With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce that BidSwitch and IPONWEB have collaborated to deliver pre- and post-bid invalid traffic (IVT) monitoring across the BidSwitch trading infrastructure with Oracle Advertising Bot Filtration. 

This update replaces our existing proprietary anti-fraud systems – it’s our goal to deliver an even higher standard of independently audited and MRC-accredited IVT detection and filtering for all of our buy-side partners.

What does this change mean for BidSwitch partners? 

With this new update powered by Oracle Moat, BidSwitch partners will enjoy a more secure trading environment:

• BidSwitch already filters out, on a pre-bid basis, any incoming supply that Oracle Moat has flagged as being invalid or originating from invalid sources. Pre-bid filtration is being applied to 100% of supply running through BidSwitch on all creative types and regions. 
• In November, BidSwitch applied post-bid monitoring to a random sampling of impressions throughout our infrastructure which will help us detect and measure any invalid traffic that might evade the pre-bid monitoring system. At launch, post-bid monitoring will be applied to Display and Native formats, with Video monitoring expected to be supported in 2022.
• Based on early indicators, we don’t expect to see any significant change in terms of traffic volumes as a result of this update. 
• Once Oracle Moat is fully operational across the BidSwitch ecosystem, we will deprecate our proprietary Impression Anomaly detection service.  

“Access to up-to-date, market-leading intelligence on invalid traffic is crucial for helping marketers and media professionals reduce losses due to ad fraud,” said Mark Kopera, head of product, Moat for Oracle Advertising. “Oracle Moat’s pre- and post-bid IVT monitoring capabilities via Oracle Advertising Bot Filtration enable IPONWEB clients to provide trustworthy analytics, while also protecting the quality of inventory and revenue potential.”

If you’d like to know more about our collaboration with Oracle Moat, or how the update will improve your experience as a BidSwitch partner, please talk to your account manager.

The post IVT Monitoring now available in BidSwitch, powered by Oracle Moat appeared first on BidSwitch.

Founded in 2012 in London, UK, LoopMe has built its name on solving attribution for advertisers in real-time. Leveraging proprietary first-party, mobile, and GPS data combined with select third-party partnerships, LoopMe delivers measurable, incremental uplift for brand advertisers.

How does LoopMe set itself apart from other SSPs in the programmatic space?

As a business, LoopMe specialises in using AI to drive measurable uplift for business outcomes and more effective advertising across online and offline marketing goals, including brand lift, purchase intent, consideration, foot traffic, and sales. Leveraging our mobile data, powerful Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms means LoopMe only delivers ads when they are most likely to perform against campaign goals (“Intelligent Exchange”).

Our Artificial Intelligence engine makes over 40 million decisions per campaign, serving ads to the top 10% of requests, making it one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal, improving return on ad spend. Across our SSP product, LoopMe offers significant and unique value to our demand partners via our 1PD generated through LoopMe’s survey technology, named ‘PurchaseLoop’, as well as having an AI powered marketing outcomes platform which adjusts QPS in real time according to advertiser demand. This product is called “Intelligent Exchange”.

How does artificial intelligence assist LoopMe’s media delivery and optimization of advertiser outcomes?

LoopMe’s Intelligent Exchange uses AI and first-party data to mirror supply to demand in real time, and does so on a paid impression basis. This means LoopMe throttles QPS up and down per GEO / ad format / publisher, and our new throttling logic optimises the bidstream per individual DSPs based on 5M individual throttle settings updated every 10 minutes.

LoopMe uses its patented PXY algorithm, which improves bid conversion rates with two new features: Smart Sampling, a mechanism to make better use of the large volumes of data we collect and provide our partners only with the traffic they have demand for, and Long Tail Processing. This has been incorporated with the PXY algorithm to allow optimisation for the long tail of rarely seen apps, so they are immediately pushed to full volume whenever we see a demand for them. This increases rCPM and profitability for our DSP partners and the agencies and brands behind this.

Our supply partners also love the product as it increases overall yield, creating a well-rounded, omnichannel product.

Video and rich media ad units have seen significant growth in recent years. How does LoopMe cater to advertisers looking to leverage these formats?

Our marketplace is increasing omnichannel and video (full-screen interstitial, instream, and outstream) across app and web, as well as CTV.

What role does the PurchaseLoop product play in enabling differentiated programmatic strategies for your advertisers?

Advertisers can use LoopMe’s award-winning PurchaseLoop product, which uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to optimize video advertising to real-world business outcomes. This can be delivered programmatically via PMP across all BidSwitch DSPs.

