Last Week In Adops #24 | week ending: January 7, 2018



a weekly email mocking the bullshit in ad tech. sent out every week so you have something to read with that first beer/coffee (I don't judge)

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2018: Double The Anger, Triple The Hot Takes



Well holy shit we lived to see 2018. Partly because I'm bored and partly because I'm dumb I'm making some slight tweaks to the newsletter format. First up I've invited a small group of very smart people to add their takes on the weeks' news. You'll see them in the thank you's at the bottom of the page. I'm also going to add a few non-industry articles for your reading pleasure, since (allegedly) there's more to life than tracking pixels. I also am testing letting companies sponsor posts. They don't get to tell me shit, I don't give them any of your info (no pixels either), and I won't vouch for them unless I've used them, but they do give me beer money and they get in front of a pretty cool audience. Ok that's enough out of me. Oh wait one more announcement, the podcast will come back. More on that at the bottom too. Ok, on with the show.

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This Week's Sponsor: Roxot

Now I've never personally worked with them but I've also never heard a complaint which is pretty surprising (I know a lot of angry people). So when Roxot approached me and asked about sponsoring the newsletter I honestly couldn't think of a reason to say no. They seem like decent folks, a bit selly but apparently we ad folk don't just throw money at people. As far as I can tell their big thing is reporting and helping publishers understand how much they're earning. Sounds noble enough.



For those in the market for an analytic suite they have a few new products on their platform such as

--> http://datahub.roxot.com/.



Again, I've never worked with them but having been approached by a million shitty ad tech companies in my time they at least act like normal humans who aren't trying to sell your watch back to you. If you take a meeting with them tell them you saw this ad. No they didn't ask for that but I'm honestly interested in learning if an ad like this (one that I've fully written w/o feedback) works or if people just scroll past.

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We're Better Than This







🚨 Funny Or Die, Bustle & A Bunch Of Pubs Unwittingly Bought Fake Traffic 🚨 // BUZZFEED

"Unwittingly".



Yeah this one pisses me off. I don’t believe a single one of these publishers was dumb or naive enough to not know what was happening. Taking it a step further I’d say this was exactly their plan, and they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids and that stupid site.



First, Buzzfeed wrote about Screenrush and their fraud-ish methods in a post in October. That post got a lot of traction and anyone even paying the slightest attention to the industry would have been aware of it.



Listen I have my own issues with audience extension (worth a whole post on it’s own) but at least that’s a somewhat more legitimate attempt to still hit your number. Buying traffic from randoms (I knew someone who would call it “turning on the darkness”) to make your sponsored content or some other sale hit it’s number should feel bad. There should be a part of you that says “fuck this definitely isn’t morally or ethically right”.

“Publishers often buy traffic at the end of the month or quarter to ‘make its numbers.’ Traffic sellers often promise the publisher that the traffic is human and will pass through all ad fraud detection filters.”

I don’t know for sure that the above is true but what I know of the industry and the various companies I’ve been pitched by tell me there is a market but holy fuck if you’re a legitimate publisher and you engage in this maybe… fucking… stop. Look just like it’s our job as publishers to call out fraud when we see it in ad tech vendors and agencies it’s also incumbent upon us to shame the fuck out of any “premium” publishers pulling shit like this.



This is our year long BFD. Let's make 2018 the year we stop pulling dumb shit like this. K?

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Other Articles





Snap Gets Downgraded Because Ad Buyers Prefer Instagram // BUSINESS INSIDER

Wall Street is weird man. A single analyst downgrades and tens of millions in market cap evaporate. Not sure if I agree or disagree with the analysis, just think the whole thing is kinda weird.

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Bidders Must Value Brand For Publisher Alliances To Succeed // ADEXCHANGER

[Anonymous Industry Insider]: Do NOT include this post, it does not warrant ANYONE having to read it. This might as well be re-used from a 2010 article about any premium pub created ad net pooling their cross-site inventory.



