Magnite's Ashlee Roenigk on Publisher Opportunities around Prebid, Header Bidding and Demand Manager

Ashlee Roenigk is VP, Revenue Solutions at Magnite (formerly known as Rubicon Project.) We spoke to her about the opportunities right now in programmatic for publishers, how and why they should get involved in prebid.org and what Rubicon’s Demand Manager product does for them:

What is the status of programmatic for publishers right now, would you say - has it become more complex lately, and if so where are the opportunities?

The majority of our publishers went through many tactical changes over the last few years implementing header bidding and all that came with it. Header bidding started as an extremely hands-on solution which was very complex, but in the last two years has now seen productization and community standardization, which continues to lessen that complexity.

Last year, we first thought the switch to server-side header bidding and understanding match rates would be the next great challenge. While that is still a focus for all parties, other topics, like cookies and identity, have also come to the fore.

Thinking specifically around Prebid.org, what are the specific challenges and opportunities there? and why is Prebid.org an important forum for publishers to join in?

Prebid.org is fighting the good fight on behalf of publishers. Magnite takes part in the vast majority of the committees and projects that exist which allow a great back and forth flow of information, including chairing many of the committees

It is an exciting time, as publisher involvement is at its highest point – and this is critical to driving solutions around all the industry challenges we face. Not only in the work being done around cookies and alternative identity solutions, but also around a universal floors solution which we believe will finally provide transparency and standardization across all Prebid.org (and hopefully Google) auction participants.

If they use Prebid, publishers should absolutely join the organization, for many reasons. In case you don’t know, there are free tiers of membership in which you can participate however you want - giving feedback, presenting at an event, joining a committee or project. There are also paid membership tiers. One such tier, the publisher tier, gives you board representation – meaning you can fully participate in product roadmaps and industry-wide discussions.

Prebid.org offered publishers a greater revenue potential but also brought complexity - What is the problem Demand Manager is seeking to solve, and what kind of publishers is it aimed at?

We want publishers to be able to focus on their business and what they're best at. We’ve done over two thousand header implementations, at least, since I’ve been at Rubicon Project/Magnite; out of that process, we built a toolset that both our clients and internal teams use to implement, troubleshoot, and optimize for our clients. We know header bidding can be as complex to set up as it is to maintain and optimize. We want to provide publishers with the data to make business and technical decisions without resource implications being a factor.

Demand Manager allows anyone to make use of the time saving tools, whether that be business teams, engineering teams, or the Magnite team upon request. To date, the service has been utilized by publishers with a variety of different needs -- the main being lack of internal dedicated resources to maintain header solutions. In addition, there are many publishers that do have resources but want better tools to really test and measure the value of their demand partners. 

How is it different to similar solutions on the market? And if possible, can you give more specific detail around what it does right now, and what we can expect it to do in the near future?

There are many solutions built around Prebid.org. It’s important that the solutions use the standard Prebid code, like Demand Manager, without any modifications. 

In addition, it’s key to have tools like Demand Manager’s configuration UIs that connect not only to the page, but to the ad server, and robust analytics that give details on all demand sources, not just the one that manages the wrapper, in order for publishers to maximize their header implementations. 

It’s advantageous to understand how solution providers interact with Prebid.org -  they can have many roles in the organization including: holding leadership positions, being extremely active by releasing features and driving industry collaboration services to serve publishers’ needs directly.

This year we’ll be taking Demand Manager a step further by continuing to automate a lot of what our tools do today, which will give publishers more ways to test and optimize their setups.

What is the longer term view on header bidding and Prebid.org? Will it be server, rather than client-based - and will it function with third party cookies, or rather, other identifiers?

We do still feel strongly that Prebid Server is the future of header bidding and we’re already seeing traction with mobile app and video. Solving the cookie issue is our mandate for 2020, and the move to servers at this time (for standard desktop en masse) is secondary to solving these core issues. All the tools being built today, both at Magnite and within Prebid.org, are built to solve today’s client-side issues as well as easily translate to server when we’re ready.

There are many publishers today that are using server for environments such as mobile app and desktop formats like video. Other publishers, on the other hand, are using tools like Demand Manager’s A/B testing module to try server in an easy and risk-free way: for example, to understand what their current match rates look like and if latency can be improved in cases where current header implementation or size can be causing page performance and/or revenue issues.

Prebid Server, and Demand Manager, support many of the current identity solutions on market as well as the newly created Prebid ID solution, which allows publishers to create and transmit their own IDs or identity vendor IDs in a standardized way to everyone in the auction.

We expect the near future to remain heavily focused on client-side for desktop display but mid-term future will have many hybrid set-ups with one to two client bidders (while 3rd party cookies still apply) and many server-side bidders.

We still believe our collective five-year future will see Prebid Server being able to fully function as ad serving technology and giving publishers real options and control over their tech setups.