Lumen Research, a leading global attention technology company, has recently made several key executive appointments as it continues to expand its reach and focus on growth, particularly in the US market.

Blaise Lucey has been named Senior Director of Marketing and will be based in New York. With over a decade of B2B SaaS experience, he has a proven track record of building marketing programs from the ground up and managing global and local marketing teams for companies such as Criteo, Roku, and Bitly. Lucey sees his new role as an opportunity to help advertisers understand the value of consumer attention in the rapidly changing world of digital advertising.

Tanwa Edu, formerly Head of Consulting, has been promoted to Chief Strategy Officer. With a decade of experience in the media agency world and as COO of a startup online magazine, Edu brings a deep and broad understanding of the media industry to her new role. She is eager to work with Lumen to continue to advance the measurement of attention and link it to meaningful outcomes.

Arthur Cole has been named Chief Operating Officer and will oversee the sales and client success teams as Lumen continues to grow. Cole, who was previously COO at Avocet, which merged with Lumen last year, sees a growing opportunity to offer clients key insights into the efficiency of their ad spend through attention metrics.

Managing Director of Lumen Research, Mike Follett, is confident that these talented individuals will take the company to the next stage of its journey and help to drive change in the way businesses think about attention as a fundamental business tool.

Lumen harnesses eye-tracking panels to measure consumer attention generated by media impressions. Its attention measurement platform, LAMP, records visual attention from consenting panel participants, creating a training data set for machine learning models to score video and display media formats. As the company continues to help a growing roster of clients link attention to outcomes such as engagement, brand lift, sales, and creative performance, these appointments signal an exciting time for Lumen and the attention measurement industry.

Affiliate marketing fraud continues to be a major challenge in the industry. Executives from four leading platforms in the affiliate industry gathered at Affiliate Summit West to discuss this issue, among others. The keynote session explored the issue of bad actors in the affiliate marketing space. There is a growing concern among affiliates that advertisers and brands are not paying their outstanding bills before moving onto another network. This has led to a need for greater cooperation among networks to weed out these bad actors and protect publishers.

One of the executives, Adam Ross, CEO of Awin, spoke about the importance of paying affiliates before launching on a network. He revealed that a CEO from another network had recently informed him about a client who had stopped communicating and hadn’t paid their affiliates. In response, Awin decided not to launch this client.

This highlights the need for networks to share information about bad actors and work together to prevent them from exploiting the system.

David A. Yovanno, CEO of impact.com, suggested building a common source where information about bad actors could be shared throughout the industry. Jeff Wender, CRO of Rakuten Advertising, agreed, stating that the industry has to focus on this issue.

The panel’s commitment to start the conversation about weeding out bad actors and collaborating to protect publishers is a step in the right direction. Hello Partner, a publication in the industry, supports this commitment and will look to assist in ensuring that the momentum of this commitment continues.

Affiliate marketing fraud is still overwhelming and executives are grappling with ways to address it. The issue of bad actors who don’t pay affiliates is a major challenge that requires cooperation and collaboration among networks. The panel’s commitment to start the conversation about weeding out bad actors and protecting publishers is a positive step, and the industry should continue to work together to find a solution.

Pod bidding is a feature in OpenRTB 2.6 protocol, a standard for programmatic buying and selling of ads. It provides a solution to the ad load problem in the streaming advertising market. The feature enables advertisers to bid on the first or last ads in a multi-ad break (called a “pod”) and allows streaming services to dynamically manage their ad breaks to maximize ad revenue while minimizing ad volume.

Advertisers and streaming services can use pod bidding to balance monetization and user experience. Advertisers can bid for premium ad slots, such as the first or last in a video or episode, while streaming services can adjust the composition of their pods based on advertiser demand. This dynamic approach to ad revenue and placement can result in higher ad revenue and a better user experience.

The first and last slots in a linear or streaming ad break are more premium positions due to higher visibility to viewers. Pod bidding allows streaming services to sell these positions separately, at higher prices. In addition, they can configure their pods dynamically, adjusting the number and length of ads in a pod based on advertiser demand.

Streaming services can use pod bidding to set a target ad revenue threshold for content, such as an episode. They can manage the makeup of their pods and the number of pods needed to reach this target, and then remove ad breaks once the target has been met to avoid overloading viewers with ads. This results in dynamic monetization and optimization of the user experience and ad revenue.

Several companies including Beachfront, Index Exchange, and Roku are in the process of adding support for pod bidding. The adoption of pod bidding has been slow since OpenRTB 2.6’s release in April, but its potential has been noted by industry experts as a solution to the ad load problem in the streaming market.

