As the advertising technology landscape continues to evolve, 2025 promises to be a pivotal year for programmatic advertising. With Google’s recent announcement about third-party cookies, the ongoing push for enhanced user experience, and AI being stronger than ever, new opportunities continue to emerge. Here industry experts Magali Quentel-Reme (CEO of Opti Digital), Mohsin Pervez (senior director, platform solutions and operations EMEA at PubMatic) and Langdon Miller (director of programmatic at Brainly) share their insights.

Navigating the shift to an effective addressability solution

In 2025, addressability solutions are at the forefront of the digital advertising landscape as the industry accelerates its transition to a cookieless future. With over 50% of third-party cookies already phased out and Google’s pivotal July 2024 announcement granting users control over cookie settings, the race to identify effective alternatives is more critical than ever. While Topics API and protected audiences have been proposed as potential solutions, many experts believe these options remain incomplete, underscoring the ongoing challenge of fully replacing third-party cookies.

Langdon Miller, Director of Programmatic at Brainly, said that “the integration of probabilistic and deterministic IDs, first-party data, contextual segmentation, and bid decoration has led to sustained performance and increased yield.” This observation is echoed on the buy side, where there is an increasing reliance on first-party data and contextual targeting, which have gained traction since Google’s announcement and are now delivering superior results compared to third-party cookies.

As the focus shifts toward these new strategies, publishers are prioritising quality in their offerings to enhance value for advertisers. This emphasises the importance of sell-side curation, encouraging publishers and sell-side partners such as Opti Digital to meticulously curate and filter ad inventory based on metrics such as user attention, click-through rate (CTR), viewability, and contextual relevance.

Reducing ad latency to improve web performance

In 2025, ad latency will continue being a critical focus for publishers as they strive to balance the best monetisation with an optimised user experience (UX). March and August 2024 Google Core Updates already demonstrated the negative impact of slow-loading pages on SERPs, leading to traffic declines for many publishers. According to a study run by Opti Digital, the average ad script on publishers’ websites can weigh up to 1.6 MB and trigger 300 requests on page load.

Magali Quentel-Reme, CEO of Opti Digital, emphasised that “a heavier ad stack leads to lower ad revenue as it slows down ad delivery, decreases ad viewability and CTR, drives users away, and negatively impacts both audience and monetization.” Her company reports observing better results with the ad stack provided by Opti Digital, which is five times lighter and makes ten times fewer requests.

As 63.6% of global internet users primarily browse on mobile, addressing ad latency has become increasingly crucial for publishers. They also wish to maintain good Core Web Vitals and protect their organic traffic from search engines. That’s why many publishers are reducing their reliance on client-side header bidding, and running auctions server-side instead to speed up ad auctions and reduce creatives load times. Additionally, in light of the ongoing shift toward a cookieless future, the value of client-side solutions is diminishing. While server-side connections are known to be more complex to set up, they offer an efficient way to deliver ads faster and improve ad quality KPIs such as viewability and CTR. However, adopting a hybrid approach that combines both client-side and server-side auctions appears to be the best strategy for 2025, as some SSPs still lack compatibility with server-to-server auctions.

Leveraging AI for bid optimisation

Supply Path Optimisation (SPO) emerged as a key trend in 2023 and 2024, focusing on simplifying the supply path in programmatic advertising, reducing the number of intermediates in the chain to make it more efficient. However, the real objective goes beyond merely keeping the direct paths; it is about identifying the most efficient routes that bring added value to both advertisers and publishers. This is where traffic shaping and machine learning algorithms become essential.

If an SSP were to receive 50 billion impressions daily across publishers and send the corresponding bid requests to 100 DSPs without any traffic shaping, this would lead to an untenable five trillion bid requests. This level of volume can lead to significant infrastructure waste, as ultimately, only one DSP can win each auction. As Mohsin Pervez, Senior Director of Platform Solutions and Operations, EMEA at PubMatic, notes: “By analysing past bid patterns, traffic shaping helps SSPs identify underperforming bids and prevent unnecessary requests, simplifying the entire supply chain.”

