The Rise of the Wrapper Managers

Kraftisms #8 - Complexity and commoditization is leading to the outsourcing of wrappertech.

“You can’t be everything to everyone, but you can be something to someone.” —Lloyd Dobler

Kraftism of the Week:
To Thine Own Self Be True

I was grabbing a snack at the AppNexus lunchroom when in walked Brian O’Kelley with a key decisionmaker from Yahoo! Japan. The Softbank-owned company is not a part of Yahoo! Inc., and is one of the largest digital businesses in Japan. Powering YJ was one of the most important initiatives at the time at AppNexus, then well into its “hockey stick” growth phase. We all knew who was in town — and why a good impression was critical.

And so there I was. Serving up some trail mix when I’m introduced to the person from YJ. He offered his hand, so I shook it, making an appropriate bow of my head at the same time… when my phone started buzzing on the counter. He gestured and said I was getting a call. At that moment, my memory of the event somehow reverts to slow motion.

I shook my head and reached for the phone, turning it over to reveal… “No, that’s just Pokémon Go saying there’s something I should catch…” I could see Brian’s eyes widen — likely in horror. I could see others around us just turning to look at me in disbelief… Did I really just tell the key client contact that I’m playing Pokémon Go?

There was a pause… and the gentlemen quietly asked me what level I was. At the time I was the then-highest level, Level 40. At which point he broke into a huge grin, got excited, and asked to see my Pokédex listings, as we talked about Pokémon for a good five minutes before it was time for him to move on.

That isn’t the reason we got the deal — the hard work of many an AppNexian is why. That said, that unexpected connection over Pokémon Go broke the ice in a way I could never have planned. I’m convinced to this day that most of the impact — both in business and in my personal life — I’ve had over the years is about being genuine about who I am. What I am. What games I play. What songs I sing in karaoke. That I know who Little Bobby Tables is (IYKYK). Yes, I’m a competitive curler (the game on ice).

There’s a reason I share what I share on here. Only by being unabashedly who I am can you know me. Can you trust me. In a world where business often feels impersonal, it’s those genuine, human moments that build the strongest bonds.

Applying the Kraftism:
The Rise of the Wrapper Manager

Who would have thought that the simple act of creating a new javascript library in 2015 would forever transform the way programmatic worked? But that’s what Matt Kendall and Paul Yang did when they first posted prebid.js for the world to see.

Publishers knew who they were… they knew what they were good at. Technological innovation around real-time bidding, however, was not it. But with this simple piece of code, the publishers saw the vision of focusing on what they did best: create great content… and use this new technology to help optimize the way they monetize that content.

The Early Days of Prebid

The concept of prebid already existed thanks to early efforts by Criteo’s RTA (real-time advertising tag) initiative, AppNexus’ tinytag, and others — but each provider at the time had to put their own code on the publisher’s page. There was no standard. There was no way for the various partners to interact. Latency was high. Publishers needed engineers to figure out how to work with multiple partners on their own. And in one fell swoop, Matt and Paul changed all that.

The industry came together and launched Prebid.org to manage Prebid. More and more players came to the table, building “adapters” (the code within the Prebid infrastructure that makes calls for bids from each monetization partner), and rapidly iterating on the functionality. The industry began to think of Prebid as a “container” in which SSPs and ad networks could bid. A publisher-run auction.

Every SSP tried to offer their own “managed” version of Prebid. Prebid was so early, however, and the publishers’ needs so diverse, that this quickly fell out of favor, with most major publishers building engineering teams to manage prebid.

The Rise of Containers

But other containers began springing up as alternative ways for SSPs and ad networks to get into the publisher-run-auction game. Google, not wanting to participate in prebid, created Open Bidding, a server-side container built into Google AdX and what today we call Google GAM — and it required zero code on the publisher page. Amazon came out with TAM, their own prebid container with code on page for the container itself, with server-side connections with the various bidders.

With the launch of Privacy Sandbox came a fourth container — this one held within the Chrome browser itself. It doesn’t require code on page, but does require participation. Which, of course, has made managing these containers (also known as “wrappers”) even more complex.

