Arrival at The Standard

In this opening session, BidSwitch’s GM, Barry Adams, and Portfolio Director, Prena Khan, will set the stage for the day’s content by providing an overview on the state of adtech and the trends and topics having the greatest impact on programmatic, leveraging data and insights from BidSwitch’s unique vantage connecting nearly 250 DSPs and SSPs worldwide.  
 
Topics to be covered: 
- Supply and demand-side trading trends, based on BidSwitch’s own listening intelligence 
- The escalating tension between bidstream distribution and relevance  
- A progress report on various industry pushes for transparency and quality 
- The state of post-cookie preparedness 
- Adoption and deployment trends across various ID and privacy solutions 
- The latest pulse on sustainability and DEI in AdTech 

Starting in January 2024, Google’s Chrome browser will start to randomly remove 3rd-party cookies from 1% of traffic, slowly ramping that population size over the course of the year, until full 3rd-party cookie deprecation is supposed to go into effect by the end of the year. 
  
In this fireside chat, BidSwitch GM, Barry Adams, will talk to Senior Product Manager for Google’s Privacy Sandbox, Alex Cone, to help our adtech partners better understand: 

- The state of Privacy Sandbox testing across the most mature APIs 
- Top ad capabilities and features supported in sandbox 
- How SSPs and DSPs should be working with Google now  
- The roadmap for Privacy Sandbox through 2024 

The programmatic bidstream has more than doubled in volume over the past 3 years, far outpacing the growth in programmatic investment. In other words, trading costs are growing faster than trading revenues. Beyond the clear financial implications, this level of waste makes programmatic advertising an even greater CO2 offender at a time when most big media buyers are paying greater attention to their ads-driven carbon footprint. 
 
The culprits are many: header bidding, bid duplication, MFA, to name a few. The various attempts to tackle these issues have been bucketed under the catch-all phrase Supply Path Optimization (SPO), and, more recently, for sellers, Demand Path Optimization. As is usually the case with adtech, there are many approaches to address these issues. What the right solution(s) are, and who should own them, is less clear. In this session, expert panelists will discuss:  

- The state of the problem - what is the impact, and how is it felt on the sell- vs. buy-side 
- What roles should the various participiants in the supply chain play in bidstream optimization 
- The various approaches to bidstream optimization 
- The impact of sustainability initiatives on bidstream optimization strategy 
- Success metrics for understanding bidstream efficiency 

Refreshments

Evolving global privacy regulations and new protocols for managing and distributing customer consent are redefining how buyers and sellers will approach core components of digital advertising in the very near future. While the IAB’s Global Privacy Platform (GPP) framework has emerged as the de facto standard for signaling consent and applicability, regional fragmentation, continued regulatory rollouts, and ad-tech holdouts on unifying GDPR and GPP are stalling adoption and preventing the framework from reaching true maturity. 
 
In this panel, we will discuss the impact of the evolving privacy landscape on various stakeholders in the advertising value chain, and the role of GPP in addressing those issues. Core topics include: 

- How publishers are approaching consent management and vendor selection 
- The state of GPP adoption and ongoing evolution to meet changing regulations 
- The CMP landscape and how they are evolving to keep pace with changing consent requirements 
- The auditability of consent management and where responsibility lives 

In recent years, adtech has taken up a number of causes that started as social movements before making their way into all facets of business. That includes everything from DE&I (both in terms of workforce representation and investment allocation), environmental sustainability, geopolitics, and responsible journalism. But oftentimes, noise and virtue signaling can outweigh intent and impact.  
 
This panel will take a long-term view to discuss:  

- Adtech’s responsibility when it comes to CSR initiatives 
- Our impact to date (and where we can be doing more) 
- Tips for tying CSR efforts to business metrics  
- Best practices for mobilizing employees, clients, and other stakeholders into collective action 

As digital advertising continues to mature, the metrics buyers look at to evaluate supply quality and campaign effectiveness are necessarily evolving. KPIs are expanding beyond viewability, VCR, and CTR to include metrics for attention, non-human traffic and supply path directness, all of which act as some sort of buy-side proxy for supply quality and media impact.  
 
In this panel, we will discuss the latest signals that are dominating buy-side conversations and how they are being used to drive bid decisioning and optimization. Topics this panel will explore include:

- What signals are buyers talking about today, and how are they different from legacy KPIs? 
- How are these signals being distributed / identified through the bidstream? 
- How are advertisers and media owners thinking about the shift? 
- What proactive steps should ad tech be taking to adjust to changing buying requirements? 

Wrap-up with Barry Adams

Cocktails and Appetizers