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My colleague, Duane Kinsey, thinks publishers are about to go solo en masse with their advertising stacks. They may plug and play certain demand channels or platforms, but on the whole, the publisher's will both build its own technology and leverage trusted partners to fill in the gaps.
I go back and forth on the concept, but I have to admit, when a company like the Washington Post decides to go at it alone, and then turn around and offer their tech stack to other publishers, it's hard not to notice.
This week, Digiday is reporting that WashPo is systematically cutting out ad tech partners who don't meet the company's speed performance thresholds. That means ad servers, ad building apps, native ad integrations, and video ad companies are all finding themselves on the outside looking in today.
For publishers, there's only one thing that matters (outside of revenue of course), and that's consumer sentiment and brand affinity. I wrote an article about the Washington Post's ad experience last summer (as well as some others). Long story short, I was so annoyed by my experience that I never even managed to read the article that caught my attention. With The Washington Post's recent move to "infiltrate the vendor space" I can't help but be filled with optimism and hope that the horrible ad experiences most of us find ourselves in every day while reading online will soon be a thing of the past.
It's getting increasingly difficult to argue against the idea that it's best for publishers to take their advertising stacks in-house and cut out the intermediaries once and for all. Both the Washington Post and Purch are shining examples of publishing companies making a move to reclaim control over their advertising ecosystems.
It's a ways out still, but the next generation of advertising online is going to be streamlined, lightweight, and consumer-friendly thanks to the efforts of publishers like The Washington Post. It's also going to be driven by publishers who look to recapture control.
AdTech News And Editorial
The Washington Post cuts off ad tech vendors slowing its site
The Post declined to name which vendors they’ve dropped or share how many vendors they’re currently working with. But Dicker said that over the past year, the publisher has decreased its reliance on vendors “significantly.”
Mediamath launches Curated Market in a bid to overcome programmatic’s brand safety image problem
Following mounting concerns about brand safety and advertisements appearing alongside questionable user-generated content, Australian programmatic player Mediamath has launched its Curated Market offering, which it claims will give advertisers access to large-scale audiences without having to resort to problematic media sources.
Luma Partners' Terry Kawaja: 'Verticalized media is here to stay'
“Im not going to name names, but sufficed to say there are the existing telcos that have invested, some of which are looking to do more, and there’s folks that haven’t made a move yet that are taking a hard look at the space,” he concludes.
Advertisers Only Have Themselves To Blame For Ad Blocking
Once mobile users become more savvy, they will start blocking ads. Who wants to be on a quiet train, trying to read the news and suddenly have sound blasting out of a video advert that can’t be skipped?
Online Video Producers Caught In Struggle Between Advertisers And YouTube
In the last two weeks ad rates have gone down as much as 75 percent. The producers are caught up in a struggle between advertisers and YouTube over ad placement.
Ad Blocking
Adtech vs. Adblock: Computers ruined advertising. Can they save it?
This adblocking controversy presents a unique conflict of interest for publishers and television networks. Asking media to address existential issues about advertising is like demanding an act of Congress to address campaign finance reform.
Google Plans Ad-Blocking Feature in Popular Chrome Browser
Alphabet Inc.’s Google is planning to introduce an ad-blocking feature in the mobile and desktop versions of its popular Chrome web browser, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
Princeton’s Ad-Blocking Superweapon May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
A team of Princeton and Stanford University researchers has fundamentally reinvented how ad-blocking works, in an attempt to put an end to the advertising versus ad-blocking arms race. The ad blocker they've created is lightweight, evaded anti ad-blocking scripts on 50 out of the 50 websites it was tested on, and can block Facebook ads that were previously unblockable.
Acquisitions
Oracle will pay more than $850 million for Moat
Moat has had several incarnations, but most recently it has focused on its role as an auditor for digital ad buyers, where it tries to see if the ads marketers have paid for are appearing where they’re supposed to appear.