Author Archives: markpilip

Zirconium: The Holdco You’ve Never Heard Of

The slippery nature of online advertising gets better (or worse) all the time. The latest comes from Confiant’s CTO, Jerome Dangu. Turns out there’s a fake agency holdco of sorts, with 28 fake ad agencies under the Zirconium umbrella. They were … Continue reading

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Bet Your Ads Aren’t Loading

Back in the early aughts, I remember getting worked up about losing around 5% of the impressions I paid for. In other words, I paid for 100 ads and could only see 95 in the server logs. The usual explanation … Continue reading

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Immigrants and Education

“Як школа?”is something asked repeatedly of me by my grandparents growing up. The question–“how’s school?”–wasn’t just about whether I was getting A’s. Although the grade was important, the question really was “are you learning?” I found myself thinking about that … Continue reading

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The Verge’s Silicon Valley editor, Casey Newton, tweeted on Thursday: So many publishers think they have audiences, when what they really have is traffic. I think we’re about to find out who has an audience. To find out who has … Continue reading

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Publisher Advice From a Buyer

Dr. Augustine Fou wrote a brilliant article yesterday, Five Unintended Consequences, Counter-intuitive Outcomes that Publishers May Not Have Thought Of,  that got me thinking about the advice I’d give publishers as a buyer. Here they are: Remove all the tracking widgets … Continue reading

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The Finish Line in the Race to the Bottom

Last night, I was doing some analysis of a premium publisher’s site. I encountered RPM optimization in all its glory. And it made me sad and sick. The malvertising at left attempts to: Hijack browser settings Encourage installation of a … Continue reading

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Mad Men Was Better

You used to pay your ad agency a 15% commission back in the day. You groused about the high fees, the bad or non-existent data about campaign performance and wondered why you had to pay for those fancy Madison Ave … Continue reading

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Improve Ad Performance With Slow, Deep, Breathing

My mission for 2018 is to help marketers improve their digital marketing performance. It’s a mess out there. The latest example? News UK (publisher of The Sun and Times of London) finds that SSPs were still offering their inventory for … Continue reading

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Ad Blockers: Common Sense

With the recent news of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws, it’s more important than ever that you do a few things: Install ad blockers (do your homework first* [update: see how-to below]!) Turn on DNT (for whatever that’s worth) … Continue reading

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Happy 2018! AdTech Surveillance Edition

How would you like it if somebody was standing over your shoulder jotting down your user ID (and who knows what else) as you were logging into sites, and then sharing the information with–well, it could be anybody? Thought so. … Continue reading

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