How is LoopMe helping advertisers plan for the imminent cookieless future?

As we navigate a post-identity world, LoopMe is positioned strongly because we have proactively planned for the phasing out of cookies and personal identifiers to ensure we continue to drive excellent results for our clients. Our multivariate approach has shown that we are able to maintain a 96% model performance, even with all identifiers removed, proving LoopMe’s scalable and adaptable ability to deliver lift across campaigns while the industry undergoes significant technical changes.

If you’d like to start leveraging the AI-powered brand uplift of LoopMe via BidSwitch, just reach out to your account manager today to get connected. 

The post Supply-Side Spotlight: LoopMe appeared first on BidSwitch.

In this BidSwitch Partner Q&A, we’re chatting with Jonathan Harrop, Vice President of Global Marketing & Communications at AdColony, to discuss the industry-wide impact of the recently released iOS 15 operating system for Apple devices.

As one of the leading mobile-first players in the programmatic space, AdColony has a stable of industry experts keeping tabs on all the ways Apple’s privacy changes impact marketers. Thanks to their in-app inventory, AdColony is well placed to keep delivering the results its clients expect from their programmatic know-how. But the big items of iOS 15 — the App Privacy Report and Mail Privacy Protection — present challenges every marketer should understand, and AdColony was happy to break it down for us

1.) What impact, if any, do you expect following the roll-out of iOS 15?

It has some serious ramifications for browser-based media, and programmatic flows which have a heavy emphasis on email collection, as well as email campaigns themselves.

As a marketer myself, these are the kinds of changes I expected. Once Apple made its “behind the scenes” privacy with AppTrackingTransparency worth of an advertising and PR campaign, something more consumer facing was only a matter of time. While we deal almost exclusively with in-app traffic at AdColony and the impacts are essentially zero for our relationships with advertisers or publishing partners, they do impact my actual day-to-day.

Private relay and iCloud+ email privacy are huge, massive and important changes that consumers will understand the benefits of. The ability to hide emails, as well as hide opens, clicks, and what is essentially a “lite” VPN to hide web traffic is Apple doubling down on what it sees as a selling point to its products.

That said, the most relevant changes for in-app media is the introduction of the App Privacy Support, which mimics some of the functionality of the Safari Privacy Report which has been in place for a while now, this may have some longer tail impact over time, which I’ll dig into more below.

2.) How do you predict the privacy changes in iOS 15 will impact the programmatic industry at large?

Publishers and bidders which have heavy dependence on email-based identifiers as the ‘handshake’ for identity may lose their degrees of addressability in the same way addressability was impacted for IDFA-based solutions when Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency requirements went into effect this April, mainly if the source of those email-based identifiers are sourced through Apple-driven channels.

Why do I say Apple-driven instead of iOS-driven? Because Apple’s privacy updates also rolled out with the latest version of macOS, iPadOS, and even tvOS, so even CTV audiences using Apple TVs are impacted by these changes. As an industry, we don’t talk about this enough — it’s not an iOS-level complication; it’s an APPLE complication.

3.) Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15 mainly targets preventing open-rate tracking using a pixel pre-load system. Do programmatic traders need to be concerned about these email-focused updates? If so, what actions should be taken?

Anyone using email marketing should be rethinking how they measure success, just like advertisers needed (and in many cases still need to) to adjust how they define success when it comes to campaigns that rely on the IDFA that launched with iOS 14.5.

Most of these changes are very ‘visible’ in terms of most users understand their privacy benefits (as opposed to AppTrackingTransparency, which is behind the scenes) than I am for the overall direction of Apple’s privacy initiatives, which seems like the eventual total obfuscation of device-level identity regardless of whether that’s a device ID, an email, or something else, is the goal.

When it comes to email marketing, D2C companies are potentially in a real “AB test” world of hurt, as email open rate has been a massive part of their testing over the years. Advertisers that are focused on email as their primary method of sales and communication should look to more challenging KPIs to judge email success: Click rate is an obvious upper funnel one, but lower-funnel actions like add to cart, checkout, and things where there’s a defined result tied to that same first-part data email address will need to be more carefully scrutinized to really see what email messaging is driving results.

4.) ITP, first launched in 2017, is being updated so that it will hide users’ IP addresses from trackers. How do you anticipate that this will impact programmatic trading?