Additionally, publishers can also leverage traffic shaping on their side by filtering out non-responsive SSPs, further ensuring a more optimised bidding process. This bilateral approach allows both SSPs and publishers to enhance their overall efficiency and drive better outcomes

As the digital advertising landscape continues to evolve in 2025, addressing the challenges of a cookieless future, improving ad latency and user experience and optimising the supply path will be essential for publishers and advertisers alike. By embracing innovative approaches, leveraging data-driven automation, and focusing on quality and efficiency, industry players can navigate this dynamic environment and unlock new opportunities for growth.

The post Adtech trends for 2025: What publishers need to know appeared first on Press Gazette.

As Google this year begins to phase out cookies on Chrome, publishers and tech vendors are clamouring to find new ways to monetise journalism on the open web.

The addressability crisis has already helped contribute to more than 8,000 newsroom jobs being lost in the UK and the USA last year, according to new Press Gazette research.

Opti Digital is one company which is working closely with publishers offering solutions to fill the gap left by the end of third-party cookies and the growing anonymity of online readers.

Here it presents four ways publishers can maximise online advertising revenue and buck the prevailing trend of online advertising decline which was seen in 2023.

[Sign up for a free webinar: Discover the evolution of eCPM across Europe in 2023]

1) Display the right metrics to attract buyers

In the absence of third-party cookies enabling precise targeting, advertisers may decide to cut back on media investments in 2024, due to the lack of a market-proven alternative solution.

Asked how publishers should be preparing for this, Opti Digital chief strategy officer and co-founder Sebastien Moutte said: “Make sure that you work with partners that are ready to monetise and to segment your audience and properly analyse them. Make sure that the advertiser that wants to buy your audience will have the right signals received from your audience to target your readers properly and get a high ROI”. Opti Digital is currently able to provide its publishers with first-party metrics that can influence buyers’ decisions, notably the measurement of attention.

2) Optimise speed for more user-friendly browsing

Another piece of advice is ensuring that adverts load quickly, work efficiently and don’t harm user experience. “A website should load as fast with adverts on the page as it does when there aren’t any,” Moutte insisted. “If publishers don’t pay attention to this optimisation then they risk losing their audience.” For example, lazy loading is a technique that improves performance by selectively sending ad requests and loading content as it becomes visible to the user, rather than multiplying ad calls and loading all content upfront.

The loading speed of a site’s elements is all the more important for mobile devices, which account for more than 70% of a website’s traffic. Moutte says their ad management solution tags are among the fastest on the market, weighing only 20Kb, which is crucial, as page load speeds are one of the most important factors when it comes to discoverability and ranking on Google search results. With a fast 3G smartphone, downloading the new version of Opti Digital’s script takes just 1.5 seconds, which enables advertisers to deliver their ads in an optimal environment, and improve investments on publishers’ websites.

Opti Digital CSO also highly recommends to switch from client-side ad calls to a cloud header bidding wrapper to make ad management lighter and participate in improving the page speed.

3) Reducing ad calls

One of the major trends in 2023, which should continue in 2024, is to prioritise quality over quantity. To achieve this, publishers can implement bid throttling. This strategy consists of publishers filtering advertising calls before sending them to SSPs. The algorithm decides the volume of calls to partners based on their probability of response or time-out by country, page, position, etc. From the SSPs’ perspective, traffic shaping improves the quality of the inventory they receive and increases their profitability and participation in auctions. This approach contributes to the reduction of the carbon footprint and the media publisher does not lose value but creating scarcity may make it even more profitable.

To make each impression as cost-effective as possible, publishers must also decorate each call with floor price data that avoids wasted bid requests by preventing responses below the minimum value requested. Opti Digital is one of the ad tech companies offering a dynamic flooring solution that uses AI to calculate and adjust floors in real-time.

4) Adopt innovative formats to avoid advertising blindness

While publishers may be tempted to increase advertising pressure to boost revenues, it’s essential to protect the user experience by integrating optimised formats tailored to the audience. Publishers should display adverts in a way that doesn’t disrupt the user’s website browsing experience and limit intrusive ads such as pop-up ads and autoplay videos that automatically have the sound on. So-called native adverts that blend in with the “look and feel of the surrounding content” are a better option, according to Moutte.

With this logic in mind, Opti Digital has developed a new ad format which avoids what Moutte describes as “banner blindness” while at the same time not impacting on user experience. It’s similar to the reader experience on Instagram Stories and comprises a carousel which has different animated elements. “We see that these types of ads are actually generating more engagement from the audiences,” he says. New ad formats stand more chance of catching the eye of readers who have become virtually immune to more traditional approaches. This advertising format is highly effective because it is able to predict each reader’s degree of attention, at impression level, and bid accordingly.

