New system dramatically reduces load times by launching ad requests earlier in the page load process, cutting latency, boosting viewability and improving the user experience. Switch’s platform allows publishers to leverage server-side integrations to increase control, insights and yield from programmatic, while solving latencies.

An innovation in digital advertising using ‘Edge Side Includes’ (ESI) calls has been launched by Switch Concepts, which promises to speed up publishers’ pages by reducing the time taken between a user requesting a web page and it appearing complete with ads in their browser.

Tests carried out with a major UK news publisher revealed that, by initiating the ad request earlier in the page load process (a concept similar to Google AMP’s Fast Fetch idea), Switch’s platform can respond with a bid within 30 milliseconds when called from the header of the web page. This is multiple times faster than the traditional header bidder set-up used by publishers and significantly reduces latency, dramatically cutting page load times, while also improving the user experience and delivering better viewability for advertisers.

“Traditionally, when a user opens a publisher’s web page, their browser requests the page from the publisher’s CDN or edge servers, which then return it to the browser,” explained Mark Duncan, Head of Business Development at Switch. “As the browser loads the web page, it sends out an ad request to the different header bidders’ servers. The header bidders have to make their decision and then respond. A maximum timeout of up to one to two seconds is usually set in a publisher's wrapper tag to wait for the header bidder’s response.

“Using ESI calls, the CDN or edge servers call Switch’s platform to initiate the ad auction at the same time as returning the web page to the user’s browser. When the browser requests an ad upon rendering the web page, the auction and decision will have already been completed by Switch’s platform and the bid price is returned almost instantaneously. Calling for the ad earlier in the process in this way significantly reduces the timeout required to just a few milliseconds.”

The Switch ESI solution speeds up the entire page-loading process, solving latency issues introduced by header bidding, a major pain point for publishers, while making the programmatic eco-system far more efficient. A reduction in timeout occurrences will increase buyer participation rates, which is good news for publisher yield. Switch has an international patent application relating to this technology.

Key benefits of web-initiated auctions

By making the ad request earlier in the page retrieval process, Switch’s ESI solution:

- Cuts page load times

- Reduces latency

- Improves user experience

- Boosts viewability

About Switch

Switch’s server-side programmatic platform drives more transparent digital ad trading. It empowers publishers to upgrade existing header bidders to trade with the benefits of server-side: centralised controls, insights and increased yield. Switch's Unified Dataset makes granular and transparent programmatic data available to a publisher to query in real-time.

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Talk to us at switch@switchconcepts.com

Spanish media group PRISA wants to provide better user experiences by adopting a more transparent digital ad trading method and reducing latency. The publisher is investing in programmatic technology by Switch Concepts, providing PRISA with a unified auction operating server-side and allowing access to an unlimited number of demand partners.

“We are excited to take our programmatic infrastructure to the next level with the objective of improving user experience and increasing efficiencies”, says PRISA’s general manager of digital revenues, Chechu Lasheras. “We’ve been operating with Prebid.js and header bidders with some success”, adds Matthias Mondini, director of yield management and business insights, PRISA. “The widely adopted wrapper tag technology allowed us to create a unified auction and increase yield; but we were facing growing problems with latency and data transparency, which Switch’s platform will overcome.

The Switch server-side platform allows PRISA to maintain its commercial relationships with third parties, yet enables more transparent and efficient ad trading, PRISA hopes.

PRISA has been working with header-bidding technology since early 2016 in an effort to improve automation and optimisation of their digital offerings.

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Talk to us at switch@switchconcepts.com

Originally published ExchangeWire 22 Sep 2017

Running programmatic ad operations across multiple countries can be an operational nightmare. Spanish- and Portuguese-language media group Prisa, which owns major national newspapers like El País and spans 22 markets, thinks it’s found the answer with server-to-server integration.

Programmatic advertising accounts for between 25 and 40 percent of Prisa’s advertising revenue, depending on the markets and titles. For example, programmatic ads across its flagship Spanish national newspaper El País and football site As.com account for between 30 and 40 percent of those titles’ ad revenue, but that number is closer to 25 percent in Prisa’s Latin American markets.

The group deployed header bidding a year ago and generated yield increases of between 30 and 50 percent across different titles. But the trade-off between yield and page latency caused by header bidding is no longer sustainable, according to Matthias Mondini, yield management and business insights director at Prisa. Plus, operating header bidding with different systems across the nine markets in which it has sales and ad operations was becoming unwieldy, overly complex and difficult to scale.