I’m going to pivot here since ITP and IP address obfuscation exists outside the Apple updates and focus instead on a similar but not an identical piece of the Apple pie: Apple’s version of a VPN, Private Relay.

Advertisers and publishers should expect most non-app (and insecure in-app, but this should be rare given that ATS Compliance has been mandated for some time now) traffic from Apple devices to be running through the iCloud+ Private Relay.

By giving iCloud+ to every user paying as little as 99 cents for the 50GB cloud storage option, Apple has leapfrogged every VPN out there and made it automatic to boot. This isn’t a new ‘premium tier’ that will have limited penetration and take time to ramp; this is a baked-in anonymity for a vast majority of Apple users globally the moment they install iOS 15.

Private Relay is still in beta and, to be generous, quite iffy.

My personal experience has outright stopped some apps from working on some connection types, despite Charles telling me the traffic is encrypted/ATS compliant and should therefore be unimpacted by Private Relay. I expect Private Relay to remain in beta for a while, as this behaviour isn’t intended, per Apple’s documentation and I’m not enough of a network engineer to know where the problem lies!

5.) Apple is updating SKAdNetwork with an attribution tool, meaning that advertisers will be able to track conversion events. Is this change actually a win for advertisers outside of the walled gardens?

iOS 15 updates to SKAdNetwork include advertisers gaining the ability to get a direct copy of the install postbacks that ad networks and bidders are driving for SKAdNetwork measurement. It was another step forward with industry transparency, which is never a bad thing. However, the net impact is negligible, given that the general industry standard is that the signing party for the SKAdNetwork measured ad (usually the bidder) would be forwarding that postback to the advertiser in order to be paid in the first place (either by way of MMP or direct integration). It does reduce the technical overhead involved for advertisers to receive and validate such install postbacks, at least.

The measurement of conversion events in such postbacks continues to be a limitation for advertisers, bidders, and ad networks alike as it is considerably more restrictive than alternative measurement methods. Apple has a long, long way to go if it wants SKAdNetwork to be seen as equally viable in the industry, and while Apple’s industry-opinion-influenced improvements from SKAN 1.0 to present are welcome changes, I think they’re being deliberately cautious about adding features to avoid giving industry players opportunity to fingerprint and end-run around that restriction. This level of caution has generally made SKAN less attractive for app install advertisers.

6.) The new App Privacy Report in iOS 15 allows users to see precisely how their activity is being tracked across apps. Do you think this will empower users to take control of their data, or will it largely be ignored by the masses?

As I alluded to at the top, iOS 15’s privacy changes can be summed up as “public-facing” in that they have a lot of tools and features that the wider public, rather than adtech insiders and privacy hawks, might care about. iOS 14 (14.5, really) was the opposite.

The Privacy Report is the logical evolution of the so-called nutrition labels, but the availability of similar tools on Android hasn’t exactly set consumers flocking one way or another. I expect the same for iOS; those who care are interested, those who don’t … don’t.

To learn more about connecting to partners like AdColony through BidSwitch, just reach out to your account manager or contact the team directly. 

The post Partner Q&A: AdColony on the Impact of iOS 15 appeared first on BidSwitch.

Since its launch in 2008, GumGum has carved a name for itself by leveraging deep learning technology to create a proprietary contextual intelligence platform known as Verity. In addition to managing the placement of multi-format ads exactly where consumers are most likely to see them, GumGum’s contextual platform is the only system which scans text, images, videos and audio when evaluating online content.

What makes GumGum unique among programmatic supply platforms?

GumGum combines proprietary technology, quality inventory, and eye-catching ad products to drive performance for brands by engaging users on relevant and safe content. We align with the most relevant content by honing in on page-level content that will amplify your brand message, achieve brand safety and suitability by avoiding unsafe content, without constraining campaign reach or performance, and allow you to future-proof your targeting by reaching your desired audience without relying on personal data or cookie. Since Verity gives us a unique and better understanding of, and classification of, the content on these pages, we understand these pages better than any other exchange or SSP. We know things about the page that nobody else knows and we can use that context to more effectively target within these sites. Verity makes these sites more valuable to you than another exchange or SSP would plus we specialize in unique placements across publishers that are not accessible through any other platform. 

What is Verity? How is it different from other contextual solutions? 

