Ratko Vidakovic is the founder, author, and principal consultant at AdProfs, where he and his team advise a wide range of clients — marketers, publishers, tech companies, and investors — on the inner workings and best practices of advertising technology. He also publishes his insights on ad tech industry news in his weekly newsletter, This Week In Ad Tech.
Columnist Ratko Vidakovic highlights issues that can potentially arise during a GDN campaign and discusses ways to optimize your display advertising campaigns to avoid fraud and reach your performance goals.
How do you determine if your DSP is actually a technology company or just pretending to be one? Columnist Ratko Vidakovic shares the telltale signs to look for.
Columnist Ratko Vidakovic walks you through ways to detect the warning signs of ad fraud to help you eliminate it from your campaigns and boost the performance of your marketing efforts.
What is header bidding, and how does it work? Columnist Ratko Vidakovic gets into the nitty-gritty of header bidding and explains the benefits for advertisers.
What does transparency mean for marketers? Columnist Ratko Vidakovic outlines the various forms of transparency and explains why marketers need to demand it from their partners.
In the wake of the recent ANA investigation into media agency transparency, columnist Ratko Vidakovic covers the key findings that marketers must know.
Columnist Ratko Vidakovic walks through steps that marketers should take to protect themselves and their ad budgets against fraud.
Columnist Ratko Vidakovic lays out the players in the programmatic ad ecosystem and examines who should be held responsible for preventing ad fraud.
Columnist Ratko Vidakovic delves into the many faces of ad fraud and the underlying reasons why it exists in the first place.
Columnist Ratko Vidakovic walks you through the various types of ad fraud to give you a better understanding of what marketers are up against.
Columnist Ratko Vidakovic explains why marketers need to leverage the open auction of the public RTB marketplace in order to obtain maximum reach and total programmatic efficiency.
What if there was a way to retain some of the characteristics of direct orders, but make the whole process even more efficient? Columnist Ratko Vidakovic explains private marketplaces.
What if you could automate the drudgery of direct buys while retaining the benefits of running directly on the publisher's ad server? Columnist Ratko Vidakovic explains "programmatic direct."
Confusion in ad tech abounds, especially around the various forms of ad buying and ad serving. In this series, we shine some light on the fundamentals of modern ad serving, and how each of the buying methods fit into the big picture.
Retargeting has become an essential tactic in the modern marketing arsenal. It increases the effectiveness of all other marketing efforts, increasing brand awareness, recall, and driving customers down the funnel to ultimate conversion.
One of 2014’s biggest stories is the rise of hyperlocal advertising. Hyperlocal, as it’s called in ad tech circles, allows marketers to use a smartphone’s GPS to geographically target audiences for the purpose of delivering relevant ads.
The fundamental evolution in display advertising, ushered in by real-time bidding (RTB) technology, is the concept of buying audiences as opposed to just inventory. We used to buy “audiences” by guessing about the characteristics of the visitors to a particular site or type of site. Now, one can pick and choose individuals by their characteristics […]
Today I’m sitting down to meditate on some of the reasons why programmatic ad buying — real-time bidding (RTB), in particular — has been showing such strong and steady growth over the past few years, and why industry analysts are predicting continued growth over the next several years. Much of the growth behind RTB has […]
A few months ago, we covered the four strategic phases of lean display advertising. The first phase consists of setting up your initial tests or experiments, which means choosing your initial campaign tactics to later observe which ones show the most potential for further optimization and scaling. This primer covers most of the campaign tactics […]
As with any emerging technology, there are always bound to be myths that circulate, often due to misunderstandings. Even if they do happen to have a hint of truth to them, they can often misrepresent reality by taking exceptions and presenting them as rules. Other times, people might take a vendor’s approach to a certain […]
Almost every discussion about online display advertising will, at some point, revolve around defining “premium inventory”. Yet, despite its prevalence as a point of discussion, there is little consensus on what “premium” actually means. It is assumed, based on the chosen language, that premium is simply more valuable, both to the advertiser and the publisher. […]
As an advertiser, there is no better way to purchase massive amounts of online display ad inventory than directly from publishers or ad networks. Granted, there is more legwork involved when compared to programmatic buying, and the CPM rates can be quite high — but this is offset by the ability to reserve large amounts […]
Having worked at a self-serve demand side platform (DSP) for over 2 years, one of the most common questions I get when trying to explain the concept of a DSP to others is: “Isn’t that kind of like AdWords?” Even amongst experienced marketers, most only have a vague idea of how DSPs work and how […]
Professional stand-up comedians are known to practice their routines with smaller audiences in preparation for their big shows and HBO specials. They do this in order to find out what works and what doesn’t and to hone all the elements of their routine: timing, delivery, wording and so on. That way, when they hit the big […]
For marketers that want to run online display ad campaigns, choosing between direct channels and real-time bidding (RTB) platforms might seem a little unclear at first. After all, the ultimate result is the same: you are placing your ads on a website somewhere. The process that a marketer must follow, however, to reach that end […]
One of the most common questions that marketers face in buying display advertising is whether to contact a publisher or ad network directly to purchase inventory (called a Direct Buy), or through indirect channels using real-time bidding (RTB) systems. To those with experience in the RTB realm, it’s well understood by now that there is […]
Many newcomers to online ad buying have questions regarding the traffic they can buy through a demand-side platform (DSP). How much does it cost? How much of it is available? What is the quality like? The answers are actually interrelated, and require an understanding of the mechanics behind how real-time bidding (RTB) works. Industry Terminology […]