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Every Friday, AdExchanger publishes original comics inspired by trends in the online advertising industry.
We get together to spitball ideas and then share them with our very talented comic artist Kevvo.
from the rise of curation to Google Advertising Technology Antitrust Court in Virginiahelps us translate the biggest news into the silliest cartoons.
However, sometimes we just entertain ourselves – and hopefully you – with a bit of ad tech puns. (Pandora’s Chumboxsomeone?)
Sometimes we wonder if Kevvo thinks we’re crazy. Probably yes! But it never goes away. When we send Kevv a comic book concept, he turns it into art.
These are the stories—and very specific double-entendres—behind AdExchanger’s 10 Best Comics of 2024.
In 2024, there was no shortage of scandals in the field of advertising technology, many of which were exposed by people on Adalyticsa programmatic log file analysis startup with the ability to drop research that delves into the inner workings of online advertising.
What they find is usually unflattering, inclusive user generated content that is not brand safe, MFA flowing through unlimited program channels and Forbes running a mislabeled MFA subdomain without the buyers knowledge.
After each scandal erupts, the industry engages in collective bargaining mother-of-pearl splicing. How could this happen? Why didn’t someone stop this? It’s time for a change!
Eventually, however, the uproar dies down and the industry settles back into the status quo.
Here’s to less shocked gasps and more real action in 2025.
Were you one of those who predicted that Google wouldn’t actually support third-party cookies?
Well, you called it. Feel free to take off the tin foil cap.
Before July, that is, when Google said “just kidding” about the whole end-of-support thing.It was considered somewhat of a conspiracy theory to say that Google would not get away with phasing out.
There’s no feeling that you can say, “I told you so.”
(By the way, this was our instruction to Kevv for this comic: “Please draw a group of smug-looking people snacking on cookies. The Lone Gunmen of The X-FilesPlease!”)
The online advertising industry tends to navel-gaze and get lost in the weeds without a compass.
An example is the semantic debate last year over whether the term for cynically produced clickbait content should be “produced for advertising” or “made for arbitrage.”
To be fair, there is an important distinction here. Arguably, any content is created with the goal of being monetized through advertising for ads, while arbitrage sites deliberately manipulate programmatic advertising to monetize low-quality content.
However, no matter what you call it, most advertisers want to avoid MFA at all costs – not that they could define it. But as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964 to explain his threshold test for obscenity: “I know it when I see it.”
And we all “see” it almost every time we browse the internet, from endless pitches to clickbait that fails. In this comic, we challenge the most familiar forms of clickbait using ad tech topics. The headline “17 DMPs and what they look like now” gave everyone on the editorial team a serious laugh.
“This is my Super Bowl, this is my Roman Empire.
Like this Ari Paparo, who is doing the Marketecture thing these days, described his experience coverage of Google’s ad tech antitrust lawsuit in Virginia in September, and we couldn’t agree more. We were also there in person during the course first week of testimony.
The trial, which lasted just three weeks, was like a vivisection of the ad tech ecosystem in all its tangled and dark complexity. From header bidding to auction dynamics, witness after witness has come forward to address complaints or defend business practices.
Our comic is from Judge Leonie Brinkema’s perspective of the courtroom where it all happened. And the gallery is overflowing with Easter eggs. Shout out to Stephanie Layser, Andrew Casale, Brian O’Kelley, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Carnegie, Mr. Monopoly and Lex Luther.
Layser and Casale both testified. Mr. Monopoly was not called.
During The Trade Desk’s Q1 2024 earnings call, CEO Jeff Green introduced a new term: the so-calledpremium internet.”
TTD defines “premium internet” as “the best of the open internet”, including connected TV, streaming audio, live sports and trusted journalism – all very attractive to advertisers.
And so there’s no reason why walled gardens should attract so many ad dollars, Green argued to investors, especially since these big ad platforms are also some of the biggest distributors of MFA content.
in February TTD has launched its SP500+ marketplace in beta, aggregating what it believes to be the best and most premium publishers on the open internet. And in the spring, TTD published a list of what it considers to be Top 100 Premium Publishers on the internet.
Both announcements caused a stir in the industrybegs the question “Who has the right to define premium internet?” In our comic, we took this idea to its next logical conclusion: a “quality coaster” where Green decides who is premium enough to ride.
It’s that time again when people like to label the “word of the year.”
So what should be the word of the year in the ad tech industry? probably”curation”, which has become one of the most buzzed and controversial topics of 2024.
Also, “chicken” has the advantage of actually being a word.
According to Oxford University Press, the word of the year 2024 is “brain rot,”, which, it should be emphasized, is two words. Meanwhile, “AI” is the ANA Word of the Year for the second year in a row. (We all realize AI isn’t a word either, right? It’s an initialism.)
Anyway, back to curation, a lot of people got it under the collar debating if it’s really a new thing or just a revamped version of ad networks.
But as curated as Sturm und Drang was this year, it was rivaled by the bitterness swirling around ID bridging.
The practice, which involves using first-party data to create matches and reset third-party cookies for bid requests when third-party cookies are not available, sparked a debate that raged within the IAB Tech Lab.
“It was perhaps the most contentious task force conversation I’ve ever had,” Hillary Slattery, Tech Lab’s senior director of product management for programmatic, told AdExchanger in July.
Since then, Tech Lab has added “Provenance ID” to the latest OpenRTB specification and the waters calmed down.
Prebid.org, the industry standards body that developed and maintains Prebid.js — a widely adopted open-source header bidding package — was in the news a lot in September.
And that’s because Prebid has made several appearances during Google’s ad tech antitrust lawsuit, including this juicy tidbit.
According to Brian O’Kelley, whose pre-recorded statement was played in court, Google was “vehemently against” to the idea of Prebid because it heralded the rise of header bidding. As the largest financial contributor to the IAB, Google was able to force the Tech Lab not to incorporate the technology.
Not that it stopped the header bid in its tracks – far from it. Prebid.org was founded as an independent organization to support header bidding and both have been thriving ever since.
Although alternative TV currency measurement they couldn’t knock Nielsen off the pedestalit is clear that the television advertising industry is ready for change.
Providers like VideoAmp, iSpot and Comscore are making life difficult for Nielsen.
For example, Paramount and Nielsen remain locked in battle above the price of Nielsen’s services. Paramount, which believes Nielsen’s fees are too high, let her contract expire. Instead, it now relies on VideoAmp for viewership numbers.
Last but not least, publishers have been talking about using the attention metric as a media buying currency for at least a decade. See this 2014 (!!) The Story of AdExchanger according to yours truly about attention metrics starting to gain traction.
Over the past year though attention gets a lot more attentionand who knows: Maybe in 2025 the click-through rate will reach the measurement version Silicon Heaven and attention metrics are finally starting to gain real momentum.
This comic was inspired by The Mets and their impressive run through the 2024 season. They may not have made it to the World Series, but they got a lot of attention. (Sorry, we had to). The Mets/metrics pun also proved irresistible.
🙏 Thanks again Kevvo for bringing our comic concepts to life! ✏️