Verity is the artificial intelligence at the heart of our platform that scans digital content for offensive text and imagery and filters for eligible inventory based on your brand’s unique safety concerns. Allowing advertisers to accurately deliver their messages in brand safe, contextually relevant environments all before an ad is served. Verity effectively “sees” and analyzes the text and prominent images and in a sense allows GumGum to see and understand a page as a human would – by comprehending the holistic and subtle meaning of all text and imagery on the page. Verity is MRC accredited for this contextual analysis along with brand safety and suitability and delivers the industry’s most sophisticated contextual targeting without sacrificing brand safety or campaign reach. GumGum is the only independent ad tech provider to have this content-level contextual analysis and brand suitability MRC accreditation across desktop and mobile and Verity is the only contextual intelligence solution that considers images, text, videos and metadata when scoring relevance and determining suitability, ensuring brand safety and campaign success. As an added bonus, advertisers can also safely say goodbye to cookies with Verity since the technology relies solely on contextual data and not the behavioral data cookies being collected. 

What types of advertisers are you working with, and what do you see as their typical goals when leveraging Contextual Intelligence?

GumGum offers a complete solution for advertisers of all kinds. We realize that it’s an exciting, but challenging time to be an advertiser. Whether it’s because of changes in ad formats, or changes in policy or declining ad effectiveness, buyers are faced with increasing pressure to find new ways to target their audience and generate attention to their ads. For more than a decade, GumGum has been developing targeting and advertising solutions aimed at giving buyers better alternatives to invasive targeting and interruptive ads. Since Verity runs across a network of thousands of trusted, quality publisher sites and has a unique understanding of those sites allowing advertisers to hone in on the most relevant content to them, this all adds up to better performance regardless of the advertiser. At the end of the day, consumers are more likely to see, engage and recall a GumGum ad – opening up the possibilities for brand awareness and performance driven advertisers. 

How does contextual targeting stack up against Behavioral Targeting? Is it better for certain types of campaigns over others?

GumGum has been proven to outperform both other contextual targeting as well as behavioral targeting thanks to its accredited contextual intelligence engine Verity, across any type of campaign. In a recent study of contextual targeting technologies, Verity not only outperformed the competition by being 69% more accurate, but also outperformed the baseline for contextual targeting by almost 2x. When compared against behavioral targeting, Verity is proven to enable more efficient media buying as well as better ad performance with 41% lower cost per viewability impressions and 48% lower cost per click. The bottom line is that working with GumGum is a smart, viable and future-proof solution for user-based targeting. 

How does Contextual work in formats and channels outside of display, like video, CTV, and audio?

Contextual targeting on the page level has powered all of our media buys for years, but we’ve now bottled up these processing capabilities and made them available across OLV, OTT and CTV channels. We combine natural language processing and computer vision to look at audio transcription, frame sampling (1 frame/ sec) for image recognition & OCR, along with metadata to actually see what’s inside of these video formats – not just the title description or metadata or page (which is what you’re getting with other platforms). Again, since we are able to understand the full context of the video we are able to ensure ads are being placed within relevant, brand-safe video content across these channels. 

What capabilities does the Just Premium acquisition add to GumGum’s value proposition for publishers and advertisers?

By joining forces with Just Premium, we’ll be able to bring clients global scale, new ad products, and further our content level roadmap. GumGum, along with Verity, will now be accessible in 10 key markets globally (across Europe, Mexico, Japan, Canada, U.S.), bringing more publishers and deeper brand and agency relationships. We’ll have access to more attention-grabbing ad units and be well equipped to reach even more consumers without the use of personal data. 

How is GumGum helping advertisers and publishers think about and plan for the cookieless future?

GumGum’s technology does not rely on any data that cookies collect; it solely relies on the contextual data scraped directly from the content. This unlocks the ability for advertisers to reach any audience they want without using any third-party cookies and for publishers to customize their content for niche audiences. Both advertisers and publishers can find the right placements without breaching any privacy laws or relying on any behavioral data. When partnering with GumGum, you can feel safe about letting the cookie crumble.

If you’d like to learn more about taking advantage of GumGum’s best-in-class contextual technology via BidSwitch, just reach out to your account manager today to get started. 

The post Supply-Side Spotlight: GumGum appeared first on BidSwitch.

Originally launched in 2018, Colossus SSP is a supply-side platform with a purpose. Recognising a lack of advertiser focus on smaller niche publishers — especially those which are minority-owned — Colossus made it its mission to amplify these multicultural publishers by aggregating their supply and audiences at scale.

Here’s what Colossus told us about their story, their goals, and their position in the marketplace. 

What makes Colossus SSP unique among programmatic supply platforms?

