real-time bidding

Definition

Automated auction-based ad buying where impressions are sold individually in milliseconds as pages load. High-frequency trading energy applied to banner ads, because markets apparently need to operate at inhuman speeds everywhere.

Example Usage

Our RTB campaigns bought 450,000 impressions yesterday across 12,000 websites we've never heard of, which is either efficiency or chaos.

Origin

Emerged from programmatic advertising technology around 2009-2010 with early exchanges like Right Media

Fun Fact

RTB auctions complete in under 100 milliseconds, meaning the ad you're ignoring was purchased, delivered, and rendered faster than you can blink.

Source: IAB Real-Time Bidding (RTB) protocol specifications and programmatic advertising standards

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storyteller

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programmatic advertising

The automated buying and selling of ad space using algorithms and real-time bidding, eliminating the need for human negotiation and replacing it with machines that work faster and complain less. It's like high-frequency trading, but for banner ads.

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bleed

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zero-party data

Information that customers intentionally and proactively share with a brand, such as preferences, purchase intentions, or personal context. It's the data people actually give you, as opposed to the data you creepily collect.

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virality

The Holy Grail metric measuring how quickly content spreads across the internet like a digital contagion. Every marketer dreams of achieving it, most fail miserably, and the few who succeed usually have no idea how it actually happened. It's basically controlled chaos with a fancy epidemiological name.

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