Intro to Ad Servers & How They Fit in the Ad Tech Landscape

once upon a time digital advertising was simple advertisers paid publishers directly to place ads on their sites the ads were hard-coded by hand right on webpages but that meant digital advertising was slow and inefficient and not scalable so then publishers figured out that ads could be delivered dynamically if the ads sizes and spaces were standardized instead of loading an actual image pages carved out a predefined shape as they loaded and called an external server to retrieve the correct image for the space because these servers are owned and operated by publishers they are called first party ad servers soon publishers started adding more user and page data in requests to the ad server which meant they could sell and manage targeted campaigns or many different advertisers they could sell ads exclusively for consumers in Cleveland to run on Saturdays and only for people with iPhones no wonder ad servers were a big hit but advertisers still had scalability challenges they might run different ads and campaigns on different sites which required emailing bulky files to each publisher a big hassle it was also hard to get timely and reliable performance data so advertisers set up their own third-party ad servers and had publishers redirect page requests for creative to those now the same ad could run with multiple publishers at once plus advertisers could more easily change creative in the middle of a campaign even better advertisers now had first hand and real time performance data both ad buyers and sellers can now handle complexity at scale with more control and visibility about the same time the IAB and other industry groups helped create standards for file size and image dimensions which made it even easier for publishers and advertiser and servers to communicate and scale and that meant rapid growth across the digital advertising industry that's all very cool of course but three big issues remain discrepancy and verification first and third party servers don't always agree on the number of impressions and clicks and advertisers need to know for sure if those iPhone users in Cleveland really saw that ad on Saturday surplus there are more ads across channels and formats mobile apps and video then publishers can sell it's hard to keep up with constantly changing consumer habits demographics publishers page data can't tell for sure attributes like ages or genders of their visitors and advertisers want more precise targeting ad servers can't solve these problems by themselves thousands of companies sell solutions to these problems and that's why the ad tech landscape looks like this infinitives digital ad experts help both publishers and advertisers optimize their ads servers and master their ad tech environments because that's the only way to make sure the right message reaches the right audience in the right time which both ad buyers and sellers want because that's how digital advertising will keep growing that's the four one one on ad servers you

Channel: Infinitive

Views: 28,760

Rating: 4.8769231 out of 5

Keywords: advertising, digital advertising, online advertising, digital marketing, display advertising, ad server, ad tech, publishers, advertisers, brands, lumascape, technology optimization

Id: MCV0K3_UL-A

Length: 3min 26sec (206 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2016