The Two Types of Wrapper Managers

As complexity grew, so came the re-emergence of the concept of a wrapper manager. This time, however, it was far more than just Prebid that needed to be managed. Not only were the wrappers being updated — new versions of Prebid coming out with regularity, but adapters were also being upgraded regularly. Imagine having 12 partners, each of which came out with a quarterly adapter upgrade that needed to be tested… that means having engineering deal with three new sets of code per month. Now add to that the other wrappers needing regular configuration, as well…

• The Full-Service Wrapper Managers — Small to mid-sized publishers just didn’t have the engineering know-how… and in came Freestar, Raptive, Mediavine, and others to offer not only a wrapper manager, but full-service management and configuration of that wrapper manager. The adapters in these full-service wrappers usually tie to seats on the various SSPs and Exchanges of the wrapper manager company, not of the individual publisher (although that’s not universal). The publishers who use this sort of service can still direct-sell, but they don’t need to: the full-service provider handles it all for them, letting the publisher focus on being their true selves: creators of content. This also frees the publisher up from needing to manage the dozens of SSPs and ad network relationships so critical to programmatic monetization.

• The Self-Service Wrapper Managers — Mid-to-large companies who don’t have a focus on building their own technology at scale still lean more towards wrapper managers, but with the publisher doing the configuration work, as well as working directly with the SSPs and ad networks. Some of these offerings come from SSPs (such as Magnite’s Demand Manager, Pubmatic’s OpenWrap, Media.net’s wrapper offering), while others are independents such as Hashtag Labs (now part of Aditude), Spiny.ai, Assertive Yield, and more. The SSP seats called by the various adapters are usually the publishers’ own (although sometimes it is a mix between pub-owned and wrapper-company-owned seats). Many of these wrappers also add other value such as analytics. This puts the burden on settings and analysis on the publisher team, and does require more engineering work, but also enables these larger publishers to go out drive their own monetization.

There is a third type of wrapper manager, of course, which is custom wrapper management systems built by engineering-heavy publishers. This doesn’t mean that the publisher isn’t using standardized technology such as prebid.js… it just means they’re doing the configuration themselves. This really only makes sense for the biggest and most diverse publishers such as Dotdash Meredith, Hearst, Conde, Ziff Davis, and the like, who have made major technological investments in ad tech, audience tech, and analytics. These companies have the engineers, the know-how, and the expertise in house, yet even on a case-by-case basis, use other commercial wrapper managers on some sites or with some offerings, especially for server-to-server (calls to monetization partners that get made by other servers, not by the consumer’s browser) setups.

There is also a point to be made on fees. In-housing ad tech other than base level stitching of systems together is usually prohibitively expensive unless you’re a top-25 tech-powered diversified media company that has engineers working on bespoke systems anyway. For self-service wrapper managers, the fees run a few percentage points, but that is more than paid for by the savings in engineering. For full-service wrapper managers, the fees run higher, but you’re saving on sales costs and getting the uplift benefit of the wrapper manager’s partnerships and optimization skills to raise CPMs. For most publishers (especially with some good negotiation work), the benefits of innovation, focus, and personnel savings outweighs the costs.

Publishers — Start Your Engines

For 22 years, I served publishers at monetization and adtech companies… where I swore up and down that publishers are not technology companies and should minimize what engineering they do in-house. They should be true to who and what they are: creators of content. And I was right… and wrong.

After 5 years of being a publisher — specifically a tech-focused publisher with our own content management platform and adtech stack — it became clear that the largest of publishers are tech companies. They have to be. With a diverse set of brands, monetization methods, and a reliance on setting themselves apart with bespoke offerings at a large enough scale that buyers will notice… yes, they are ad tech companies, too, building products such as Dotdash Meredith and their D-Cipher tech. They should run their own core wrapper technology (and in most cases do!).

But for anyone else? Please… to thine own self be true. Use a wrapper manager. Be that a full-service one because you’re too small to garner bespoke deals at scale… or a self-service one because you’re large enough to manage your own programmatic relationships but not large enough to be an adtech company in your own right. There’s too much to stay on top of on your own and too much innovation happening that you’re missing out on. It doesn’t make you lesser. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up. It means you’re focusing on being true to what you do best.

So, whether you're a small publisher or a large media company, take a moment to evaluate your strengths. Embrace the right technology, and let your authenticity lead the way to success.

Andrew