“We want transparency [of the bid streams] and to be able to manage and control incoming ad quality via one platform,” he said. “For header bidding to work at its best, you need between five and 10 different interfaces — we wanted to reduce that technology fragmentation and make our operations more nimble.”

That’s why it turned to Switch Concepts’ server-to-server platform, which provides a transparent and unified overview of a publisher’s live bid streams across all its exchanges simultaneously, while facilitating a unified auction off the publisher’s own header.

That additional visibility of the bid streams shows the publisher who is winning and losing bids, opening up valuable insights into who would make suitable programmatic-direct partners, which it can feed to sales teams. Programmatic-direct deals are on the rise everywhere. Around 30 percent of Prisa’s programmatic revenue now comes from direct deals, compared to less than 10 percent two years ago, according to Mondini. While agencies are still pushing for open marketplace auctions, large advertisers that want brand-safety guarantees are actively pushing for programmatic direct, he added.

Prisa is also bullish about managing ad quality, but doing so across the some 12 billion monthly impressions across its portfolio of titles, with fragmented systems in each market, has been challenging, to say the least. The Switch platform should help alleviate that. Previously, ad quality was managed via 10 different platforms, with staff manually screening sites for bad ads, figuring out their sources and then blocking them. “Operationally, it was far from perfect, and reporting was equally difficult and costly,” said Mondini.

Server-side auctions have been welcomed by publishers for their ability to allay page latency caused by header bidding. Content loads separately from ads across Prisa titles, and it wasn’t a great user experience to have them appearing on page at different times. “We want to reduce the ad-load time from 700 milliseconds to 100-200 milliseconds, which we believe is more acceptable,” said Mondini. Prisa also expects yields to grow as a result of the additional bid density that server-side bidding can offer.

Prisa has also tested Google’s server-side option, exchange bidding in dynamic allocation, and has seen decent yield lifts compared to what Google’s ad exchange is generating, according to Mondini. But there are drawbacks. “The product itself is a bit limited still. You can’t set up programmatic-direct deals outside of Google AdX, so you can’t use other third-party platforms,” he said. “Google’s auction mechanics with AdX and EBDA are still a black box — we don’t know how they work. Ultimately, we want to work with agnostic tech providers.”

This is a reason why it hasn’t investigated Amazon’s server-side solution more, as questions around Amazon’s potential conflict of interest in buying and selling media haven’t yet been answered. That said, given Amazon’s unique demand, Prisa won’t close the door on header bidding entirely. “We want to reduce client-side header bidding integration as much as we can,” Mondini said. “However, we may not be able to reduce it to zero, as there is some uncertainty around demand partners like Criteo and Amazon, which want publishers to use their own products and may not be willing to integrate with third-party platforms.”

While page-latency issues have dogged header bidding, reduced user matching has cast a shadow over server-side bidding. Prisa isn’t immune to the risks. “We want to manage the risk we see in terms of lower cookie-syncing rates,” said Mondini. “So far, we haven’t seen a huge difference, but it’s true that cookie-syncing rates can potentially negatively impact yield.”

However, Mondini stressed that chasing yield increases is not Prisa’s only objective in opting for server-side integration. The ultimate aim is to have a single system from which it can better manage and control its digital ad trading across all its markets.

Want to talk?

We do.

Talk to us at switch@switchconcepts.com

Originally published DIGIDAY UK 22 Sep 2017

One of the world’s leading Spanish and Portuguese-language media groups, PRISA Group, is adopting a server-side programmatic platform from Switch Concepts to drive more transparent digital ad trading and reduce latency, significantly speeding up page load times and improving user experience.

“We are excited to take our programmatic infrastructure to the next level with the objective of improving user experience and increasing efficiencies”, said PRISA’s General Manager of Digital Revenues, Chechu Lasheras.

The move will provide PRISA with a unified auction operating server-side and, unlike header bidding, allows access to an unlimited number of demand partners. Meanwhile, Switch’s unique platform alleviates latency.

“We’ve been operating with Prebid.js and header bidders with some success,” explained Matthias Mondini, Director of Yield Management and Business Insights at PRISA. “The widely adopted wrapper tag technology allowed us to create a unified auction and increase yield, but we were facing growing problems with latency and data transparency, which Switch’s platform will overcome.

“A real game changer for us, however, is Switch’s unified data set – non-siloed and log level data from each auction streamed in real time. Quite frankly, this takes transparency to a whole new level.”

The Switch server-side platform will enable PRISA to maintain its commercial relationships with third parties, while the technology’s agnostic and independent nature allows ad trading to take place more openly and efficiently than ever before.

