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Every Friday, AdExchanger publishes an original comic creation inspired by trends in the online advertising industry.
We get together to spit out ideas and then share them with our very talented cartoonist Kevvo.
Of the rise of curators on Antitrust lawsuit against Google’s ad technology in Virginiahe helps us translate the biggest news stories into the geekiest cartoons.
Sometimes, though, we just entertain ourselves—and hopefully you—with a little ad tech pun. (Pandora’s Chumboxanyone?)
Sometimes we wonder if Kevvo thinks we’re crazy. They probably will! But he never misses. When we send Kev a concept for a comic, he turns it into art.
These are the stories—and very specific double signs—behind AdExchanger’s Top 10 Comics of 2024.
There was no shortage of ad tech scandals in 2024, and many of them were uncovered by the folks at Adalyticsa programmatic analytics log file startup with a sense of giving up research that digs into the inner workings of online advertising.
What he discovers is usually not flattering, including brand-unsafe user-generated content, MFA flows unfettered through program pipelines and Forbes operates a mislabeled MFA subdomain without the knowledge of the customers.
After each scandal breaks, the industry engages in collective action catching pearls. How could this happen? Why didn’t someone stop it? It’s time for changes!
Eventually, though, the furor subsides and the industry returns to the status quo.
For less shocked sighs and more real action in 2025.
Were you one of those who predicted that Google would not actually suspend third-party cookies?
So you called. Feel free to take off the tinfoil hat.
Before July, which is when Google said I was “just kidding” about the whole rejection thingit was considered somewhat of a conspiracy theory to claim that Google would not undergo a phase-out.
It doesn’t feel like you can say, “I told you so.”
(By the way, this was our instruction to Kev for this comic: “Please draw a group of smug-looking people munching on cookies. Oh, and make them look like The Lone Gunmen of The X-FilesPlease!”)
The internet advertising industry has a tendency to navel-gaze and get lost in the weeds without a compass.
For example, the semantic debate last year over whether the term for cynically produced clickbait content should be “made for advertising” or “made for arbitration.”
To be fair, there is an important difference. It could be argued that any content that aims to monetize advertising has been created for advertising, while sites built for arbitrage deliberately manipulate programmatic advertising to monetize low-quality content.
However, no matter what you call it, most advertisers want to avoid MFA at all costs – not that they know how to define it. But as US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said in 1964 to explain his obscenity threshold test: “I know it when I see it.”
And we all “see” it almost every time we browse the internet, from endless slideshows to clickbait that doesn’t deliver. In this comic, we expose the most notorious forms of clickbait using ad tech topics. The headline “17 DMPs and what they look like now” got a serious laugh from everyone on the editorial team.
“This is my Super Bowl, this is my Roman Empire.”
Here’s how Ari Paparo, who deals with Marketecture these days, described his experience coverage of Google’s advertising technology antitrust trial in September in Virginia, which we disagree with. We were there in person during first week of testimony.
The trial, which lasted just three weeks, was like a vivisection of the ad tech ecosystem in all its intricate and dark complexity. From header bidding to auction dynamics, witness after witness took the stand to air grievances or defend business practices.
Our comic is from Judge Leonie Brinkem’s view of the courtroom where it all happened. And the gallery is full of Easter eggs. Say hello to Stephanie Layser, Andrew Casale, Brian O’Kelley, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Carnegie, Mr. Monopoly, and Lex Luther.
Layser and Casale also testified. Mr. Monopoly was not invited.
During The Trade Desk’s Q1 2024 earnings call, CEO Jeff Green introduced a new term: the so-calledpremium internet.”
TTD defines “premium internet” as “the best of the open internet”, including connected television, streaming audio, live sports and reliable journalism – all of which are very attractive to advertisers.
And so there’s no reason why walled gardens should attract so much advertising dollars, Green argued to investors, especially when those big ad platforms are also some of the biggest distributors of MFA content.
In February TTD has launched its SP500+ marketplace in beta, bringing together what it considers the top publishers on the open internet. And in the spring, TTD published a list of what it considers to be top 100 most premium publishers on the internet.
Both announcements caused a stir in the industryprovoking the question, ”Who has the right to define premium internet?” In our comic, we took that idea to its next logical conclusion: a “quality coaster” where Green decides who is top-notch enough to ride.
Second place
It’s that time again when people like to determine the “word of the year”.
So what should be the word of the year in the ad tech industry? probably “curation”, which became one of the most sought-after and controversial topics in 2024.
Also, “curation” has an advantage because it actually is word.
According to Oxford University Press, the word of the year 2024 is “brain rot,” which, it should be noted, are two words. Meanwhile, “AI” is ANA’s word of the year for the second year in a row. (We all realize AI isn’t a word, right? It’s a startup term.)
Anyway, back to curation, it has fired up a lot of people as they debate whether it’s really a new thing or just a retooled version of ad networks.
But as over-the-top as Sturm und Drang was curated this year, it was rivaled by the resentment swirling around ID bridging.
The practice, which involves using first-party data to find matches and recovering third-party cookies for bid requests when third-party cookies are not available, prompted a debate that raged inside the IAB Tech Lab.
“This was the most contentious task force conversation I’ve ever had,” Hillary Slattery, senior director of product management for Programmatic at Tech Lab, he told AdExchanger in July.
Since then, Tech Lab has added “Provenance ID” to the latest OpenRTB specification and the waters settled.
Competing rapper in the header
Prebid.org, the industry standards body that developed and maintains Prebid.js – a widely adopted open source header bidding wrapper – was in the news a lot in September.
And that’s because Prebid has appeared multiple times during the trial of Google’s anti-competitive advertising technology, including this juicy tidbit.
According to Brian O’Kelley, whose pre-recorded statement was played in court, Google was “strongly opposed” to the idea of Prebid, because he hinted at an increase in bidding in the header. As the IAB’s largest financial contributor, Google was able to pressure the Tech Lab not to include the technology.
Not that this has stopped header bidding – far from it. Prebid.org was founded as an independent header bidding support organization and both have been thriving ever since.
Although alternative TV measurement currencies they failed to knock Nielsen off the pedestalit is clear that the TV advertising industry is ready for change.
Service providers like VideoAmp, iSpot and Comscore are making life difficult for Nielsen.
For example, Paramount and Nielsen remain locked in battle over the price of the Nielsen service. Paramount, finding Nielsen’s fees too high, let his contract expire. It now relies on VideoAmp for viewership instead.
Last but not least, publishers have been talking about using attention metrics as a unit of media buying currency for at least a decade. Look at this The 2014 AdExchanger Story (!!). frankly speaking the attention metric is starting to gain traction.
However, over the past year, attention gets a lot more attentionand who knows: maybe in 2025 the click-through rate will break through to the measured version Silicon paradise and attention metrics will finally start to gain real momentum.
This comic is inspired The Mets and their impressive streak during the 2024 season. They may not have made it to the World Cup, but they have generated a lot of attention. (Sorry, we had to). The Mets/metrics pun also proved irresistible.
🙏 Congratulations once again Kevvo for bringing our comic book concepts to life! ✏️
