SPRITES, HEADER BIDDING AND THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE

By Offer Yehudai, President and Co-Founder

Looking at new products, one can ask two questions: are these products valuable for the consumer and will the consumer be expecting this product?

A new product that is not valuable and expected is usually about catching up to the market. A product that is valuable and expected is about listening to your customers. A product that is valuable and not expected is the holy grail — what we like to call innovation. The element of surprise. The wow factor.

Speaking about surprises, after spending the week in our NY office, I was waiting for my flight back home. Unfortunately, the plane had technical issues, so the airline had to get a new one. It took them 5 hours. Surprise. So I had time to think.

For a long time, mobile web publishers with strong ad sales teams were bound to work only with ad servers such as DFP. But think about this: you run your entire ad sales on DFP and if you want to add a programmatic buyer (like Criteo, for example) you must use AdX which, by definition, comes after your direct sales. And so, publishers insisted and Google released their “first look” feature, allowing publishers to waterfall AdX before the direct sales but still charging the publisher 10–15% for that programmatic line item.

In the last weeks, AppNexus, Rubicon and OpenX (to name a few) released their open source Header Bidding Wrapper — a piece of code that allow a publisher to call multiple ad providers (DFP included) in parallel from the page header and determine who gets to serve the ad. Basically, what this does is bring the auction to the page itself, thus cutting DFP off.

This is a big thing. It reminds me of the early days of mediation, where in order to go off a player like Millennial Media, you had to use SDK mediation with some basic switches and toggles. Publishers were looking for control so no mediation meant being left out of the game. The same applies to the Header Bidding Wrappers. If you don’t have a wrapper, you’ll end up as a line item on somebody else’s wrapper. Not a very attractive position. So — who’s taking up that glove?

Mobile web publishers never expected to autoplay a video ad on their webpage because both Google and Apple blocked the ability to do so. Only the device full screen media player can. So companies like Teads, Opera and others came up with an idea — why don’t you break the video into frames and animate them (like GIFs on your Facebook feed) while stitching back the audio? It’s called Sprites and actually used to animate PC games when we were kids. This valuable and unexpected idea allowed those companies to grab a lot of market share and replace banners with high paying video ads. When we talk to those publishers today, they expect more value. Premium publishers in the news industry that we speak to state that they don’t like the concept of collapsing video and prefer a native video solution such as STORY. Just like the Header Bidding Wrapper, the mobile web video player is an asset that gains traction with publishers. So — who’s taking up that glove? Food for thought.