As a minority-owned SSP, we’re able to work with brands to qualify their diversity spend. We also put culture first and focus on the under-represented voice, whether it’s a specific audience or small publisher. We understand that smaller publishers are often shut out of the space due to lack of traffic, resources, or knowledge and we work with them to make sure they are included. We also understand the value of niche audiences given their buying power, despite their size in comparison to the general market.

Why is it important to have a minority-owned platform representing multicultural media and minority-owned properties?

It’s important to be authentic. When you are a part of the culture that you are selling towards, it gives a form of expertise that’s innate and cannot be taught or bought. It also provides a level of comfort to the buyers as well as strategic partners to understand that we are a part of the fight to see a more equitable and diverse overall ecosystem.

How do you see this benefitting the end users, and visitors to those properties?

We intentionally seek out those who may be unknown as it relates to publishing properties. While we may not be the only Supply Side Partner a publisher works with, we may very well be the first in which there’s no duplication to their traffic. With that, there’s high value placed on the targeted users and they now have an opportunity to show the power of their dollar and influence.

What types of advertisers are you working with, and what do you see as their typical goals when working with Colossus SSP?

Colossus SSP works with advertisers across all categories such as telecom, CPG, Auto and Insurance just to name a few. Given the recent and very tragic social injustice events witnessed across the US, many brands began to put plans into action that showed their support of Black Americans. With that, we received many inbound enquiries regarding the brands wanting to purposefully spend on Black-Owned properties which was the basic short term goal.

Your site mentions wanting to normalize diversity in the field of programmatic. What would you say is the current state of diversity in ad-tech, and how do you see it evolving? What changes would you like to see take place?

Diversity needs to be intentional and graded equally. 

At this time, there’s a lot of talk but when we see the action attempted to be put into play, we are met with strict inclusion lists that actually prohibit brands from reaching a scaled audience. We would like to see less dictation and more questions being asked from partners such as Colossus on how to diversify. 

If you’d like to know more about connecting to Colossus SSP via BidSwitch, simply reach out to your account manager today to get the ball rolling.

The post Supply-Side Spotlight: Colossus SSP appeared first on BidSwitch.

BidSwitch’s intelligent traffic routing system, SmartSwitch, saved Bidtellect 35% on these costs for one connected supply partner, and helped achieve a 2.7 times increase in auction win rate (meaning that they are almost three times as likely to win the programmatic advertising auction), ultimately improving performance.

Bidtellect is a buy-side platform that helps brand advertisers reach targeted audiences in contextually relevant environments at scale across the web. Its technology prioritises contextual relevance and sentiment and works in conjunction with audience creation, an approach that caters to the specific goals of each advertiser and enables brands to engage consumers at peak moments of intent. Bidtellect’s proprietary algorithms go beyond domain-level targeting, optimizing down to the ad placement level to ensure advertisers reach the right audience and achieve ROI.

Optimization conducted at the bid opportunity level requires listening to huge amounts of the programmatic bidstream, which is demanding from both the technological and hardware perspective, driving up costs while reducing the effectiveness of media spend. Bidtellect turned to BidSwitch to manage some of its over 40 connections to SSP partners, leaning on BidSwitch’s SmartSwitch to filter out unwanted inventory, reducing the costs associated with listening to huge volumes of bidstream data and helping Bidtellect improve the overall bidding performance for their clients.

To further help buy-side effectiveness, Bidtellect recently announced  AARDvark (Automatic Algorithmic Rate Determination), its proprietary automatic bid factoring technology. Bid factoring is a traditionally manual process in other platforms; AARDvark’s automatic optimization tool analyses non-identity, cookieless signals to determine the best ad opportunities to achieve advertiser goals and save traders time. Bidtellect also recently announced its expansion into formats beyond native ad types, including display, promising the same context-driven optimization technology and maximum performance outcomes to advertisers.

BidSwitch’s SmartSwitch technology applies proprietary machine learning to the global programmatic bidstream that BidSwitch processes daily from more than 130 supply partners. Looking at the buying patterns and history for each demand partner, while also taking into account the unique supply filtering rules that the demand partners set up themselves, SmartSwitch determines the best supply to send to each buyer, optimizing and shaping the bid traffic to reduce the volume of bid requests buyers have to listen to, without affecting bidder performance.

