Guides
How-tos, explainers, and deep dives.
What Data Protection by Design and Default Means for AdTech and MarTech Platforms
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced a range of new obligations for AdTech and MarTech companies — the controllers and processors of personal data under the regulation's framework. Among those…
Ads.txt vs. Ads.cert: How They Work Together to Fight Ad Fraud
Programmatic ad buying faces persistent pressure from ad fraud — fraudulent representation of impressions and clicks, and manipulation of bid requests for financial gain. Ads.txt emerged as a partial countermeasure, and…
What is Ads.cert and How Does It Work?
Despite years of advancement in programmatic advertising — header bidding, rapidly growing ad spend, increasingly sophisticated targeting — two stubborn problems remain: ad fraud and a persistent lack of supply chain…
OTT Advertising: What It Is and How It Works
Cable television is in serious decline, losing ground to streaming media on both convenience and reach. Video ad views on OTT (over-the-top) devices grew 63% year over year in Q3 2016, and the trajectory has continued…
GDPR and ePrivacy: Frequently Asked Questions for AdTech Vendors
Despite the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) having been in force for several years, and the ongoing media coverage around data privacy, there remains a significant amount of confusion about what the GDPR and…
RTB, Private Marketplace, and Programmatic Direct: How Each Model Works
The online advertising industry operates across several distinct media-buying models, and even experienced practitioners can find the terminology confusing. Real-time bidding (RTB), private marketplace (PMP), and…
GDPR and AdTech/MarTech: What Obtaining User Consent Looks Like
Of all the hurdles publishers and AdTech/MarTech companies face in complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), user consent is the most demanding. Since May 25, 2018, any organization that wants to…
What Is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and How Does It Work?
In the early days of online marketing, marketers operated with remarkably limited information about their customers. Targeting options were minimal, and online advertising was closer to guesswork than science. The…
GDPR & ePrivacy: Technical Implications for AdTech and MarTech Platforms
On April 27, 2016, the European Union adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), triggering a two-year transition period before its enforcement date of May 25, 2018. Every company collecting data about…
What is an Ad Server and How Does It Work?
Since the very beginning of online advertising more than two decades ago, a succession of technologies has been introduced to the AdTech ecosystem to solve problems faced by advertisers and publishers and to improve the…
What Is an Ad Network and How Does It Work?
When print publishers first began moving online in the 1990s, they quickly needed a way to generate revenue. The most intuitive model was the one they already knew: advertising. Display ads offered a natural fit, and…
How Publishers Can Detect Ad Blockers
The tug of war between publishers and users who resist display advertising has been ongoing for years, and there is no clean resolution in sight. Ad blockers cannot be made completely invisible to the sites they operate…
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Search Advertising
Search advertising displays ads within search-engine results the moment a user queries specific keywords, meaning the ad shown is directly matched to the searcher's intent. This article covers how paid search works,…
Waterfalling, Header Bidding, and the Evolution of Programmatic Auction Dynamics
In the early days of online advertising, ad space was purchased much like print inventory — directly from publishers at a set price, typically on a cost-per-mille (CPM) basis. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, a…
AdTech vs. MarTech: Key Differences Explained
The confusion between AdTech and MarTech is understandable. Recent advances in technology have blurred a once-clear boundary, and the two terms are increasingly written as a single concept. Yet meaningful distinctions…
Predictive vs. Rules-Based Personalization: How They Differ and When to Use Each
Content personalization is about making a website experience equally relevant for every visitor — tailoring what each person sees based on their own preferences, history, and behaviour. Effective personalization…
What is Predictive Content Personalization and How Does It Work?
Since Tim Berners-Lee laid the foundation for the World Wide Web in 1990, the volume of content users create and consume has grown exponentially. Attention spans have contracted in response, and users have become highly…
What Is Ad Retargeting and How Does It Work?
In an ideal world, every visitor to an online store would complete a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or otherwise convert. In practice, that rarely happens. Converting prospects into paying customers is a long,…
What Is Intelligent Tracking Prevention and How Does It Work? (Versions 1.0–2.3)
Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is a WebKit feature shipped in Safari 12 and iOS 11 that changes how Safari handles first-party cookies — effectively narrowing one of the last remaining avenues for cross-site…
What Is Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and How Does It Work?
Account-based marketing (ABM) has been around since the early 2000s, but it's only in the past five or so years that it has truly taken off and been applied at scale — largely due to the maturation of marketing…
Rapid Prototyping, MVP Development, and Agile: A Practical Framework for Building MarTech Solutions
The MarTech landscape has expanded dramatically over the past decade. chiefmartec's annual Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic makes the scale of that growth impossible to ignore. Despite the steady rise in new…
Integrating with MediaMath: What Ad Agencies and AdTech Vendors Can Achieve
Founded in 2007, MediaMath has grown from a single DSP into an international provider of programmatic solutions serving advertisers, agencies, and publishers. Through its TerminalOne Marketing Operating System, the…
What is Look-alike Modeling and How Does it Work?
Look-alike modeling is a core technique in audience targeting — one that lets advertisers find new potential customers who share the characteristics and behaviours of their best existing ones. This guide explains what…
How OpenRTB Integration Makes AdTech Platforms More Valuable
Programmatic advertising has become one of the dominant forces in digital media buying, and at the centre of that shift sits a single open-source protocol: OpenRTB. Understanding what it is, how it works, and why nearly…