“Together with forward-thinking publishers like PRISA Brand Solutions, we’re making our vision of a frictionless, transparent and mature programmatic market a reality, providing value to all the stakeholders in every transaction,” said Switch’s Director of Business Development, Mark Duncan. “As we move into a new phase of the evolution of the programmatic ecosystem, our approach is resonating with buyers and sellers seeking to resolve the asymmetric environment they have endured for too long.”

The incorporation of the Switch server-side platform into PRISA’s ad-tech stack is another milestone in the effort of building a best in class digital, technology driven setup providing its advertisers and partners the latest technology and product solutions while continuing to focus on user experience. PRISA began experimenting with client-side header-bidding early 2016 being the first leading Spanish media group adopting this technology in addition to implementing the industry leading Data Management Platform as part of its data strategy and a continued effort in automating and optimising its digital operations across display, video and audio content.

PRISA specialises in creating and distributing digital content on culture, education, news and information, and entertainment. With a presence in 23 countries, it reaches over 60 million people through its 50 global brands such as El País, AS, Cadenaser, LOS40.

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We do.

Talk to us at switch@switchconcepts.com

Originally published What's New in Publishing 14 Sep 2017

Trinity Mirror's Programmatic abilities rapidly enhanced by Switch’s Machine Learning and

Server-to-Server Algorithms

Amir Malik, Programmatic Director at Trinity Mirror, hails success of partnership with Switch in

significantly improving the publisher’s programmatic performance

London, UK - February 2, 2017 - The volume of advertising spend from targeted buyers using pricing algorithms across Trinity Mirror has grown by 150x since the introduction of the first party server-side programmatic ad trading platform powered by Switch.

According to Amir Malik, Programmatic Director at Trinity Mirror, the publisher has been able to uncover many more reporting dimensions and expand its use of proprietary data.

“We have really benefited from Switch’s server-side centralised reporting interface and unified data suite,” Malik said. “It is allowing us to apply more intelligence to our pricing strategy and also understand the buying patterns of advertisers that are active across multiple exchanges, so that we can drive more performance to them and achieve better underlying yield for the publisher.

“User-matching has improved, while Switch’s software as a service approach is truly independent putting the publisher firmly in the driving seat, with no issues around bias or conflicts of interest - the platform truly empowers us. We now manage a perfect parallel auction with all advertisers and buyers getting an equal chance to bid and the best ad securing the space every single time.” “In terms of performance with one of our key advertiser partners,” Malik continued, “we drove down their cost per acquisition by 75% and increased the volume of spend across Trinity Mirror by around 175x per month.”

Moving buyers to a server-side relationship via Switch has allowed Trinity Mirror to improve its service to advertisers. The publisher can now be more consultative with brands that are active programmatically, and inform them how to maximise performance across its inventory without diminishing its yield or control. Meanwhile, reducing third-party scripts on pages has significantly reduced latency, so that pages load more quickly.

“Trying to get a centralised view of our data and managing third-party relationships has been exhausting historically, pushing up labour costs,” explained Malik. “It was very taxing on our productivity. Switch’s centralised reporting and a unified dataset provides us real freedom to focus on strategic activity that is commercially focused and actionable, as opposed to trying to make sense of the chaos of third-party reporting. Switch has enabled us to democratise our ad inventory in the most latency free and frictionless way as well as drive more relevant ads to our users. So if we can drive our underlying yield in an upward direction then we can avoid adding more aggressive ad formats to the page which disrupt the user experience. It's a win for everyone.”

Commenting on his company’s partnership with Trinity Mirror, Switch CEO and co-founder Tom Barnett said: “We are delighted to be working with Amir and his team. They have truly embraced the potential of this technology that we have now released externally.”

“The power of sell side algorithms and artificial intelligence is new to this market and we believe, ultimately, it will be the catalyst for an entirely new breed of web publishing.”

Want to talk?

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Talk to us at switch@switchconcepts.com

Updated article published DIGIDAY UK 06 Feb 2017

The current real time bidding process is simply the spot market for the impression, and is nothing but the warm up act for something much more predictive and sophisticated, says Switch's Tom Barnett.

Imagine for a minute that you’ve swapped your current job to become chief egg buyer for a fast food chain that serves breakfast to hundreds of millions of people a day, and you need to procure at least a billion eggs a year.

The good news is you’ve got the world’s biggest egg supplier in your office. The bad news is he begins to show you his wares one by one.

“What do you think of this one? How about this?”

You realise this could be a very long day. In fact, selecting a billion eggs individually would take around 32 years, and that’s if you chose one every second – do the maths!

