they are placing their ads on when buying through that platform.
“Assuring high quality, fraud-free inventory is a virtuous cycle,” said Dean Harris, CMO for Forensiq. “To borrow a concept from Economics, better quality inventory will perform better and those better performing sites will get more digital investment at a higher CPM because they are trusted and work more effectively.”

Technorati's focus on quality has also resulted in becoming one of the introductory organizations to achieve the IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines, which has a goal of providing transparency to advertisers as well as defining a framework for industry-wide sell-side disclosures to ensure buyers are enabled to make informed decisions.

About Technorati
Technorati is a company of advertising technology specialists working toward rewarding the creators of great content. To accomplish this, Technorati builds tools and services that accelerates publishers' programmatic revenues as well as makes partnering in programmatic easier and more effective for publishers. Technorati is headquartered in San Francisco.

About Forensiq
Forensiq is a fast growing company that has developed and implemented a series of effective solutions to help fight online ad fraud from impressions to clicks to conversions. The firm combines the latest technology plus a dedicated staff of fraud fighters who are obsessed with helping clients stay steps ahead of the bad actors and achieve a better ROI. Forensiq is headquartered in New York City with offices in London and San Francisco. The company won 3 LeadsCouncil LEADER Awards in 2015 plus the Leads Council LEADER Award for Best-In-Class for Fraud Detection in 2014. To learn more, visit http://www.forensiq.com