Brian O'Kelley - BOKonAds

Protecting cancer victims from ad tech

How ad tech companies (and the marketers and publishers that enable them) use our most sensitive, personal information against cancer victims and their families.

Proposals for Privacy and Competition

Today I testified in front of the US Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing about privacy and competition in the digital advertising space. My testimony is here. Highlights at 32:00 (my oral testimony), 50:00 (when I make an analogy and Senator Graham says "whatever"), and 2:04:30

BOK off Ads

In March 2003, I stepped off the PATH train at 23rd and 6th and walked down the block to my new job as a contractor for Poindexter Systems, an "ad tech" company. The Flatiron neighborhood was, much like the internet at the time, hung over from the dot

Trusted Data Partners: Epilogue

In early 2017, I wrote a couple of posts where I described the problem of data leakage in the ad tech industry and I proposed a solution: publishers should list their Trusted Data Partners and require the ad tech ecosystem to only send the publisher's data to companies on this

blockchain

Blockchain: Building Blocks, Not Blockbuster

I share my basic thoughts on blockchain, ad tech, and ICOs

transparency

The Transparency Bear

Transparency is coming. And for ad tech companies, the question is simple: can you outrun the transparency bear? And if not, can you outrun your competitors?

fraud

Ending Ad Fraud: A Distributed and Punitive Approach

Over the past 20 years of digital advertising, we have seen a drumbeat of news stories about fraud. Often, these stories include some terrifying sum of advertising money that is being wasted buying fraudulent traffic. These stories are often seeded by an anti-fraud vendor or their proxy, who stand to

spo

Passthrough Auctions: Rethinking Supply Path Optimization

Last August, I wrote a post introducing the concept of Supply Path Optimization to address the commoditization of programmatic supply access due to header bidding. Over the next two quarters, I worked closely with a team at AppNexus that did a domain-by-domain analysis of supply paths and rolled out a

Request for Comments: Trusted Data Partners

In a previous post I explained how data leakage happens. In this post I will propose a framework to solve this problem systematically. Levels of data leakage protection As publishers think about preventing data leakage, there is an implicit tradeoff between protecting data and maximizing revenue. In general, we think

data leakage

Data is fallout, not oil

A reporter once told me he was going to write a piece about programmatic advertising called "Data is the new oil"[1]. His idea was that having data about customers and prospects is directly correlated with the ability to drive successful marketing outcomes, and thus that brands should

opinion

The ad tech renaissance

We simply must fix the monetization and distribution challenges that publishers face. This is a societal problem as well as an economic one; we need to support real news if we want to fight back fake news. The internet needs an ad tech renaissance, one based on creating real value

Can Technology Save Journalism?

Cross-posting a couple of articles I wrote for Forbes: Can Technology Save Journalism? Part I - February 23, 2016 Can Technology Save Journalism? Part II - September 6, 2016

Why lower win rates are better

In the world of the ad exchange, your "win rate" is the ratio of bids to wins. This seems like an intuitive metric: if you want to win more, bid higher. Even with all of the crazy multi-tier pseudo-auctions we see these days, this is still generally the

spo

Preventing Bad Behavior in Header Bidding: Supply Path Optimization

As publishers implement header bidding in increasing numbers, we are beginning to see new techniques that allow an aggressive SSP to significantly alter outcomes for both the publisher and the buyer. This results in short-term gain for the SSP but long-term pain for the advertiser, publisher, and the programmatic ecosystem