Google's First Look is now open to all DoubleClick for publishers
As Google’s First Look solution becomes globally available to all DoubleClick for publishers (DFP) clients from this week, the future of header bidding within the programmatic ecosystem is looking increasingly uncertain. With the move to offer advertisers more insight into publishers’ available inventories before programmatic bids are made on ads, Google hopes First Look will improve on the header bidding process by reducing ad latency, enhancing buyer competition and allowing publishers to better manage demand. Google’s new pilot programme, connecting DFP and its Dynamic Allocation solution with the Rubicon Project’s Exchange API for testing exchange bidding, is also expected to present new opportunities for publishers to migrate from current waterfall-based ad tags that may have slowed webpage performance and inhibited customer experience, thereby potentially generating better yield.

Google made a big announcement Wednesday morning: its First Look solution is now available to all DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) clients globally.

The news represents a major change to the DFP ad server, as Google will now allow real-time bids from publishers’ other exchange partners -- which are often numerous -- to its Dynamic Allocation product. It has also begun testing exchange bidding in DFP.

The change marks a major turning point, since many companies in the programmatic ecosystem, along with publishers, have complained about Google’s process.

Header bidding, which issues a call for bids before the ad server is called, represents the ecosystem's response to getting around Google -- which until now only permitted its own ad exchange to compete for each ad impression. Google’s ad server would project what outside exchanges would bring in, and exchanges were not able to submit bids for each individual impression.

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This dynamic was not favorable for publishers’ yield, and header bidding was used to enable bidders to compete on real price information, not estimates.

The DFP change was “months” in the making, according to Jonathan Bellack, director of product management for Google’s DoubleClick.

“We’re always working with publishers and talking to them about how they’re generating yield, and the strategies they’re pursuing. We’ve known for a while that when someone is setting up competition within DFP, they’re entering an average CPM. We want accurate price competition, but we’re also cautious because we don’t want to hurt the user experience. Publishers were asking us if there was something DFP could do,” Bellack explained.

Bellack called for an industrywide discussion about programmatic buyers’ needs: “We need a dialogue with the buy side. The biggest unanswered question that we as an industry need to work through is, what is the effect of technologies -- including header bidding -- on buyers.”

For example, he said the same query from the same user could be sent to the same programmatic buyer multiple times, with a potential negative effect: “It can drive up their technology costs because you can only buy that impression once. Also, does it mean that buyers are competing with themselves, and paying more than they intended?” he asked.

In conjunction with the announcement, Google is creating a pilot program testing exchange bidding in Dynamic Allocation. Pilot program partners include Index Exchange, Rubicon Project, About.com, Zillow and publishing giants Hearst and Meredith. The goal of the pilot program is to ensure that the technology works, according to Bellack. "We’ll be working with our publisher partners on yield--and, most importantly, we want to make sure that this delivers a good consumer experience."