Pod bidding provides a balance between maximizing ad revenue and minimizing ad load for streaming services. By allowing for dynamic ad placement and revenue management, pod bidding can result in higher ad revenue and a better user experience. The feature is in the process of being adopted by streaming services, advertisers, and platforms.

Pursuing a career as an influencer has become a popular trend in recent years, with many people hoping to achieve success and financial stability in the industry. However, the reality might not be as rosy as many expect. A recent survey by Aspire, an influencer marketing platform, has found that only 4.3% of the more than 1,700 creators surveyed earn six figures or more per year.

The staggering number of creators, which stands at 303 million in nine major markets globally, according to Adobe, suggests that this 4.3% figure could represent a potentially huge number of people. This highlights the fact that becoming an influencer is not a guaranteed way to get rich quickly.

The survey also found that 55.2% of the creators polled have increased their rates in the past six months, demonstrating the growing competitiveness of the influencer industry. This trend is likely to continue, as creators seek to make a living from their work.

Moreover, 64% of the creators surveyed have turned down campaigns in the past year due to a misalignment between the brand’s values and their own. This shows that creators are increasingly conscious of the brands they associate with and are willing to take a stand on issues that matter to them.

The number one thing that creators want from brands is more creative freedom, according to the survey. This is a clear indication that creators want to be able to express themselves and create content that aligns with their own values and interests, rather than simply following a set of guidelines provided by brands.

Aspire’s founder and CEO, Anand Kishore, stated that guidelines are of course necessary, but trying to control a creator’s output too much “defeats part of the purpose” of working with creators for authentic content. Kishore emphasized that the relationship between brands and influencers should be one of collaboration, rather than control.

Although 74% of the creators surveyed are “very willing” to partner with companies that are “committed to sustainability,” only 15% of those who do sustainability-related work said they would charge a lower rate for it. This suggests that while sustainability is important to many creators, it is not yet a major consideration in the influencer industry.

The results of the survey by Aspire provide a sobering look at the reality of the influencer industry. While there are certainly successful influencers who earn a good income, the majority of creators are still struggling to make a living from their work. This highlights the need for creators to be mindful of the brands they work with, to maintain creative freedom, and to be realistic about the potential financial returns from pursuing a career as an influencer.

Folks, let me tell you, the open market of programmatic inventory is in a bit of a pickle. The problem is that there are just too many publisher-initiated auctions going on at the same time, and it’s all happening in a shrinking ad tech space. This is leading to advertisers bidding against each other and driving up the price they pay. But hey, it’s making publishers a lot of money, so they’re not exactly rushing to fix the problem.

You see, the problem with all these auctions is that it’s causing a lot of duplicate inventory, and it’s mostly coming from lower quality publishers. That’s right, it’s not the premium publishers driving up the prices, it’s the ones that are just here to aggressively monetize their traffic.

Now, you might be thinking, what’s the harm? Well, the longer this impasse continues, the more lower quality supply will occupy the programmatic inventory market. And it doesn’t look like publishers are in a hurry to change things, at least not if the size of their ads.txt files is anything to go by.

You see, back in 2020, the top 10,000 publishers only authorized 205 supply paths for their programmatic auctions, but by late 2022, that number had tripled to 622 supply paths. And that, my friends, is why there’s just too much of the open market. It’s not cost-efficient to listen to it all, so everyone in the ad tech world is kind of throttling back on the amount of the open market they manage.

This is why you’re seeing a trickle of ad dollars move out of the open market into private marketplaces. However, it’s important to note that private marketplaces still only account for a smaller portion of online ad spending. Plus, private programmatic deals are a heavy lift and expensive, so the open auction remains the preferred option for many advertisers.

But, there is a better way, and it involves curation on a larger scale. Instead of curating a premium programmatic marketplace through one-to-one deals with publishers, agencies and advertisers are trying to create their own supply pipelines of curated inventory through one-to-many deals with publishers and supply-side platforms. These curated marketplaces are like a safer place to buy ads, where they avoid lower quality impressions and shady publishers.

In the long run, these curated marketplaces could become the equivalent of the open auction. The idea is to use them to pull money out of the open auction and help advertisers learn where the best audiences are. The more intel they get, the easier it is for them to start spending more money directly with the publishers that perform best. It’s a virtuous cycle, folks.

But for now, ad dollars continue to flow into the open market. And look, it’s not all bad. Ad tech vendors are working hard to sort the wheat from the chaff and remove lower quality inventory from the supply chain. But they can only do so much. So, the future of the open market of programmatic inventory remains to be seen. But, let’s hope that with a little help from curation, we can find a way to make the open market a better place for everyone.