Commentary

AOL: Next Frontier Is Bringing Header Bidding To Mobile In-App Advertising

RTBlog asked Matt Gillis, SVP of publisher platforms, AOL, to look into his crystal ball. Gillis sees header bidding functionality seguing to mobile in-app advertising, more adoption of header bidding containers, and server-side header bidding in 2017.

Building header bidding into mobile in-app:

The next frontier here is mobile -- and not just mobile Web, but in-app. Candidly, the traditional waterfall on mobile is more challenging to manage. Higher CPMs are held back by too many disparate demand sources in a sequential bid process.

As publishers have seen success across their desktop inventory, they want to see that play out similarly across mobile. And as ad spend on mobile increases, the need to bring the concept of header bidding to mobile in-app experiences will, too. The technology is still evolving to meet the opportunity. Platforms like ours will evolve in 2017 to deliver on mobile objectives.

More adoption of header bidding containers in 2017:

The adoption of header bidding has increased considerably among publishers this year. According to our own survey of 300 publishers, 50% have already implemented header bidding.

The real challenge in header bidding is that as adoption has exploded, and though each new header bidding partner can increase yield, adding multiple header bidding partner code to a Web site introduces a lot complexity across the site. This can slow the load time and impact consumers’ experience—and we see that 75% of publishers use at least five header bidding partners.

In 2017, we expect publishers to think about header bidding optimization. That means a greater focus on header bidding containers that can organize the programmatic process to prevent slow load times and latency.

Containers help publishers add, manage, and organize potential buyers as they enter an ad server. They basically build in a set of rules and guidelines for programmatic auctions. Containers can significantly simplify bidder relationships, offer flexible controls to maximize demand opportunities while preventing latency, and provide transparency into performance across all partners.

Another trend that’s beginning to emerge is server-to-server integrations. These integrations remove latency on the client side, bringing everything to the background, server side. Amazon recently stepped into the space offering its own solution, which is likely to accelerate interest and adoption from header bidding to server-to-server.

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