Happy Friday!,
The big news week again, with the biggest news being a mistake made in a programmatic training exercise caused a buyer to inadvertently spend $1.6 million in a mintutes. With CPMs in excess of $200 it is rumored as much as $10m was spent in 45 minutes… The full details and how I think this could be avoided, below.
The other really big news this week is Pete Kim’s MightyHive have decided to sell to Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital. It looks like Sir Martin got a good deal for such a mightily impressive business, full details below.
Next we turn our attention to some sad news: MediaMath is laying some staff off, this has been something of a trend recently for AdTech firms & I hope anyone effected is okay. Finally we look at some really important news from the IAB Tech Lab who recently announced ads.txt for Apps in beta. This is a really important development for anyone working in AdTech to understand and importantly get behind.
Enjoy the newsletter,
Simon
Zero To $1.6m In Minutes
You don’t hear much about overspends these days, a good thing, as for traders they are the things of nightmares.
I have NEVER heard of one as big as the one that happened on December the 4th when Google made a mistake during a training exercise with media agency DMG 360 which resulted in a campaign going live by accident for 45 minutes:
As the dust settled, it is said that the campaign had spent at least $1.6 million and that total spending may well have exceeded $10 million.
CPMs were reportedly more than $270, with some publishers saw payments north of $100,000 and reports suggest that even niche publishers saw thousands of dollars spent every few seconds.
It is unclear exactly what the mistake was, perhaps someone assigned creative to an active line item & it started to serve or maybe someone changed the status of an inactive I/O that had active line items within it to active… the truth is we may never know, but one thing we do know is that the campaign went live & internet users across the US & Australia saw bright yellow MPU’s almost constantly for just under an hour.
Here is Google’s statement on the matter:
"An advertiser training exercise led to an error where actual spend happened on publisher sites for approximately 45 minutes. As soon as we were made aware of this honest mistake we worked quickly to stop the campaigns running. We will honor payments to publishers for any ads purchased and are working hard to put safeguards in place to ensure this doesn't happen again."
Whilst better safeguards are not as sexy as adding new formats or channels to a DSP, this is certainly an area where the platforms would benefit from improving. My recommendation would be that platforms provide a sandbox environment for training new users of their systems based on legacy auction data. This way the platform can simulate real-time buying without creating the risk of significant errors being made.
S4 Acquires MightyHive For $150 Million
S4 Capital, Martin Sorrell’s new age holding company announced on Tuesday morning that it has entered into an agreement to acquire programmatic solutions provider MightyHive for $150 million.
There has been speculation for months that this would be S4’s next acquisition and it will certainly be interesting to see what opportunities combining the capabilities of MediaMonks & MightyHive creates for S4 clients:
MightyHive sells itself as a "new breed of media consultancy" and has been phenomenally successful, working with a host of large brands globally.
It provides programmatic trading, training on how to trade for clients looking to take programmatic trading in house, as well services such as as data strategy & analytics.
S4 will fund the cash portion of the deal by issuing 67 million new ordinary shares at a price of 110 pence ($1.40) each & I think they got a really good deal:
Congratulations to everyone at MightyHive, I expect this change will help the business continue the stellar success of 2018 and take you all to greater heights in 2019.
Lay Offs At MediaMath
Sadly it is not all positive news this week, AdTech journalist @ronan_shields had the scoop on a round of layoffs at venerable demand side business MediaMath:
MediaMath who have raised more than $200 million this year said in an internal memo the business said it was realigning its leadership structure & that this would involve a number job losses as the business merges its product and engineering teams.
MediaMath’s CEO, said, “The changes we have made in our organizational structure will enable us to develop products for and with our clients in order to ensure that we are best equipped to serve and mobilize the ecosystem as a whole.”
It is a challenging time for AdTech businesses, public exits are few and far between & as programmatic has scaled margins have been compressed, this means businesses are forced to be leaner than ever before. It is never good news when people lose their jobs & I wish everyone effected well.
The IAB Launches Ads.txt For Apps Into Beta
The IAB Tech Lab is an amazing organisation, for the uninitiated they are the body that codifies the standards upon which the programmatic ecosystem runs. They recently announced that ads.txt for apps called “app-ads.txt” is in beta:
The process began in the spring of 2017 & has taken longer than hoped because App stores have dragged their heels. The current process is very similar to ads.txt for websites.
As referenced above the file name that contains authorized sellers is actually “app-ads.txt” as opposed to “ads.txt” so that app and web configurations are managed separately and do not create conflicts between each other. The process for a developer to follow is:
1) App developers provide a website URL in their app’s store metadata & publish an app ads.txt file on that website that lists authorized sellers of their app’s ad inventory.
2) SSPs provide store listing URL on bid requests to facilitate enforcement of authorized seller status.
3) App stores publish app metadata in a standard HTML tag on the app store’s listing page for the app so that it can be crawled and parsed as structured data.
4) Authorized seller verifiers crawl app stores to find developer website information, crawl developer websites to obtain and interpret app-ads.txt files, and enforce authorization status on inventory.
It’s great that this protocol is now in beta, the mobile app ecosystem has been challenging from a verification perspective for some time & as with ads.txt these standards will improve trust in the mobile app ecosystem. You can download the full specs here
Okay that’s another newsletter done. As always if you want to connect you can find me here:
Twitter: @SimonJHarris
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Thanks & have a lovely weekend
Simon