The Ad Ops Podcast

On the podcast this I guess this week we had Daniel Kornblit, who is the GM of Baron’s Media. Baron's is an interesting part of the ad tech world because they are smaller shop, in terms of headcount, but have decided to take a lot of the technology that they would normally pay vendors and to instead build it in-house. This has both dramatically increased their ability to provide services to their clients and cut their internal costs. Barron's started by building an ad server to allow them more flexibility and lower serving costs than anything they could find in the market. They then blanched often built in SSP and now in the process of building a DSB lab with her clients and advertising partners a full range of internal options. As anti-tax has become a larger topic industry, with some reports of it exceeding 55% of overall earnings, it was very ancient to talk to company was built a lot of their own technology in-house. it doesn’t sound easy to both hire the right talent to build this type of technology or to invest the time and energy in rolling out, but it sounds like this is a worthwhile use of money if us if your company can afford.

On this podcast Marc Goldberg was kind enough be our guest and answer several fraud related questions on the industry. He is the CEO of a company called Trust Metrics, which builds whitelists for advertiser and help them buy safer programmatic inventory. Marc raised a very interesting theory, that there is not nearly as much programmatic inventory online as everyone assumes. He is main point is that when you remove the walled gardens, such as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, then take away porn, then take away fraudulent sites and copyright infringers, what you have left isn’t the inventory levels that everyone assumes. This certainly holds true for video and extends across many classes of advertising, such as Mobile Web and In-App display. It was really interesting to hear Marc’s throughs on these formats and how he thinks each inventory class functions differently. Marc talks us through some of the methods his company uses to analyze a publisher site and determine if he things that traffic there is real. One of the great tips that he included was making sure that the domains you’ve set a campaign to run on actually matches the list of domains that your ads served on. Domain spoofing is becoming a larger problem and methods such as this allow you to better understand the inventory that you’re buying.

This week on the podcast we talk with Roy Peleng, who is one of the founders of a company called First Impression. Roy has build the technology that allows a publisher to dynamically test 19 different ad units, along with the monetization partners behind them, to determine what the best format for each page/device type is. I was initially interested in talking with Roy because his comapny is sitting on a huge data set about how users respond to different ad formats and he is in a place to definitively say what formats work the best in what scenarios. It turns out, as with many parts of ad tech, general rules of thumb are rare and almost ever ad format is dependent on the content around it. There is no single format that works the best everywhere, but with enough diligence and testing you can determine the format that works best for you. First Impression, similar to Sortable, is a company that has brining large scale infrastructure and machine learning capabilities to a field that has traditionally be run by humans. I think this new style of ad tech companies are extremely interesting and will make major waves in the next few years as the market changes.

This week on the podcast Shailin Dhar returns to discuss the study that he recently released on advertising fraud. He just released a report that shows how ridiculously easy and profitable it is to make money with bot traffic. Prior to reading this report, I thought that defrauding an advertiser is at least complicated or took some time. It turns out neither of those are true. In under a week, Shailin was able to create a fake publisher site, fill it with bot traffic, and make a profit. He did all of this while having the industry standard anti fraud filters installed on the site. The vast majority of the traffic that he purchased was able to beat MOAT, Double Verify and IAS’s detection platforms, as it was engineered to pass their screening processes.

This week on the podcast Victor Lopez returns to discuss the current trends in programmatic media buying and ad tech. As the industry changes, client needs are also constantly evolving and the media plans that best server brands need to change with them . Victor has extensive experience running programmatic media buying, and is the Programmatic Media Director at Affiperf, which is a subsidiary of Havas. He has recently been promoted to take over buying across all channels of online media. One of the interesting trends that we talked about in this episode is that more dollars flowing into programmatic media and coming from all other channels, not just TV or traditional print. Programmatic spending is increasing at the expense of all other media. Clients initially took some time to warm up to the concept of programmatic, but now are adopting it in larger numbers.

This week on the podcast we talked publisher side latency and header bidding with Gabriel DeWitt, who is the VP of Technical Operations at Index Exchange. Gabe was highly recommended to us as the person to break down the complexities of latency and what most publishers can do to speed their site up. The most frequently talked about concept within latency is the affect that header bidding is having on publisher site. Gabe has an interesting perspective on this and doesn’t think that header bidding has to slow a site down. In many instances it can actually make ads load faster.

This week on the podcast, we talk with Manny Balbin about latency and its associated effects. Manny is the VP of Revenue & Supply Operations at PadSquad. Prior to switching jobs, he spent several years on the vendor side, specifically at Yieldbot. He was highly recommend by our subscribers as the person to talk to about latency on the vendor side. There are several types of latency, and for this episode we are talking about latency from the ad tech vendor perspective, specifically exchanges and ad networks. Manny made several great points in this episode, but perhaps the point that stuck me as the most interesting was how complex latency is. Its very easy to dump the whole issue on publishers for running too many tags on a page or on vendors for not improving their technology. However, latency is really a measure of the whole ecosystem. It can be affected by any participant, especially the user via their device and connection strength. Therefore its important to view managing latency as an evolving process that is never fully complete. It takes ongoing disciple to manage and control latency. Very interesting episode.

