How to navigate the 3 auction clearinghouses that dominate digital advertising
How to navigate the 3 auction clearinghouses that dominate digital advertising
Usually, when a user visits a website, an ad impression is generated immediately. The ad inventory, which is the amount of ad spaces a publisher has available to sell to an advertiser, is typically valued on the basis of impressions and with the rise of new tech, it is increasingly being sold via programmatic ads.
To gain real value for a pub, the ad inventory needs to be seen by a max number of advertisers at the same time. Thanks to header bidding (HB), pubs found a way to have multiple exchanges bid against each other in real time.
In the market, there are 3 main HB solutions:
– Prebid: an open source HB wrapper solution, free to use for pubs.
– Google open bidding (former exchange bidding): a server-side unified auction, which is often been referred to as Google’s alternative to HB.
– Amazon’ Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM): the amazon’s server side HB suite for publishers.
Over the years the process of trading inventory has become increasingly confusing as an impression can take many paths between the pub and the buyer, making it easy to leak and enabling bad actors to hide in the chain.
In order to bring more transparency and confidence in the supply paths, in 2019 IAB Tech Lab launched two new standards: the SupplyChain Object and sellers.json.
