BRAVE

Micro-drama inventory is now in open programmatic. Worth knowing what you're dealing with before it lands in your packages... The short version: ✔️ Per user, they hold mobile viewers longer than Netflix does. ✔️ Free tiers can carry an ad every minute or two. ✔️ 12 to 25 ad opportunities per person, per day ✔️ Top 20 apps reach 250 million monthly active users. Volume that arrives before supply-quality standards do is where arbitrage lives. So the only question that matters is: curated or arbitraged? One of them will be in your package. Blog article featuring insights by Jeremy Goldman (EMARKETER), Maria Rua Aguete (Omdia), Donny Kristianto & Rui Ma (Sensor Tower), Doug Choy (The Trade Desk), Ludovic Bostral (Streaming Radar), Dmitry Vakhtin (Filmustage), and Anatolii Kasianov (HOLYWATER TECH)

Micro-drama inventory is entering open programmatic at brand scale. The Trade Desk became DramaBox's first-ever DSP partner in April. The category's top 20 apps reach 250 million monthly active users. Free tiers can carry an ad every minute or two. Volume that arrives before supply-quality standards do is where arbitrage lives. The buyers who win this category will be the ones who can tell curated supply from arbitraged supply. New on the blog: Alexa Greenstein breaks down the 3 questions to ask of any path carrying this inventory this year ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/d6ingDHd

Advertisers have spent years blaming creative for a 0.3% CTR. Alex Heng makes the case it was mostly a timing problem. Right message, right person, right time. #AI shopping assistants are the first place all 3 land at once.

The signal problem doesn’t stem from your optimization models. It starts upstream. Alex Heng on bid fidelity, direct inventory, and what curation changes on your side of the auction.

2 advertisers spend the same. One converts 54% of that spend into qualified impressions. The other converts 32%. That gap is not budget. It is evaluation. The Q1 programmatic transparency benchmark from the Association of National Advertisers split advertisers into performance cohorts and found the difference sitting entirely in how rigorously they judge what they buy. Both cohorts spent nearly the same on PMPs vs open market and paid similar fees. The difference was what they let through. Meanwhile, 99.2% of #CTV programmatic spend now runs through private marketplaces (which means PMP access has stopped being a differentiator). What separates supply partners now is what happens before the impression is offered. The RFI convergence and what buyers are actually evaluating: https://lnkd.in/dpr2Kz3g

The programmatic transparency benchmark (Association of National Advertisers) found 59% of ad spend going to private marketplaces, compared with 41% in the open marketplace. A complete reversal from the year before. That's not a shift in preference. It's buyers estimating the true cost of unmanaged supply. The legacy model treated supply as passive plumbing. The connected stack treats it as a lever. More on what curated supply paths actually change: https://lnkd.in/djEFHhXQ

41.4% more revenue per million ad requests. 3.4% lower advertiser CPA. That is the documented result when pre-bid signal exchange filters traffic before it reaches the bidder. Sending less traffic makes both sides more money. Efficiency is not a compromise between supply and demand. It is the thing they actually share. Alex Heng breaks down what this means for Q4 margins: https://lnkd.in/dYwfTeXK

It's a loud month for AI in programmatic advertising. ✔️ ChatGPT ads went from pilot to platform ✔️ Impressions served to #AI agents became a real industry debate ✔️ AI curation landed on everyone's roadmap Back in July, we profiled the Top 10 AI Innovators in Programmatic Infrastructure, the people who built the layer that makes all this possible. This month, the headlines caught up. 4 of the 10, in their own words. The pattern is hard to miss: AI as the enabler. The person behind the tech as the rule-setter. Laetitia Pfeiffer (Publicis Groupe), Melissa Furze (Integral Ad Science), Ikkjin Ahn (Moloco), and Neal Richter (Amazon). The full list 👇

"Send us everything," said no #DSP ever. Alex Heng on why curated and shaped beats "everything," every time.

In May, we gave it a name: #agentic blindness. The inability to tell whether an impression reaches a person or an #AI agent. Fast forward 3 months: the industry started selling ads to these agents on purpose. An agent acting for a real buyer is a new kind of audience, and the honest questions are the old ones: ��️ Who does this impression actually serve? ✔️ Who verified it? ✔️ Who is accountable when no one's accountable? For a decade, non-human traffic was called fraud. It cannot become a product just because a rate card is attached. The difference between the 2 is provenance, and that's exactly where supply path blind spots still sit. We wrote about the fix 3 months ago ➡️ https://lnkd.in/dDw6f6tp Curation did not get less relevant. It became the whole conversation.