The Guardian U.S. is experimenting with header-bidding technology, as the publisher seeks to strike the right balance between increasing the number of bids on its advertising inventory without detracting from the user experience in a real-time bidding context, according to a report in The Drum. The Guardian confirmed it's testing several ad tech options, and working with a number of vendors including AppNexus and Rubicon Project.

AdExchanger's Sarah Sluis interviews Justin Stefano, co-founder and CEO of Refinery29, the hot publisher catering to millennial women and the advertisers that want to reach them. Notably, Refinery29 doesn't sell media programmatically.Why not? Stefano said: "The reason why brands come to us and want to work with us is because of how well we know our audience and how closely we work with them to drive results. We solve a big problem for brands, which is relevance with millennial women. When you work with a third party, an ad network or programmatic network, you can’t do that. You just …

Microsoft plans to build ad-blocking features into the next iteration of its Edge browser. This isn't a huge surprise, since Apple has built ad blocking into the latest versions of Safari on mobile devices. ZDNet reports the former CTO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich, has launched a startup called Brave, whose lead product is an ad-blocking browser. New features in Windows 10 are expected soon and more information may be released about the ad-blocking function.

Now owners of specific Samsung devices have a new browser option. Samsung debuted an internet app very own that deliver ad blocking if consumers have a dedicated third-party app installed. Engadget notes that Samsung had a rough time of it with ad-blocking for its Android browser. It initially launched it for devices on Marshmallow (Android 6.0), but Google quickly pulled the required partner app, Adblocker Plus. Google subsequently changed course and now there's a variety of ad blockers consumers can use with Samsung's browser.

It's no secret that the digital media industry has a problem with bloated ads and sluggish web page loads, both are reasons why many consumers have turned to ad blockers. The issues are coming to a head as "people increasingly find content through social media links and view content on mobile devices—two outlets where speed is crucial to keep consumers from growing impatient and moving on," reports Mike Shields in The Wall Street Journal. Now publishers are placing their content directly on Facebook via its Instant Articles program instead of redirecting readers back to their own websites. Publishers are also …

Speaking with Beet.TV, Accuen Global CEO Megan Pagliuca maintains that the future of programmatic media buying will involve more direct relationships between advertisers/agencies and publishers—a trend that will be hastened by header bidding. On the road to programmatic, first there was manual buying, and then came ad networks, which made programmatic media easier because of their mass reach. But, she says,  “The challenge with that model was that the ad network was arbitraging and not working on behalf of the advertiser agency or the publisher." During last week's 4A's Transformation conference, Pagliuca said: “What we’re ultimately getting back to is …

After a shakeup that included appointments of a new CEO, CFO, COO and CPO, Pandora CRO John Trimble -- the only person who wasn't affected by the reboot -- chats with AdExchanger's Sarah Sluis.  Pandora's user growth has stalled in the face of competition by Spotify and Google Play Music even while ad revenue is up. Trimble said that programmatic is key to Pandora's growth strategy, noting: "We are just in the early stages now of programmatic mobile [display], and we are learning a lot there. ...The next step is how we think about an audio programmatic offering. We do …

The Wall Street Journal reports that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is angling to create a major digital advertising competitor to Facebook and Google and will leverage Verizon to do it.  Google and Facebook both control a combined 50% of the mobile ad market in the U.S., but Armstrong has been meeting with ad buyers to discuss what marketers can achieve if they're armed with Verizon’s database of customers and AOL’s data. Armstrong would likely achieve even more scale if Verizon ends up casting the winning bid in the auction for Yahoo’s core business.

Writing on TechCrunch, Ragnar Kruse, CEO and founder of Smaato explores one of Apple's failures: the iAd. Apple confirmed it's shuttering the six-year-old program on June 30th. The shuttering signals defeat in the digital advertising space where Google, Facebook and other major players rule. In 2010, Kruse notes, Steve Jobs said iAd would reach 50% of the mobile advertising market; fill rates were anywhere from 18% to 6%. So what happened? Kruse blames it on Apple's walled garden approach which didn't work with mobile advertising.The standalone iAds platform "closed customers off to important revenue opportunities on other networks. By operating …

A new eMarketer report indicates that programmatic advertising accounts for more than half of U.S. digital display ad spending. Automated buying is now a common way to purchase mobile and video display inventory. However, multidevice measurement, fraud and ad blocking are big concerns for advertisers, along with ad quality and viewability. In fact, 57% of senior U.S. ad buyers said multidevice measurement was a big issue for them, outranking fraud at 47%.