Header bidding is hot. But are the high expectations justified? With the Adhese Gateway, Belgian company Adhese, which specialises in ad-serving technology, is bringing a better alternative onto the market that delivers publishers up to 35 per cent more income on adverts than header bidding.
Currently, the Adhese Gateway runs on the full online network of three large Belgian publishers, namely Pebblemedia (including the Flemish and Walloon public broadcasters), Mediahuis and IPM. The results are spectacular: a higher income for the publisher and a better user experience for the end user.
Via the Gateway, SSPs get access to every impression and can subsequently publish an offer. By allowing SSPs to directly compete with other adverts (such as premium, in-house and partner deals), publishers achieve considerably more income per impression: overall, this leads to up to 35 per cent more income.
Server-side implementation: more control, less data use, lower latency.
The Adhese Gateway operates fully server-side instead of client-side like header bidding. This has many advantages for both publishers and end users.
Publishers get more control and no longer need to continually update their applications (on the client-side).
For end users, the lower latency and reduced data use are clearly tangible. In particular on mobiles this means lower costs and less frustration: everyone is familiar with pages jumping or moving when ads are loaded. With the strict time-out that the Gateway imposes, and by putting all the ads in a single request, this sort of inconvenience is a thing of the past.
Optimising every impression
The Gateway means multiple SSPs can be connected, either in parallel or directly in competition. It is perfectly possible for example to couple a different SSP for video than for mobile, or simply to allow multiple SSPs to compete against each other for the same impression.
The endless redirection of requests between different SSPs without result (which leads to really long loading times, considerable amounts of data use for end users, and potentially missed income for publishers) is simply not possible with the Adhese Gateway.
Currently, the Adhese Gateway is connected with Rubicon, but a connection with other SSPs such as Improve Digital and Adform is in the works.
