Test Article for Demo's - What is Header Bidding?

Advertising technology has seen its fair share of landmark accomplishments in the last decade, constantly pushing to give publishers an opportunity for more significant revenue with less manual work. Header bidding allowed publishers to grow their revenue further within the advertising technology landscape by implementing a fairer and wider-reaching bidding method. 

Header bidding would consistently hang out near the top of the 'Media and Publishing Buzzword Chart' (if such a thing exists), despite many people in the industry having only a minor grasp of the concept. I can't fault these people, as the idea of header bidding and programmatic advertising was entirely foreign to me until relatively recently. 

To fully understand the concept of header bidding, it's essential to understand precisely what it's not. Typically, header bidding is thought of as a product or ad server, but this isn't exactly the case. In its simplest form, header bidding is the concept of offering ad inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously. In reality, it's a programmatic technology that publishers use to get the most out of their ad inventory and ensure the highest-paying bid is served. 

Popular Header Bidding Platforms

While starting with Google or Amazon's solutions is enticing, it's impossible to speak about header bidding without highlighting Prebid. Prebid is a free, open-source header bidding solution encapsulating prebid.js, the most widely used header bidding wrapper, and Prebid Server. 

According to Prebid's documentation, "Prebid.js is a feature-rich header bidding platform for the web, including more than 300 demand sources and 50 analytics adapters. It supports currency conversion, GDPR, common ID systems, and multiple ad servers."

Prebid solves many problems for large publishers with comprehensive ad ops teams and time to invest in their solution. Because it's very much a 'do-it-yourself' platform, small and mid-size publishers might struggle to set up and manage prebid successfully. 

While header bidding was the industry's attempt to level the playing field with Google (or maybe even give themselves an advantage), the US's most prominent digital ad publisher wouldn't give up easily. Google's response was to create their 'Exchange Bidding' or 'Open Bidding' solutions. 

Exchange Bidding is a server-side header bidding-style method of ad sales that easily integrates with Google's other ad-sales tools. Luckily, publishers can incorporate Exchange Bidding along with other header bidding partners to achieve maximum flexibility and yield optimization.

Similar to Google, Amazon also decided to try its hand in the header bidding game, developing the Unified Ad Marketplace (UAM) and Transparent Ad Marketplace (TAM). Both UAM and TAM technically work similarly to Google's Exchange Bidding, in the sense that they are a type of header bidding rather than a particular technology. The most significant difference between the two platforms is that UAM focuses on small and mid-size publishers, while TAM addresses large publishers' needs.