If anything, irony of this post should be that you don’t need AI to do ANY of this.



And this is why I read very little industry news.



[Anonymous Ad Tech Vendor]: +1 on what [above] said -- if the byline is by a vendor it’s probably garbage



[Ryan's Note]: I had to include these just to show I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO SHITS ON THIS STUFF. Ok carry on.

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Snapchat May Force Users To Watch Three Seconds Of Ads Before Skipping // ADAGE

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself copying Google. What's surprising to me isn’t that this is something Snapchat needs but simply that for a company who prides itself on it's understanding of the user and it's creativity their answer is so devoid of creativity.



“Advertisers are complaining that users skip their ads too quickly”

<literally zero mental thought later>

“Ok don’t let the users skip the ads as quickly as they want”

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U.S. Digital Ad Revenue Explodes During First Half Of 2017 // AXIOS

[Anonymous Insider]: Bullshit don’t believe what you read. Headlines are misleading, I am waiting for the podcast, harder to misrepresent data during a 45-minute podcast interview/conversation



[Ryan's Note]: No clue what [anon] means re: the podcast but I do know that the going phrase I was hearing around publishers in 2017 was "flat is the new up" so I have my doubts anyone felt H1 2017 was one of "explosive growth"

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Server-to-Server Bidding Doesn’t End Up Replacing Header Bidding // DIGIDAY

First I need to show this (in my opinon) absolutely bonkers twitter exchange I saw earlier this week. Credit to Paul for trying to gently lead this person back to sanity.







[Anonymous Vendor]: Some people seemed to interpret this article as saying that people were running the same demand sources through both server side and client side, which isn’t really happening. This isn’t messing with auction dynamics, in other words. There isn’t a super great reason to go server-side only in display today for most publishers. Server-to-server technology is critical for things like video and mobile app, though, and I think that’s what a lot of people are missing. This stuff has to be in place for header bidding to be everywhere, it just doesn’t have a mandate on display.

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HN: The Digital Advertising Duopoly // HACKER NEWS

While the Fred Wilson source article is clearly a Jason Kint wet dream and an interesting - albeit brief - piece on it’s own, the more interesting content is the conversation happening around it. This is from Hacker News. It’s a site mostly followed by a combination of coders, startup founders, angel/vc funders, or the wider orb of wannabe’s (yours truly).



Now you need to understand this is a fairly rational and intelligent group. HN has some of the best (both in depth and breadth) and most intellectual conversations on the open web. A quick glance at the top voted articles right now contains:

Linux page table isolation is not needed on AMD processors

Physicists Uncover Geometric ‘Theory Space’

Lensless camera creates detailed 3-D images without scanning

How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine

All of that to say this is a smart group. But do me a favor and read the comments to this article. The top voted comment says“The whole publishing world is rife with fraud and desperate attempts to increase page views.”The second top comment explains that this is why “we need adblockers”.All this to say (and show) that sometimes we (ad tech) can get so caught up in our own world and we don’t see how outsiders (even intelligent, tangentially related ones) view us as an industry. This is why (below) I'm going to start adding interesting non-ad tech articles to each newsletter.

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Off The Beaten Path



Saving the Free Press From Private Equity // AMERICAN PROSPECT

Inside the Eccentric, Relentless Deal-Making of Masayoshi Son // BLOOMBERG

“OH MY GOD, THIS IS SO F---ED UP”: INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S SECRETIVE, ORGIASTIC DARK SIDE // VANITY FAIR

Discretion Still Matters — Don’t Ruin Your Career By Sharing Too Much // SMASH COMPANY

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Thank You's

Finally, thank you to this group who took the time to actually read my thoughts and input their 2c:

Drew B, Ari P, Sara L, Steph L, Matthew G, Michael R, Rich C, Media Lad, Adam H, Paul G, Ciaran O, Jay G.



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Thanks for reading and have a great week! Or don't. I'm not the boss of you.







