COLOGNE — Thank Brian O’Kelley for the new-wave way that publishers are maximizing yield by tapping in to multiple demand sources.
In the words of the AppNexus CEO himself: “I invented header bidding back in 2009.”
Using that technology, publishers don’t have to be hemmed to selling their space through just one ad exchange, they can take bids from multiple exchanges at once.
“The first iteration was more complex for the browser to render,” O’Kelley tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re seeing more technically-savvy ways of implementing header bidding.”
Whilst that may be bearing fruit for publishers, O’Kelley has additional ideas. AppNexus acquired Yieldex two years ago and is now making in-roads in predictive ad trading.
“We took the forecasting and intelligence of Yieldex and built an ad server around it,” he says. “We are able to us Yieldex forecasting, which is used by tens of the largest publishers in the world, to decide better which impression to serve to the user. We see significant increases in price and sell-through over other ad servers in terms of overall yield.”
What’s next, however, is not just yield but more logic. Many readers may be familiar with IFTTT and Zapier, online tools that let consumers make conditional connections between otherwise-connected services (for instance, when Kim Kardashian emails me, flash the kitchen light red).
O’Kelley sees the same “programmable” logic coming to ad trading. “The world is becoming programmable,” he says. “It allows you to layer in logic. We’re doing the same in marketing technology.
‘(For instance), ‘if a user comes to my website and doesn’t come back for three days, then do these things’ – that’s a program … for user messaging and decisioning. We’re going to launch a brand new buying platform built on our own programmable technology.”
This interview was taped at DMEXCO ’16. It is part of a video series of industry leaders. The series is sponsored by Videology. For more Beet.TV coverage of DMEXCO, please visit this page.