As it has turned out, online spending with publishers has fallen in the UK and US in 2023 even as the display advertising market has grown overall (Check here how you compare with other media in your category). Companies like Opti Digital are hoping this trend can be reversed in 2024, as suggested by some recent reports. But for this to happen, it is essential that media publishers work with partners that stay ahead of ad tech developments and bring ROI to advertisers.

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Publishers are losing out on digital advertising revenue by failing to get to grips with key issues at a time when the ad market slowdown means they should be making every penny count.

According to a report by Enders Analysis, the UK online display ad market is “growing much slower after a giddy two years”, with a number of large platforms affected by the drop-off. (Although the long-term trend of society and the economy moving online continues.)

Ad-tech provider Opti Digital’s chief executive Magali Quentel-Reme (pictured) highlights three key challenges facing publishers in making the most of their programmatic ad revenues – and offers solutions.

Lower consent rates for cookies and irrelevant ads

With the move to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the UK and Europe and the demise of third-party cookies across web browsers (Google will plans to finally phase out publisher cookies on Chrome in late 2024) – users are increasingly declining cookies when visiting websites.

“In Europe, an everyday lower consent rate is causing major harm to publishers’ revenues,” explains Quentel-Reme. The fewer cookies accepted, the less information advertisers have to target users with more valuable relevant advertising, ultimately hitting publishers’ revenues.”

One solution is Opti Digital’s cross-consent stack that delivers ads dynamically according to the user’s choice: through Google Ad Server or through an alternative ad server that meets privacy legislation and “allows the delivery of campaigns without using any personal data”.

“However,” adds Quentel-Reme, “since we receive many more campaigns using cookie-based targeting that perform better and have higher eCPMs, our strategy is to help publishers improve their consent rates.”

Research carried out by the Chilean government last year found that how cookie prompts are displayed to users can drastically change the level of consent given. In tests it found that an “opt-in” pop-up approach led to a high level of rejection of additional cookies among users at 87%. But when an “opt-out” approach is taken, with additional cookies pre-selected, 94% of users accepted them.

To improve cookie consent rates for publishers, Opti Digital uses a “test and learn approach”.

“We test several different CMP layouts and messages to see which ones collect the highest consent rate,” explains Quentel-Reme. “We also implement consent recovery models to invite users to change their mind and meet a higher profitability again.”

When it comes to the relevance of the advertising displayed on a publisher’s website, Quentel-Reme says “the subject has become a bit more complicated with the end of third-party cookies,” but adds:

“For the time being, publishers should optimise consent rates on their website so that advertisers have enough data to target relevant users.

“In order to do this, we verify that publishers have set up the best consent storage options: the longest storage possible for positive consent and the shortest one for negative consent. In the second case, this means that the user will see a new request for consent within a reasonable time.”

Poor website performance

Poor web performance, leading to slow-loading pages, is a common gripe among users, but it has a real-term impact on digital ad revenues for publishers as well. “Web performance plays a critical role in optimising the effectiveness and efficiency of advertising campaigns,” says Quentel-Reme.

“A slow-loading website can result in a decrease of visitors and negatively impact on key performance indicators, such as viewability [a metric for ad impressions actually seen by users].”

To boost web performance, Opti Digital offers so-called “lazy loading” ad units. A lazy-loading ad appears only after the main elements of the page have loaded and, if placed further down the page, only loads when the user scrolls to it, responding to how they navigate the content.

According to Opti Digital, lazy loading ads “reduce the weight of the page [and] the loading time”, making for an improved user experience and better search engine rankings.

Quentel-Reme says these ad units “allow us to achieve viewability rates of over 75% cross-device on all the inventories we optimise, but that also considerably improves the overall performance of the media, especially their loading speed”.

She says Opti Digital also encourages publishers “to switch from a client-side auctions technology to a server-side one, as it requires less processing power from the user’s browser” to boost web performance. Opti Engage is Opti Digital’s own plug-and-play ad format, based on a server-side model.

“In this configuration, Prebid.JS does not call the SSPs directly, but makes a call to our own Prebid Server, which then calls bidding partners. The computing power needed to run the auctions is then outsourced, which greatly improves the overall performance of the media,” says Quentel-Reme.

