50 of the leading publishers in Sweden gathered together last Wednesday at Berns for our latest event – covering both the latest product updates, as well as analysing the most recent market trends.

Presented alongside our partner Rubicon Project, these events give our customers fuel to keep growing their programmatic businesses – and a chance to catch up with colleagues – all in just a couple of hours.

Rubicon's Flora Evans kicked off the event with an informative talk about all things header bidding, from its creation – to optimise all revenue sources in real-time – to its quick passage from wide adoption to maturity – the open source standards which Rubicon jointly oversees on the Prebid council.

Next up is moving the whole process out of the page header to the server (also known as server-to-server header bidding), which promises even lower latency and faster page loading times – though this is still at an early stage.

Our own Victor Hammarstrand also took to the stage, explaining why Rubicon’s acquisition of supply path optimisation (SPO) tech nToggle is so important to the future. Of course, other companies have talked about SPO, but our partner is the only to invest millions of dollars in the technology. What nToggle essentially does is to enable buyers to navigate the new reality of header bidding, getting around its complexities. Essentially, with this new piece of kit in place, we are helping them to avoid inventory duplication, cut operating costs and increase win rates. When you think of the longer term market forces, we believe this will help to surface the quality publishers on our own platform – and make demand even stronger.

Another, similarly important project is the adoption of ads.txt. Born out of the IAB, it’s essentially a simple way of adding an extra layer of transparency to programmatic. And at the same time, limit access to premium inventory only to authorised buyers. Rubicon Account Director Nathan Probert explained the benefits in detail, and a quick show of hands confirmed that a number of Swedish publishers have already adopted the measure.

To summarise all of the talks in one in a short space is tricky – but whether it’s header bidding, SPO, ads.txt or any of the other areas discussed – what brings them all together is the aim of becoming the most open, complete and efficient marketplace in the Nordics (and worldwide). And you could even say that events like this have their part to play in that strategy.

If you attended, we hope you got a lot out of the morning. If you didn’t, we hope to see you at another one soon.

We will follow up in the coming weeks with a series of interviews featuring some of our customers who were there on the day.