This week on the podcast we talk with Jeff Mayer, who is the newly minted Director of Programmatic at Shazam. Jeff has been a previous guest on our podcast (here), where he covered tips on how to set up a programmatic strategy. This far, its been our most popular episode. Jeff was nice enough to come back and cover the topic of pricing programmatic inventory. He has some excellent tips on how to build our your programmatic rate card, which I would highly suggest that everyone follow. We cover topics such as using your Direct Sales team to determine which parts of your audience are selling, how to put sufficient price pressure on programmatic inventory, and ways to ensure that you're not cannibalising your no programmatic inventory, This was a really interesting episode to recored. In talking with Jeff, it sounds like pricing your inventory is not a task that is ever really completed, more a continuous exercise of testing new options and determining where you can make improvements. Thanks again to Jeff for coming on. Jeff's previous episode on Programatic Strategy: http://adpipes.io/blog/simplifying-programmatic-strategy-a-how-to-guide-with-jeffrey-mayer-2/

This week on the podcast we talk with Jeff Mayer, who is the newly minted Director of Programmatic at Shazam. Jeff has been a previous guest on our podcast (here), where he covered tips on how to set up a programmatic strategy. This far, its been our most popular episode. Jeff was nice enough to come back and cover the topic of pricing programmatic inventory. He has some excellent tips on how to build our your programmatic rate card, which I would highly suggest that everyone follow. We cover topics such as using your Direct Sales team to determine which parts of your audience are selling, how to put sufficient price pressure on programmatic inventory, and ways to ensure that you're not cannibalising your no programmatic inventory, This was a really interesting episode to recored. In talking with Jeff, it sounds like pricing your inventory is not a task that is ever really completed, more a continuous exercise of testing new options and determining where you can make improvements. Thanks again to Jeff for coming on. Jeff's previous episode on Programatic Strategy: http://adpipes.io/blog/simplifying-programmatic-strategy-a-how-to-guide-with-jeffrey-mayer-2/

This week on the podcast we discuss ad tech investments, M&A, and fundraising. Its no secret that funding for ad tech has dried up over the last 12 months and this trend is gong to have a major impact on the industry. Our guest this week is Sarah Sluis, who is a Senior Editor at Ad Exchanger and covers all things Ad Tech. You can check out her writing here and here. We’ve been looking for a podcast guest to talk Ad Tech/Digitial Media M&A and Sara has written some great coverage of the industry. The general narrative of the ad tech world is that consolidation is coming, which is hard to argue with. Google and Facebook make a combined 60% of the total revenue in online advertising, which is compressing the margins of smaller companies. Its hard to argue that the remaining 40% of revenue will be able to sustain the amount of ad tech related companies that currently exists. At the same time, its easier than ever to start an Ad Tech company or become a publisher, so the amount of new entrants into the market each year. DSPs, SSPs, and Ad Networks have become commoditized in recent years, and a flood of new companies have joined the market in this space. While Google and Facebook dominate the industry, there is still money to be made and the barriers to entry are low. It feels to me like the ad tech world is at the end of the current cycle, and the next trends are slowly emerging.

Header Bidding has been around for more than a year now, so we wanted to touch base with a publisher who has been running OpenX’s header bidding solution for the last 12 months. Header bidding has hit a reasonable saturation point in the market, but there are still publishers out there who are still feeling out the technology. Martin Calhoun from the Philadelphia Media Network and Miki Rapoport from OpenX were nice enough to join us on the podcast this week to talk through what header bidding has meant for their businesses. Martin gave us some great insights about the set up processes, the amount of time that header bidding has freed up, and how this set up has affected the rest of their programmatic inventory. It was interesting to hear from Miki’s perspective how header bidding has been received from OpenX’s advertising clients. It makes perfect sense that they would prefer to the option of paying a higher CPM to have first look at audiences they would like to reach.

This week on the podcast we talk with Rob Applegate and discuss all things QA Testing. Rob is a great person to talk with about this as he has seen how a QA process runs at a smaller publisher, a large media company and is now running the same process on the Ad tech DSP side. Rob worked at Bleacher Report in its early days, then transition to Turner and has recently joined Virool as their Head of Ad Operations. Rob did a great job in walking us through what he has learned about testing and validating creatives in all of these different environments. We cover how to QA tags technically, how to monitor for suspicious ad calls, and what tools Rob recommends to make this testing easier for an ad ops team. Rob also makes a great point recommending that QA is one of the few revenue related elements that an ad ops can control to ensure that campaigns pull in the maximum amount of money. It makes sense to run these process and ensure that campaigns don’t under deliver and end up costing you money in the form of make-good to you client.

