You’re new to the digital media industry, and it’s your first week on the job. In meetings, co-workers are throwing around words like “demand side platform” and “viewability” and “programmatic direct” and “cookies.” You’re left scratching your head in bewilderment – and, wait a second, cookies? Someone brought cookies? You don’t see cookies in this conference room.

Nope, unfortunately, no one brought cookies. What they’re talking about is an HTTP cookie – a string of text sent from a web server to a user’s browser. Cookies store a unique identifier, and may contain information like what ads were recently seen and when the web cookie was created.

See? It’s hard to keep up.

Ad tech is already rife with complexity, but throw in advertising buzzwords and jargon on top of that and you’ve got a recipe for confusion, miscommunication and misunderstanding.

So, to help you out, we’ve created a quick cheat sheet to help you understand some of the more common and popular terms being thrown around the industry. Soon enough you’ll be the one dropping these words into casual conversation.

To those of you who have been in the digital media space for quite some time, rest assured that this guide is useful for amateurs and seasoned veterans alike. You digital experts might not think you need a refresher, but it couldn’t hurt. Technology is constantly evolving, and everyone has different definitions for the terminology, so it’s good to have this handy.

Read the cheat sheet here! 

We continue to release product features, updates, and functionality within our DSP to make your day-to-day campaign management more effective and efficient. Over the coming weeks we will be introducing important enhancements to pacing and budget management. These updates are designed to give you more precision and control when managing campaigns.

Advertiser Spend
There are many ways buyers and sellers work together. Business models can range from selling on a dynamic CPM to a fixed CPC -- and everything in between. In order to provide more visibility to buyers, today we are releasing new optional fields within our DSP at the campaign and group level. These fields can be used to calculate and track contracted budgets, media spend, and performance. The platform will calculate progress at the line-item level. Now buyers can compare and report on goals directly in the DSP and will no longer need to refer to a spreadsheet or email.

New Pacing System
Using a DSP can be like driving a car. Whether you’re on a city street or the freeway, you need to be sensible about how fast you’re going. Pacing is the speed at which your DSP campaign spends its budget, and controlling delivery is vital to ensuring a campaign performs well. On August 16, Centro DSP will enable a new pacing system, giving you access to several new options for setting pacing at the group and campaign levels.

At the group level, you’ll have the option to set start and end dates and apply a group pacing setting. This means all campaigns within the group will inherit the pacing, which eliminates extra work, potential errors, and wasted time. Also, you can choose to spend evenly or more quickly at both the group and campaign level to make sure each tactic has the fuel it needs.

Experts from our Customer Success team will be sharing best practices and use cases for the new pacing system and advertiser spend during our August 18 webinar. You can sign up here. For more information, contact your Centro DSP representative or visit the help center.

Most national magazines, newspapers, and websites don’t have the sales resources to connect with regional advertisers. Instead, they focus on national campaigns that drive the most revenue per campaign. While national publishers are aware that local ad dollars are available, it makes sense that they don’t pursue them based on staffing limitations.

Read more from Centro's Jesse Cozart in Publishing Executive.

At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!

Why Social Data Will Dominate Online Ad Targeting
Social data is becoming a key part of online marketing campaigns -- Facebook data is so pervasive it can’t be ignored -- but how do marketers deal with the fact that most social networks operate as walled gardens?

Only 20% of Companies Have a Mobile Strategy
The vast majority of brands and advertisers still lack a mobile-specific strategy. A new report from Adobe and eConsultancy found that only 20% of companies and 11% of agencies have built out year-long mobile strategies.

Stonyfield Farm Cultivates Pokémon Go Mobile Moments Via In-App Ads
Are brands and advertisers taking advantage of the Pokémon craze? You bet they are! While the app’s developers have yet to release direct advertising opportunities, CPG brand Stonyfield Farm sought to target Pokémon players through AKi Technologies. Also: check out six ways local merchants are getting on board.

Consumers Don’t Mind Hearing From Brands in Messaging Apps
As the way we consume, engage and share in the social space evolves, brands and consumers are starting to figure out how to interact with each other in messaging apps. This infographic highlights a few stats that signal a potentially massive shift in how brands connect with consumers in a mobile and social arena moving forward.