Luckily, you’re smart enough to realise that it doesn’t have to be this laborious. Once you’ve let the egg seller show you several more and pulled out the ones you feel are the best, and tasted them, you say: “OK, you can stop there. These are the kind I want. As long as all the other eggs looks like this, taste like this, and aren’t rotten I will take a billion of them thanks.”

Job done!

This process of selection is called buying forward, and has been happening with commodities on the stock market since the technique was introduced at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange at the turn of the 20th century.

What’s it got to do with the digital advertising ecosystem? Well, like the stock market – or even the egg market – we’re in commodities. But, compared to the stock market, we’re still living in Victorian Times. We’re stuck with a spot market. There’s no forward buying, let alone trading against a future.

Real Time Bidding (RTB) is the spot market for our commodity, the impression. It is the exact moment when a human eye engages with an image or moving screen. The big bang in advertising occurred out of the need for automation and efficiency. This created an evolving and pervasive spot market. But the concept of automating communication between an advertiser and an individual cannot and will not stop at a massive spot market. It will go forward, as it always does, and buyers will want to speculate on the future. As history repeats itself for our industry, the imperative point is to understand the future, not the present.

There are a lot of semantics in the market – 'programmatic premium', 'private marketplace', 'automated guaranteed' – and you can pretty much swap any of those six words around and come up with a catch phrase that creates buzz. None of them, though, even get close to what it really means to go forward and all too often they represent methods that focus on the individual transaction and executable auction.

Forward trades require grades and standards around the commodity, a terminal contract, symmetrical data, a transparent market and the necessity of the buyer and seller to achieve a state of perfect information. They need market participants to act a certain way and require a proper understanding of price elasticity, scarcity, certainty, risk and opportunity cost.

As with everything in advertising, we are gambling. Every campaign is an investment strategy on behalf of an investor – the buyer or advertiser – who is trying to move a market by betting on chances to communicate their message. It is an effort to influence the behaviour of a consumer. The outcome of our wager between the investment and the consumers results in a return.

On the publishing side, we see a production line… the manufacturer of this commodity. Their business is to produce an opportunity for an advertiser to place a bet and try to affect the future.

So it’s inevitable that before long there will be a real forward market emerging within this impression-based commodity market. The impending tide shift it is going to make the emergence of RTB – the spot market – look like a warm up act, and it is one hell of an opportunity for all of us.

Those who prepare now for will be ready to make the most of it; those who don’t will be left behind.

Want to talk forwards and futures?

We do.

Talk to us at switch@switchconcepts.com

Originally published ExchangeWire 23 Nov 2016

Huge strides have been made by publishers through the adoption of header bidders. However, the increasingly apparent limitations of this approach are driving a shift in thinking that presents major business opportunities. Switch’s co-founder, Tom Barnett (pictured below), says that, for the right publishers, now’s the time to make a move that will transform the whole industry.

Digital publishers have done an incredible job in gaining control of their space in the programmatic environment. The advent of header bidding has driven up digital advertising revenue and introduced an early form of parallel auction that puts them in control of the process.

It increasingly looks like we’re reaching a watershed moment in online publishing. Programmatic technology has been rapidly adopted as publishers seek the fastest and most efficient way to offer their inventory to advertisers in order to maximise yield and get the best revenue return.

Header bidding has played a key role in that it has created an auction environment that allows advertisers to bid for the inventory they most want, allowing publishers the chance to sell to the highest bidder, driving up ad revenues. Publishers are adopting header bidders as a way to try to emulate a holistic auction.

It’s no surprise that there’s currently a lot of debate taking place between publishers, advertising agencies and brands over how to curb the ad-blocking explosion.

Much of the discussion tends to be focused on the quality of advertising content and how it is presented to consumers. The more relevant, inspiring, entertaining and informative the ad content, the more value and less ‘annoying’ it is likely to be, therefore reducing the demand for adblocking.

Publishers need more than header bidders and third-party server-to-server solutions to unify the publishing/advertising ecosystem. Andy Mitchell, CRO at Switch Concepts (pictured below), explains why publishers need a first-party S2S solution – and why making such a move would be worth it, despite whatever investment has been made into header bidding.

There’s been a lot of debate around header bidding recently, both positive and negative. Despite its recent rapid adoption, it’s actually been around for years. And, although it is helping to grow publishers’ revenues by increasing competition among buyers, this client-side ad auctioning system isn’t what users want at all. In fact, so much so, that it could be helping to fuel ad-blocking – in many respects it has just pushed the legacy waterfall pricing approach further up the page.