Tag Archives: programmatic

Programmatic: Buying or Media?

Posted on Monday, 5 March 2018 8:46 am by

I’ve been asked a couple of times if I’m pro- or anti-programmatic. My answer, sometimes to the asker’s frustration, is “it depends.” Whether or not a medium works for you depends on many things. The first, and most fundamental question … Continue reading →

Posted in digital marketing, Media, Travel | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Bet Your Ads Aren’t Loading

Posted on Tuesday, 23 January 2018 8:27 am by

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 →

Posted in Data, digital marketing, fraud, Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ad Blockers: Common Sense

Posted on Monday, 8 January 2018 9:18 am by

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 →

Posted in Data, digital marketing, fraud, Media, Privacy, Security | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Humans Still Go To Malls

As long as we’re going to malls ourselves and not sending non-human traffic–like drones or social media strategists–there to get our stuff, programmatic OOH makes sense. See, I’m not totally against buying media programmatically!

Aside | Posted on Wednesday, 27 December 2017 8:42 am by | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Zipf: A Counter to Programmatic Nonsense

Posted on Tuesday, 26 December 2017 9:07 am by

One of the arguments in favor of using programmatic buying is “variety.” As in, there’s so many websites available that there’s no efficient way to purchase on that number of sites. Because you can’t do that many direct deals, you … Continue reading →

Posted in digital marketing, Media, Strategy | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Where’s the Bottom of the Barrel?

Posted on Tuesday, 31 October 2017 9:09 am by

This quote from an un-named programmatic specialist at a media company is telling: If you want our $1 to $2 inventory that’s on the open exchange, we’re glad you are interested in it, but you aren’t going to get much … Continue reading →

Posted in digital marketing, fraud, Media | Tagged , | Leave a comment

ANA Pwned by Programmatic

The ANA was running ads on the hate site Breitbart. The attributed it to “an unintentional result of a programmatic buy and it has been removed.” This happened just days after Bob Liodice said “We as leaders should not accept … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on Friday, 13 October 2017 7:52 am by | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Ads.txt: Cui bono?

Posted on Thursday, 5 October 2017 8:27 am by

Ads.txt is not the answer to solving the widespread problem of fraud in the digital marketing ecosystem, but it’s a small step in the right direction. I was glad to hear that MediaMath announced that it will begin rapidly rolling out … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, digital marketing, fraud, Media | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Who’s Going to Debug Digital Advertising?

Posted on Wednesday, 16 August 2017 11:33 am by

In Alan Kay’s talk “How To Invent The Future II” he quotes Tony Hoare: “Debugging is  harder than programming, so don’t use all your cleverness to write the program.” The entire digital ecosystem, so incredibly complicated that nobody can tell … Continue reading →

Posted in Data, digital marketing, Marketing, Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

DSP Transparency

Do your DSP(s) have any rebate agreements with ad exchanges or anybody else? If not, great! Is that explicitly laid out in the contracts you have with them, and do you have full audit rights? And if not, why not? … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on Thursday, 20 July 2017 7:07 am by | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment