It took only a few short years of “programmatic” advertising for a new sub-variant, “header bidding”, to come on to the scene.
But one publisher thinks that technology, which lets ad sellers entertain bids from multiple demand source simultaneously to achieve higher yield, should not be talked about as a distinct product.
“Header itself, overall, was a great concept and it’s revolutionized the way that people are buying,” sauys Meredith data and programmatic VP Chip Schenck in this video interview with Beet.TV. “I think header itself needs to just be part of the conversation and not as its own terminology.”
Schenck says “wrappers”, on which header bidding depends, help achieve that. But he wants people to move “beyond the wrapper itself” and “just think of all of these – header, server to server, direct integration – all as some sort of concurrent demand enablement”.
Schenck also spoke about how publishers can dance around both the large web publishers and the increasingly-important ad-tech suppliers.
Both camps have become a mixture of opportunity and threat for publishers like Meredith.
“The platforms have established that platform-based buying is the way of the future,” Schenck adds.
“So I think the role of publishers is to work around what we (now) look at as foundational partners, which may be your platforms, and then engagement-based partners, where you have category specificity, quality engagements with consumers…”
“The role of the independent publisher is to understand how to engage the consumer more deeply”
This segment is part of a Beet.TV series on innovation in programmatic advertising around header bidding and wrappers. The series is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