Low quality ads

Publishers provide a guaranteed quality audience for advertisers, with content typically regulated and always curated, so adverts should be of a quality to match – but this is not always the case.

Rejecting brands that don’t fit with a publisher’s ethos or audience, known as “blacklisting”, is one way to improve the quality of the ads on display.

Quentel-Reme says Opti Digital “monitors the quality of ads up front by blacklisting brand lists and categories rejected by the publisher”. The team also educates publishers on how to blacklist brands even after the ad has displayed on the page.

Another solution to ensure quality ads for a fair price is dynamic price flooring. Setting a price floor – a price limit below which ads cannot be sold – guarantees a minimum revenue per ad impression for publishers. Dynamic price flooring “enhances the overall quality of the ads displayed on the sites by challenging bidding partners to pay the real value of the inventory,” says Quentel-Reme.

Opti Yield, an AI-based plug-and-play solution that automatically defines the best price floors for ad inventory, calculates more than one million price floors every day for client websites, with an average uplift of 20% in digital ad sales – but which can rise as high as 40%.

Opti Yield “provides a fairer auction environment for all demand partners,” says Quentel-Reme. The product is transparent and has been developed “to push the competition even further, and in response to Google’s monopoly,” she added.

Opti Yield’s price floors are adjusted daily and hourly and these are communicated to all ad exchanges connected to Google Ad Manager, including Prebid, Amazon, Google Ad Exchange and Open Bidding, “providing a fairer auction environment for all demand partners across all inventory types: Display, Video, Web, AMP, app”, says Quentel-Reme. The prices set take into account not just historical bid data but also a publisher’s ad inventories – pages, placement, ad size, etc. – and a user’s browser history: (he more cookies the better the ad targeting capabilities for buyers who will pay more for a highly qualified user.

Click here for more information on Opti Digital’s ad-tech solutions for publishers

The post How publishers can address three key online ad revenue challenges appeared first on Press Gazette.

Opti Digital is a company that develops in-house advertising technologies that allow online publishers and sales houses to efficiently optimise their online revenues.

Opti Digital allows mid-market publishers who do not have access to extensive internal resources to optimise their advertising revenues through a turnkey solution, consisting of several technologies (lazy loading, in view ad refresh…) in a tag management system synchronised with the publisher’s ad server.

For larger media groups with a mature stack, we have also developed a plug-and-play technology: Opti Yield, an automated yield optimisation solution that sets the best price floors based on multiple data.

For large media groups and channel partners, Opti Digital also offers a cutting-edge ad format that aggregates and transforms programmatic demand in real-time: Opti Engage. Its social media-inspired carousel design allows ads to be displayed to users in an engaging way in IAB size formats through a standard Prebid Adapter.

Benefits of Opti Digital advertising technology for publishers

The benefits of Opti All-in-One for publishers include:

• The possibility to run their direct campaigns autonomously on their own ad server.
• An analytical platform for transparent results
• Data-driven optimisations via a/b testing
• Access to all our technologies even the plug & play ones detailed below
• A dedicated account manager and individual consulting
• An average uplift of 40%

The benefits of Opti Yield for publishers include:

• Automatic definition of floor prices, which saves a lot of time
• Fast Plug and Play integration
• Effectively counteract bid shading
• Uplift of 20% EBITDA

The benefits of Opti Engage for publishers include:

• Engaging and beautiful ad format
• Brings more demand
• Rank #1 on high visibility advertising placements
• +7% RPM

Which leading publishers use Opti Digital?

Opti Digital’s clients include the online news magazine Slate, the tabloid magazine Closer but also the monthly women’s magazine Psychologies.

What’s the big idea?

Summarising their offering, Opti Digital says: “In an ever-changing ad tech industry, publishers are struggling to stay up to date. That’s where our expertise in yield management and cutting-edge technology comes in, as we work to help them maximise their advertising revenue. Rather than simply capitalising on market opportunities, our approach involves creating them. Through daily interactions with publishing groups, we’re constantly inspired to innovate and develop the most effective technologies both for the present and future.

Contact Opti Digital for a free live audit of your site

Contact Opti Digital’s team now to get a live audit of your site and personalised advice from their yield management experts. They will advise you on the most appropriate solution to boost your online monetization.

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