Google Can Now Place Native Ads Programmatically
The worlds of native and programmatic continue to collide -- this time with even less barriers to entry.

Search Advertising Coming to Facebook
In their recent Q2 earnings call, Facebook announced they are preparing to offer paid search advertising. This comes on the heels of a similar offering by Amazon last year. Timing has not been given, but expect continued competition for Google’s lucrative search business.

YouTube Expands, Tweaks TrueView Video Ads
The digital video behemoth shakes things up with announcements about a few new features rolling out soon, putting an even greater emphasis on mobile.

How Set-Top Box Data is Changing TV Buying
For years, traditional TV buys have been bought on age and gender demographics, but as the industry continues to see dollars shift toward digital channels, there’s been talk about moving beyond Nielsen ratings and rethinking historical targeting and currency models.

Can Spotify Make Programmatic Audio Mainstream?
Shifting away from audio-only exchanges (like Triton), programmatic buyers can now access Spotify’s 70 million users of its ad-supported platform with audio ads alongside display and video.

IAB Ad Blocking Report: Who Blocks Ads, Why, and How to Win Them Back
A new report by the IAB and C3Research dives deep into who is blocking ads, why they’re blocking, and what they want to see (i.e., what we can and should be doing). Full report here.

Interested in joining the Centro team? Check out our hottest openings of the week and apply today!

Midwest

Financial Analyst – Chicago
This position reports to the VP of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) and provides key support to the VP of FP&A and the company’s CFO, COO and extended executive team. Primary responsibilities include playing a lead role with the annual budget and monthly forecasts, formulating analysis of financial and operational data to support effective decision-making and large company strategic and operational initiatives, as well as developing monthly executive and quarterly Board of Director materials.

Technical Ad Operations Manager – Chicago
This role will be responsible for subject matter expertise on all of Centro’s third-party ad serving, while working with the media strategy and operations and RTB teams to execute digital media campaigns.

DevOps Manager – Chicago
This role will manage a production operations/DevOps team, which creates, operates, maintains and evolves Centro’s SaaS platform infrastructure. The team makes sure that we can move fast, while not breaking things, as our enterprise customers rely on the platform’s stability to make money. You will be working closely with development, QA, product and technical support teams to achieve company’s goals.

Programmatic Supply Specialist – Chicago
Reporting into the director of programmatic supply, this position will also work closely with internal key stakeholders and external publishers to support day-to-day ad operations and relationship management within Centro Brand Exchange. This role will also serve as a technical expert for partner support and troubleshooting.

East Coast

Programmatic Buyer – New York
This role will work directly with Centro’s account management team and help develop tactical executions that align with client goals and objectives. The programmatic buyer will translate these tactics into physical implementation across multiple Demand Side Platforms (DSPs). This role will be responsible for day-to-day management of campaigns, as well as identifying opportunities within each campaign to improve performance and take action to improve results.

Campaign Manager – DC
The campaign manager will be responsible for the quality and timely execution and trafficking of client campaigns while working with the media strategy and operations team. Campaign managers will excel in day-to-day ad operations with proficiency working in third party ad serving systems, creating and implementing pixels and tracking tags.

West Coast

Media Strategy Supervisor – San Francisco
The media strategy supervisor will work alongside the account media strategy and operations team and will play an active role in delivering innovative and strategic media solutions with a focus on Client Direct and/or full-service clients. Additionally, this person will manage the professional and personal development of an assigned team, providing hands-on mentoring and training support, as needed.

Account Lead, Sales – San Francisco
This role will be responsible for developing new digital media relationships with in-house marketing teams and agencies within the San Francisco market and throughout Northern California.

Canada 

Software Engineer, Backend API – Toronto
Responsibilities include building out new products, while updating and expanding our existing offerings. Core functions include developing on and improving Centro's Restful API for the real-time bidding platform, which processes more than 30 billion auctions, each within milliseconds every day. You will actively participate on our team and help drive innovation for new products and services.

 

 

Header bidding is the talk “du jour” in the world of ad tech, but many still don’t have a good sense for why it exists or what it is intended to accomplish.