John DeSantis, Portfolio Director at BidSwitch, says: “Programmatic marketing provides media buyers with a flexible and effective tool to reach consumers with timely messages, but the volume of inventory can make it unwieldy and reduces the effectiveness of using it.  As many of the opportunities in the bidstream are irrelevant, taking these duplicates and undesirable inventory out of the equation does not impact results, but can dramatically lower hardware costs. SmartSwitch provides buy-side partners with sophisticated and automated tools to filter out what they aren’t likely to buy, freeing up their listening capacity to only receive impression opportunities that they are likely to want. Bidtellect is able to extend the value derived from intelligent traffic management to its clients through more performative campaigns and efficient media.”

Michael Feeley, Vice President, Supply Partnerships and Product Solutions at Bidtellect says: “Everything we do at Bidtellect focuses on putting brand content in front of consumers at the right time within the environments when they are most receptive and likely to engage – in the most efficient way possible. While the programmatic ecosystem generates the best opportunities to do this, the sheer amount of inventory hinders this process. Working with the BidSwitch team and seeing such unequivocal results leaves no doubt that SmartSwitch is a highly valuable tool to have within our arsenal for achieving those goals.”

View the original press release here

About Bidtellect:

Bidtellect is a performance-driven DSP specializing in context-first optimization, cookieless solutions, and native programmatic. We pride ourselves in premium supply quality and optimizing down to the placement level, while offering deep campaign insights across a wide range of KPIs for our brand, agency, and trading desk partners. Bidtellect consistently outperforms competitors in nearly every head-to-head performance test thanks to industry-leading brand safety technology, premium supply quality, superior context capabilities, and proprietary bid factoring and optimization technology: delivering ads that work.

About BidSwitch:

Engineered by IPONWEB, BidSwitch helps programmatic ad-tech and media companies overcome increasing marketplace complexity by providing partners an efficient and transparent way to manage access to supply and demand at global scale. Unlike an exchange, BidSwitch operates as a neutral, infrastructure network, intelligently routing and filtering the bidstream to ensure optimized, non-fraudulent access for buyers and sellers. Today, BidSwitch facilitates more than 350 supply and demand technology partners globally to connect and trade media across the display, mobile, video TV, native and DOOH ecosystems, all via a single standardized integration. Visit www.bidswitch.com to learn more.

About IPONWEB:

IPONWEB​ is an industry pioneer and world leader in the engineering and operation of highly customized, real-time media trading systems for publishers, advertisers, agencies and innovative technology companies. With more than 15 years’ experience driving innovation in the ad exchange and real-time technology space, IPONWEB is the ‘behind the scenes’ technology provider that many of the world’s leading industry players rely on to successfully power their media and data businesses. Visit www.iponweb.com​ to learn more.

The post Bidtellect Saves 35% on Bidstream Processing Costs Using BidSwitch appeared first on BidSwitch.

At BidSwitch, we’ve been keeping a close eye on CTV trends and monitoring the growth of this burgeoning space across the programmatic ecosystem. In fact, the boom in CTV ad spend – and how programmatic is a catalyst for its growth – was the focus of our most recent webinar. 

If you’re already sold on the CTV opportunity, our team has been working on something that should help you make the most of it. 

Over the last year, we’ve worked closely with our partners to conduct a series of consultations and analysis to begin to carve out some best practices for trading CTV programmatically. 

Whether you’re a CTV buyer or seller, our quick guide to CTV trading best practices is full of practical, actionable steps you should already be taking to optimize your trading – and maximize your results.

In this guide, we cover several topics which are essential for effective CTV trading, including:

• • Content objects
  • app-ads.txt
  • Server Side Ad Insertion (SSAI)
  • Impression tracking
  • …and more

To download the free PDF guide, simply click here. No sign-up required.

The post Best Practices for Trading CTV with BidSwitch appeared first on BidSwitch.

Moderated by BidSwitch Director of Client Services, Ryan Chandler, the webinar featured a panel of some of the industry’s leading experts in the area of programmatic connected TV:

• • Brock Bradley, Director of Supply Services, Samsung Ads
  • Ilana Wollin, VP of Global Partnerships, Xandr
  • Tim Ware, Executive Director of Programmatic Ad Revenue, Crackle Plus

The state of CTV in 2021

The webinar kicked off with a summary of exactly where we are with CTV in 2021. 

Naturally, in the wake of the global pandemic, things have changed quite a bit – but what impact has it had on the future of CTV and programmatic buying? 

To put it in hard numbers, the CTV sector has seen exponential growth over the past year thanks in part to cord-cutting and the fact that, well, we’ve all been at home a lot more. 

