Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio García Martínez

Why do ad servers matter? At first glance, they seem inconsequential. To continue my (now perhaps stretched) nautical analogy, they’re merely the container cranes that shuffle boxes around. But in fact they play a much more important role. Look: the advertiser doesn’t trust its agency, the agency doesn’t trust its trading desk, the trading desk doesn’t trust the ads-buying software it’s using, and the ads-buying technology company doesn’t trust the exchanges. The only thing that keeps this dishonest world honest is the existence of an agreed-upon source of truth. That oracle is the ad server. If a marketer wants to reach a million people in the eastern United States, showing each person no more than four ad impressions between the hours of four and ten p.m. on Thursday (a common buy for movies, incidentally, which always launch on a Friday), then that marketer will be satisfied only if the ad server report says that’s what he got. The ad server isn’t merely a data server spewing forth pixels on demand; it’s also the accounting system that decides what gets delivered when, to whom, how often, and where on the Internet. And that’s just for fairly brainless brand marketing buys that want to make a big, broad splash. For marketers who track their performance (such as online retailers), the tyranny of the ad server yardstick is even greater, since it defines the units, in addition to the accounting, of marketing dollars.

Nice slide deck on how adservers work https://www.slideshare.net/gnehapk/online-ad-serving A more comprehensive explanation of “first part ad servers” and “third party ad servers” - Also a brief history of how they came into being https://clearcode.cc/blog/what-is-an-ad-server/ DOUBLECLICK by Google and ATLAS by Facebook - Are platforms that allow advertisers/agencies to create 3rd party ad servers AND also allow publishers to create 1st party ad servers