So, let’s clear it up: What is header bidding?

Header bidding enables advertisers to compete for publishers’ reserved and unreserved inventory via an auction that takes place outside of the ad server.

Traditionally, publishers have managed their ad prioritization via their ad server, most often Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP). Through this method – often known as a waterfall – when a web page is loading and the ad slot is up for sale, the ad server plugs into advertising partners to sell the impression.

In this waterfall, advertisers requiring guarantees on placement and timing are booked as reserved impressions in the ad server and receive priority delivery over unreserved impressions. One thing to note: Driving publisher yield is not a consideration for reserved impressions; meeting IO impression goals is the primary focus of the ad server.

For unreserved impressions, other factors such as yield, CPMs and fill rates are considered for delivery prioritization. If the preferred partners’ campaigns are on schedule to deliver, then the unreserved impressions have a chance to compete.

With the growth in programmatic over the past several years, the number of sell-side platforms (SSPs) and exchanges exploded, but they were still relegated to compete for unreserved impressions only. Publishers wanted to change this, and wanted to give all demand partners the ability to compete for reserved impressions as long as two conditions were met:

1. Publishers’ reserved inventory was on or ahead of schedule to deliver.
2. The demand partner could win the impression if yield from that demand partner was higher than what they would receive by serving another reserved impression.

The solution: Header bidding.

By definition, header bidding is when publishers place a piece of code into their page headers to allow preferred demand sources to submit bids at the same time an ad server is considering the ads that were bought directly.

But with a lot of code running in the background, page load times can be greatly affected. To accomplish the same function – and limit the issue of slow page loads – many are beginning to consider server-to-server options.

The Centro Brand Exchange, our invite-only ad marketplace, is entering this space and is now available as a header bidding demand partner. Publishers can integrate our demand sources via their preferred wrapper solutions (a wrapper is the software used to manage the header bidder partners). Our goal as a header bidding partner is to be agnostic to whatever the preferred publisher solution is.

Adding Centro Brand Exchange as a header bidding partner means access to brand-safe advertisers who may be willing to pay higher CPMs. This is another way Centro drives high-quality advertisers to publishers.

To learn even more about Centro Brand Exchange or get started, click here.

"If you’re wondering how deeply mobile technology has permeated American culture, look no further than the 2016 presidential race."

Read more from Centro's Grace Briscoe and Noor Naseer in MediaShift.

Now is the time for marketers to incorporate Snapchat into their digital strategies.

Read more from Centro's Aubry Parks-Fried in Adweek's Social Times.

Running a successful campaign starts well before launch. Demand-side platforms, such as Centro DSP, offer a wealth of targeting options, data providers, and inventory sources, which makes it vital to set a clear objective when putting together a plan.

Whether you are trying to increase awareness, traffic, or sales, it is important to match the goal to a measureable KPI. The two most common ways to do this are click-based and conversion-based KPIs. For both metrics, make sure you factor in costs and use a CPC or CPA to compare performance. A certain site might deliver 5 times the average click-through-rate, but if the CPM is 10 times higher, then you are not getting the perceived value.

Don’t forget: Regardless of KPI, have conversion pixels placed.

What are some of the known factors for achieving a CPC or CPA goal? Centro’s experienced services team has found retargeting and mobile to be especially effective at driving clicks. With a best-in-class mobile DSP experience, Centro allows you to take advantage of this proven strategy. For conversion-based campaigns, a healthy prospecting effort and a separate retargeting tactic transforms leads into customers.

Once a campaign is live, follow these three simple steps:

1. Accrue data. Waiting to accumulate sufficient data in reporting ensures your optimization decisions will be sound.
2. Make minor adjustments. Minor adjustments to bid and frequency can make a big difference to delivery and performance.
3. Implement major optimizations. Pausing or excluding creative and inventory sources will further hone your campaign.

Did you know? Centro DSP has in-line editing at the placement level to make optimizations a breeze.

Finally, don’t be afraid to make changes to your campaigns. A good DSP should allow you to observe the effects and use real-time insights to dictate optimizations. Remember: You can always change something back. The real risk is not doing anything at all.

Want to learn more? Check out the full presentation here.