According to research carried out by eMarketer, we’re expecting 70% of ad spend on CTV to be conducted via programmatic channels this year – but there’s still plenty of room to grow. According to Digiday / Innovid, 24% of advertisers have just made the shift to CTV advertising in the last 12 months, while another 24% haven’t made the jump at all just yet.  

Even with adoption numbers rising, CTV still faces some challenges in converting those remaining advertisers. Primarily, the specific barriers to entry are:

• • Difficulty finding the right audiences via CTV platforms
  • Achieving scale given CTV’s limitations on reach and frequency
  • Fragmentation of inventory across differing hardware and software platforms
  • Inconsistent measurement solutions due to a lack of standardization

Key insights from the webinar

You can watch the full webinar to follow our panel’s conversation on where CTV is today, an in-depth look at the challenges it faces, and where it might be going in the wake of the looming identity crisis. In the meantime, here are some of the key insights our panelists shared from the front line of programmatic CTV. 

On the subject of barriers to scale:

Speaking to both transparency and the need for standardization in the CTV space, Ilana Wollin explained that it’s essential for publishers to help buyers better understand the content being shown via CTV, and therefore the potential audiences they can tap into. She also mentioned the need for Supply Path Optimization (SPO) in CTV and how cleaner paths to supply could, over time, bring scale to the space. 

On the subject of identity: 

Tim Ware explained that, because CTV has never relied on cookies for identity resolution, the playing field has actually been levelled somewhat with the upcoming changes to third-party cookies. He went on to explain that his suspicion is that the industry will eventually decide on a standard identity solution for CTV to ensure good match rates across the board, with some data partners already taking the lead. 

On the subject of open vs. private transactions in CTV:

Brock Bradley told the audience that, so far, Private Marketplaces (PMPs) are driving most of the transactions in the CTV space, especially now that top-tier AVOD apps are entering the picture. But, to achieve true scalability, Brock explains that advertisers can’t ignore the open marketplace and the opportunities it holds. The only problem is a hesitancy in some advertisers due to concerns about fraud and a lack of auditing. That said, with initiatives like app-ads.txt and better standardization, he can see a future in which advertisers are much more comfortable in the open marketplace of CTV. 

Get the full picture

This recap is really just a glimpse into the in-depth discussion that was had during the webinar. For the full picture, you can either watch the video in a new tab or simply click below to view it right here. 

Have a question about BidSwitch or want to get connected? Get in touch today to learn more. 

If you’re already taking advantage of the CTV opportunity and looking for some best practice tips on the buy or the sell side, be sure to download our free PDF guide Best Practices for Trading CTV Supply through BidSwitch

The post Webinar Recap: How Programmatic Buying is Driving CTV Scale appeared first on BidSwitch.

Is this the end of 1:1 personalized digital tactics like retargeting, cross-channel attribution, frequency capping, and more? 

At BidSwitch, we don’t think so. That’s why today we’re pleased to announce the integration of LiveRamp Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) into BidSwitch. 

LiveRamp, BidSwitch, and the future of the open web

Taking a privacy-first approach to online advertising has been a long time coming, and it’s one we fully support at BidSwitch. 

But with the underlying value exchange between consumers and publishers unchanged, it’s difficult to see how the loss of the third-party cookie won’t mean diminished results on both sides of the ecosystem.  

This is where LiveRamp Authenticated Traffic Solution steps into the spotlight. 

Here’s how it works. 

A user authenticates on the publisher’s property by providing a piece of directly identifiable information such as an email address. Using ATS, the publisher can connect the information to LiveRamp’s pseudonymous, people-based identifier, RampID, which is encrypted within an “envelope” and stored in a first-party cookie context. 

Publishers can permission secure access of the envelopes to specific buy- and sell-side platforms and manage how they want to monetize their inventory with ATS. LiveRamp enables envelope decryption and encoding of RampIDs on a platform-by-platform basis in the bidstream, so SSPs can securely pass RampIDs to BidSwitch, along with the bid request and BidSwitch can send the traffic on to each DSP as part of the standard RTB process.

No third-party cookies. No PII. No fuss. 

How LiveRamp brings brands and publishers together through BidSwitch

Along with the advantages of maintaining the same targeting and attribution techniques you already use with cookie-based methodologies, our integration with LiveRamp brings plenty of other benefits from one end of the supply chain to the other:

• Unique user IDs with full privacy control. Saying goodbye to cookies is much easier when you have an alternative already in place. ATS leverages trusted value exchanges with consumers to reach audiences on a people-based level via a privacy-conscious, pseudonymous identifier.

