• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, December 2, 2016

Everyone else is in it -- why not Amazon? The online commerce giant plans to enter cloud-based header bidding, and is expected to make an announcement by next week, according to a report in Advertising Age.

Header bidding has experienced widespread adoption in 2016, as the process offers advertisers visibility into all ad inventory available for bid. Last spring Google announced its plans to test exchange bidding. Header bidding was largely a response to advertisers not having access to all inventory due to Google’s hegemony vis-à-vis DoubleClick AdX.

Notably, Amazon isn't calling its header bidding offering a “wrapper” -- as many header bidding providers do -- because it plans to integrate it into the cloud. However, ad requests will likely be managed on the server vs. consumers’ Internet browsers. Server-to-server integrations are said to cause less problems with latency and page load times. By placing this process in the cloud, Amazon may avoid current challenges with the wrapper.

In the U.S., programmatic ad spending is expected to grow at a double-digit clip. In fact, eMarketer projected that it would increase to $25.23 billion this year. And programmatic is expected to represent 73% of all display ad spending in the U.S. this year.

Jay Friedman, partner and COO, of Goodway Group, told Real-Time Daily via email that header bidding has given publishers the feeling of having options other than going down the DoubleClick for Publishers/AdX (Google) path.

“Publishers know that header bidding as it exists today is not the best option, but it’s an interim one that is better than what they had,” Friedman said. “Whatever the end state is, publishers, because they’re human, would like to have options.”  Further, Friedman said that Amazon entering the fray is good for competition, helping to break up Google’s dominance in the area.