Yesterday at our Programmatic for Publishers Summit in London, we brought together some of the world’s biggest media brands with thought leaders from across the mobile marketing world to discuss how publishers address the challenges and opportunities that exist within the programmatic market.

Header bidding and mobile monetisation are the two topics dominating conversation in the programmatic space. Our summit gives publishers the chance to get answers from those programmatic know-how and gain a better understanding of the key technology and its impact on mobile marketing.

If you weren’t able to attend the conference, here is a selection of the best gems of wisdom shared during the event.

“The combination of sights, sounds, and emotions on a mobile screen presents a really powerful messaging vehicle for publishers.”

“Mobile and video makes a killer combination, it’s fair to say. And as we see more mobile-only digital consumption, including video content consumption, as a publisher you have to invest in those platforms to capture that.”

Julian Strut, manager for publisher business development at SpotX, showed publishers why they need to get on mobile video advertising in a big way.

“There’s been a rise in ad blocker usage and we believe that a lot of that is down to the fact that ads are really intrusive, or getting in the way of the user, resulting in a negative user experience. However, brands still need to ensure a strong delivery of their message. In particular, ensure the expenditure of their high impact budgets as well.”

Mobile advertising isn’t always the best. So, Shez Iqbal, head of UK & Ireland publishers at Sublime Skinz discussed how publishers can use a variety of ad formats to provide impactful ads providing the best user experience.

“It’s not so much about the data… the focus is on the individual and the increasing use of digital services. The data footprint that these people leave and how that affects their lives increasingly… GDPR is now saying this needs to be transparent, this needs to be controlled, and it needs to be put back into the hands of the user.”

Robert Bergmann, CEO & co-founder at Teavaro guided the publishers in attendance through how they can get their business in order with the GDPR implementation fast approaching.

“There’s a few misconceptions in header bidding. I think, at the moment, there’s a lot of talk about client-side header bidding versus server-side. And it’s a little bit like ‘server-side will solve all your problems’ – that’s not strictly true. I think there’s an evolution to server-side, it might get there eventually but it’s not quite the case today.”

“I think there’s a bit of a misconception that moving things to server-side is going to solve your latency issues.”

“There’s a common misconception that the highest CPM is the best for yield. I think, the way that header bidding is used today, that’s pretty much the setup that most publishers have. They just play the SSPs off against each other and see who has the highest CPM. There’s a bit of a smarter way and that’s taking scarcity into consideration.”

There are still a few myths and wrong approaches taken by publishers in header bidding, according to Martin Hill, director of solution engineering at Iponweb.  

“Trust has never been a more important topic than it is at the moment.”

“In this time, what we’re going through in terms of GDPR and how things are moving to header bidding, I think it’s really important to think about the audience you’re accessing and the ways in which you can access that.”

Ben Putley, strategic account director at Sharethrough looked at the trust that consumers have in publishers over the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

“If you’re an advertiser, you don’t want to turn off 50 per cent of your audience just because you presented an argument in some way or you affiliated yourself to something.”

Ian Hocking, head of programmatic at News UK rounded off the day telling publishers how News uses data to effectively target the right sections of its audience with the right ads.