• Ads.txt
• Advertising Trends
• Digital Advertising

Marketing Dive—While ads.txt and other measure being taken by digital marketers this year have suggested a more concerted effort to address fraud, the MediaRadar report highlights how fighting fraud can only be effective if the measures are adopted.

• Ads.txt

Campaign—Ads.txt, launched by IAB Tech Labs to combat ad fraud, is a simple text file that publishers host on their sites listing all the suppliers that are authorised to sell inventory on their behalf.

• Ads.txt

The Drum—The introduction of ads.txt by the IAB Tech Lab this year is arguably one of the key breakthroughs to repair trust in digital advertising in 2017, a sector that remains buoyant in terms of growth, but is not without its detractors, especially with the growth of automated trading technologies. The Drum explores its evolution.

BusinessInsider- Ads.txt has been billed a high profile, potentially high impact effort to clean up digital advertising. But it's been moving in slow motion.

Large brands, publishers, ad agencies, ad tech middlemen, industry trade groups and even Google have rallied behind the initiative.

• Brand Safety

Business Insider - The role of media agencies has never been more in doubt, if a new report by the Association of National Advertisers is anything to go by.

More than 35% of companies that responded to a new ANA survey said they had expanded their in-house programmatic media-buying capabilities and limited the role of outside agencies, up from 14% in 2016. Programmatic buying lets advertisers purchase digital ads online algorithmically through a bidding system in real time.

• Interview

On Marketing Technology

MTS: Tell us about your role and how you got here. What inspired you to start an ad sales intelligence company?
I am the CEO and co-founder of MediaRadar. In 2003, I started working for Gruner + Jahr, a German publisher with hundreds of titles worldwide. I loved the company, but was frustrated by the lack of timely industry insights in the media market and believed that almost all media formats would be disintermediated by the internet. With no signs of innovation from existing vendors servicing the market segment, my business partner and I started MediaRadar to meet this growing need. MediaRadar sold to its first client in September 2007.

• Programmatic Advertising

Digiday- Ad tech is full of overblown hype, but one area publishers are making headway in is reducing the number of vendors they use to sell their inventory.

On average, the 500 largest publishers in the U.S. use about six such vendors, down from about eight a year ago, according to aggregate data from ad tracking firm Pathmatics, which provided the data at Digiday’s request. This reduction in vendors suggests that publishers are coming down from their header-bidding sugar highs and getting stricter about what ad tech vendors they work with. This shift puts further pressure on ad tech consolidation, as publishers purge ad tags from their pages to increase page speed, make the ad-supply chain more manageable and reduce their exposure to arbitrage.

• youtube

Digiday - The fear and disappointment that gripped brands in the wake of the brand-safety crisis on YouTube in March has been replaced with pragmatism and caution in the latest one.

• Print Advertising

Folio-It’s been a rather tumultuous year for magazine media, to say the least. With so many consumers reading content on digital platforms, it appears that many publishers are reducing print frequencies or altogether shuttering print editions of magazines to focus on digital initiatives and cut costs.

• Brand Safety

DCN- From YouTube to Facebook, brands are more concerned than ever that their ads are being displayed next to offensive content. This is especially in the light of the most recent YouTube scandal. As a result, some are beginning to shift programmatic spend. But is this the right move? How can agencies and brands better control quality? How can the industry improve?