This week on the podcast we’re doing something a little different. If you’re trying to learn more about Ad Ops, perhaps the best online community in existence is the sub reddit [r/adops](https://www.reddit.com/r/adops). The quality of the discussion is extremely high, everyone who posts there is very knowledgable, and its a great place to expand your knowledge. In an industry that badly needs more quality content, this site is invaluable. The sub reddit just passed 3,000 subscribers a week ago, so I wanted to have all of the moderators of the site on the podcast to celebrate and learn more about how the group got its start. These are the people volunteer their time and put the hard work in behind the scenes to ensure that the group functions smoothly. We hit on some interesting points about the industry, as well as what types of discussions each moderator wants to see more of. I would assume that most people that listen to this podcast found it through r/adops, but it you haven’t, I would highly suggest that you subscribe. The more people that join the group, the better it will be for everyone. Below are instructions on how to sign up and get involved.

This week on the podcast we take with Steve Feldman, who is the Senior Manager of Ad Operation at Stack Overflow. I wanted to have Stephen on the podcast because he wrote a really interesting blog post. In it, he discusses the reasons that Stack Overflow isn’t going to do anything about ad blocking and why they are ok with that. The more we discussed ad blocking on this episode, the harder it is to form a concrete opinion on the issue. On the one hand, advertising is what keeps the internet free, allows publisher to create content, and pays the bills for everyone in digital media. On the other hand, its tough to argue that publishers & ad tech companies haven’t over stepped their bounds and with tracking technology and this raises real privacy concerns. This was a very interesting and honest conversation about one of the major issue in the industry today and I appreciate Steve coming on to talk about it.

This week on the podcast we talk with Ivan Guzenko about a variety of topics related to Real Time Bidding. This is a technical deep dive into how real time bidding works, the types of bids that are possible and what this means for the industry. Ivan walks us through the different types of protocols found within OpenRTB and the types of bids that he think aren't being used enough in the industry. Towards the end of the episode, we also get into the concept of derivative style products that could be built on top of ad impressions. Derivatives, such as futures and options, are common in the financial world and conceptually could exist in programmatic world as well. A few companies have discussed creating these products, however none of them have yet created them. Ivan's company, Smarty Ads is looking into the possibility of creating such derivatives, and has promised to keep us up to date on their progress.

This week on the podcast we talk with Madhura Sengupta, who is the Director of Ad Product Technology at Edmunds.com. Madhura has been a frequent speaker and contributor to the ad ops world, so I was excited to have her join us on the podcast to talk about audience segmentation. Segmenting an audience allows a publisher to provide better targeting for advertisers and, therefore, command higher rates. Edmunds has set up their own data warehouse that is used to track, store, and segment their audience in extreme detail. This detail allows them to offer major advertisers, such as Ford, the ability to influence potential customers in the crucial moments before they purchase a car. In this podcast, Madhura walks us through the logical and technology that Edmunds used to build this process. Audience segmentation would be helpful for any publishers, and especially those with audiences interested in major purchases and high value goods. 4d27aehi

This week on the podcast we talk with Randy Westergren, who is a security researcher and wrote a blog post last week about a major security vulnerability present in top tier ad networks and publisher. His blog post does a great job in walking you through the technical details of the issue, and we wanted to have him on the podcast to explain what this means to publishers and ad tech companies. This issue was found across all major ad networks and allows an attacker to hijack the session of a user and any data associated. This issue exists for all publishers, but is the biggest problem for any sites that have user profiles and store confidential info, such as home address or credit card info.

This week on the podcast we talk with John Lemp, who is the Founder of RevContent. John has a long career in the ad tech space, founding several traffic related companies before he started RevContent a few years ago. The main question that we tackle on this episode, is how you start a site and build an audience with the tools that exist today. There are now several sources of traffic available to publishers, but just driving people there won't necessarily make you money. We discuss content strategies, product design and other tools that can help you get started.

This week on the podcast, we talk with Chris Reid, who is the founder of Sortable, which uses machine learning and data science to optimize publisher advertising. Sortable is different than most monetization companies because they have build a large, back-end infrastructure to programmatically analyze users and show them the ad networks that will be most profitable to the publisher. This was fascinating conversation for me, as I have long thought that many industries will head in this direction. The technology that Chris and his team have built allows them to massively out perform traditional optimization. They are seeing huge growth in their publisher base, and this episode should give you an idea as to why.

This is Part 2 of 2 in our series on bot traffic. We talk again with Shailin Dhar, who walks us through the process of purchasing bot traffic and discuss the different options for non human traffic. Not surprisingly, bots have become increasingly sophisticated as the internet has evolved. Depending on the amount of money that you're willing to pay, you can obtain traffic that will pass any detection filter or countermeasure on the market. This raises the interesting point of when it makes more sense to drive actual people to your site.