• Unlock premium, people-based authenticated inventory. ATS enables publishers to directly connect their authenticated inventory to advertiser demand. By enhancing their first-party data with people-based identity, publishers ensure brands can reach their known audiences on a personalized level.

• A more streamlined RTB pipeline. The use of a single, people-based identifier means much less syncing is required on page load, reducing hardware overhead and improving the end user experience.

• Transparent addressability across cookieless environments. Whether you’re targeting users in Safari, Firefox, or the soon-to-be cookieless Chrome, ATS ensures you can match, measure, and optimize across inventory sources.

• Expanded options for programmatic trading partners. Leveraging ATS means you’ll be able to trade with any other platform that also uses RampID – no direct connection required.

Take control of your identity strategy

Whether you’re a buy- or sell-side BidSwitch partner, you can start defining your cookieless future today with our LiveRamp integration. 

Support for RampID is already enabled in BidSwitch, so we can help you get up and running in no time. 

Read more about the nuts and bolts of the integration in our Documentation Portal, or simply get in touch with your BidSwitch account manager to get started today.  

The post BidSwitch and LiveRamp: Setting the Stage for a Privacy-First Future appeared first on BidSwitch.

Supporting the Ecosystem

At BidSwitch, we’re proud to serve as a neutral intermediary in the programmatic ecosystem. We see our role as a custodian of the bidstream, opening doors for new partner integrations, optimising programmatic performance, and minimising the technical burdens associated with scaled trading on both the demand and supply side.

We asked Isaac Schechtman, Head of Product and Solution Engineering at IPONWEB and BidSwitch, to explain more about our position on the shifting landscape around digital identity:

“As a neutral platform committed to enabling optimal trading among SSP and DSP clients, BidSwitch has been partnering with industry trade leaders to lay the foundation for a cookieless future for over a year now. Most, if not all, identifiers can be leveraged by SSPs and DSPs connected through BidSwitch if passed via the open RTB standard EIDS (Extended IDs) field. Other solutions including the ‘avian’ ones like FLoC, TURTLEDOVE, SWAN – as well as new contextual options – are also under evaluation and some will be available for client testing and usage in the near future.”

As for the overall vision for identity and BidSwitch, Isaac said:

“The long-term goal is to ensure support for any mix of these that our clients and partners want to leverage. In the short term, that means a focus on testing solutions for insights into things like coverage and performance.”

In detail: Support for identity solutions in BidSwitch

With so much complexity in the space already, below is a summary of the steps we’re currently taking at BidSwitch to make the move to a cookieless future as frictionless as possible for our partners across the ecosystem.

We will support the Privacy Sandbox. Perhaps the most well-known answer to the question of identity, we’re planning to fully support the mainstream Privacy Sandbox, also known as the ‘avian’ solutions. Initially, we will deliver support for FloC and TURTLEDOVE, but we will also add support for FLEDGE once it’s been rolled out by Google.

We will support Apple’s SKAdnetwork. For partners who focus on app installations, we already support Apple’s privacy-focused SKAdnetwork framework. This includes registration with the IAB for the universal ID list.

We will support select third-party ID solutions. We currently support solutions from LiveIntent, LiveRamp, ID5, The Trade Desk, and PreBid through the use of the “EIDS” field. In the near future, we’ll support all third-party IDs sent within supply-side bid requests via the EIDS extension field. This will also enable support for several additional solutions via BidSwitch such as the Parrable ID,Panorama,>Net ID and the Brightpool ID.

We are focusing on contextual signals, too. BidSwitch currently offers support for Oracle’s Grapeshot contextual services, and we are exploring additional opportunities with partners such as Peer 39 to round out our support for contextual targeting.

We will keep testing, testing, testing. As we move closer to a cookieless future, we’ll be running continuous tests on the various ID solutions and sharing results with our partners. These critical insights about the effectiveness of the IDs will help clients make more informed decisions about which solutions are right for them.

Have other ideas? Just let us know. At BidSwitch, we’re always open to evaluating other identity solutions, provided it makes sense for all parties involved.

No matter how you’re planning to tackle identity in the years ahead, BidSwitch is here to help you succeed. So, if you have any questions about the shift to the cookieless reality – or just want to get started with BidSwitch – get in touch to learn more today.

The post How BidSwitch is Approaching Identity in the Cookieless World appeared first on BidSwitch.