Above the Fold: November 24, 2025

by

Above the Fold: November 24, 2025

BY ROB BEELER

Please note that this information is confidential and intended for the internal use of our partners only. The Above the Fold Report is an amalgamation of the discussions taking place within the Beeler.Tech universe. Much of what is presented is based on conversations held behind closed doors within the last week. The topics will range from the existential threats to publishers down to questions about how to use a specific feature in an ad server. We believe that if you are a publisher or someone who works with publishers, all of these provide opportunities to help or learn. The report’s format changes as the conversations change.

Quotes of the week

  • “[Agentic Advertising] is an opportunity to fix a system that doesn’t actually work for the advertiser or the buyer. Maybe not my best analogy, but I know that a part of work is eating shit. I am not looking to eat more shit faster or to automate the process.” – Rob Beeler 
  • “Well, my hope is we don’t replicate programmatic at all. As I’ve said before, my programmatic strategy is not to serve programmatic. I think my new version of this is that my auction strategy is to not participate in auctions.” – Rob Beeler 

Yes, I am fully entitled to provide my own “quotes of the week.”

Community Feed

This Week’s Top Community Topics (Non-Agentic Advertising)

Sometimes AI-assisted to be more articulate, but definitely human-reviewed. 

Ad Quality: Reports of hijacking or incredibly NSFW ads coming through Meta from a publisher that hasn’t seen such things in over a year. Someone pointed to the Meta ad review site and noted that switching off rich media ads will resolve several quality issues. Ad cloaking was discussed as a particular culprit. “If you can replicate on your devices, consider using Charles Proxy or MITM to capture a full trace.” Also, “I’ve had to disable FAN a few times in my career due to quality issues or scam ads; they haven’t been very helpful over the years at cleaning this up (and keep in mind now we know 10% of their revenue is scam ads).”

Brand Safety:

DV is introducing three new categories*:* Sensitive Breaking News, Current Events, and Opinion & Editorial. Link

News publishers can reclaim ad spend lost to “brand safety” advertising bias

“A second factor is the widespread belief that advertising next to news harms brand perception, even though there is no peer-reviewed research validating this claim. Studies often cited to justify brand safety practices test consumer reactions to hate speech or conspiracy theories — not journalism. In fact, multiple surveys show consumers trust brands more when they advertise in reputable news environments.”

Google Policy Violations spike: Multiple publishers report a sudden spike in Google flagging direct-sold and house creatives for malware. Alerts started a few days ago, with inconsistent clearing and no explanation. A Google incident was posted, but issues persist. Some saw fewer flags briefly, then increased again. Overall sentiment: ongoing, erratic, and likely an internal Google glitch. Google Alert.

Programmatic Partners: A publisher working with Connatix reports higher rates in the player but lower rates in Google Ad Manager. “Not sure this is helpful, but Connatix used to report on the fixed line item CPM rather than the clearing price.” Tangent comment: Aren’t AdX passback VAST tags frowned upon?

Programmatic Payments tied to DV360: Publishers are comparing notes on SSPs shifting to bill-on-view (BOV) related to DV360’s September 2025 changes. Publishers have said that Sovrn confirmed it will log impressions on view only when DV360 wins, citing DSP-mandated alignment. Publishers are reporting that PubMatic and Magnite haven’t announced broad BOV changes; Magnite says any adjustments apply solely to DV360 to reduce discrepancies.

Demand Sources that provide revenue by ads.txt line (that we have cataloged to date, as reported by publishers):

 33Across, Index Exchange, Kargo, Magnite, Openweb (AdYouLike), OpenX, Ozone, Perion, Rise, Sharethrough, Smilewanted, Triton Audio, Undertone.

Help us catalog more. 

CloudX’s value: unclear business model, unclear take-rate, and overlap with what publishers can already do by setting competitive floors in Max. Some see it as similar to Nimbus. Curiosity remains around how its “AI” handles 3P SDK integrations.

Question asked and answered regarding Sellers.Json: Sellers.json QQ – Do we need to update sellers.json line only with MCM MA connection/s or combined MA and MI connection/s? Answer: You’ll need to list all of your partners in the sellers.json file, regardless of whether they are under the MCM Manage Account (MA) or the Manage Inventory (MI) model.

Inmobi CMP: A report of InMobi’s CMP behaving differently depending on whether a consent button is rendered. Without it, GPP strings lean “non-consent,” and consent can’t be reset via UI. Some use conditional logic in Prebid to validate desired strings. Note CMP stubs can block GAM and trigger Prebid timeouts, so keeping scripts updated is essential.

Taking Action

  • The Jounce Seller Sentiment Survey closes at the end of the month and tracks sentiment for the top 50 publisher and SSP brands. Some of us think publisher voices are significantly underrepresented, so it would be great to get more pub participation. Can I ask everyone to take some time to contribute? Jounce Supply Chain Sentiment Survey 2025

Human-Hallucinations-Only Summary of This Week’s Topics

In other words, this is manually compiled because we believe you deserve more than “good enough.”

  • Google Partnership Leadership Summit: “Google is AI’ing everything”

Troubleshooting

A publisher reported a recent rise in Google Ad ID targeting restrictions observed in GAM’s Identity Insights for North American app traffic. They observed a notable increase in missing or personalization-disabled IDs starting around September 25 and again on October 22, despite no changes to their app, OS, or geo-level settings. The trend appeared consistent across app versions and Android builds. Other publishers shared their numbers, seeing stable levels, while others noted a smaller October 22 bump, but not as severe. 

Anyone?

Questions asked in the community that went unanswered or deserve more attention.

  • For anyone using Deal Desk/OpenPath, have you seen any revenue discrepancies between the Deal Desk UI and external or downloaded reporting?
  • Is anyone else seeing a large increase in video errors yesterday? It’s across partners (including those with their own demand), across countries, and across bid caches.
  • I need inspiration for new KPIs for my ad ops and yield teams. Does anyone have good ones they can share?
  • Is anyone currently deploying OB Direct Pay? If so, how is it working out for you?
  • Odd question, but does anyone know which partner/vendor has creative IDs that start with 1 or 1i? We’re getting an increase in error, and all the IDs are 1i—- (6 characters total). But I can’t find other details

Have you seen this bad ad?

Anyone seeing an uptick in malicious redirects yesterday/today? Appears to be related to “Shortiez”

All Day I Dream of Agentic Advertising

Anonymized but barely edited community conversations:

All of our “sales stuff” is in our CRM. Salesforce is already working on its own Agentic Sales Agent, and we are mostly direct sold with more than just ads. So, naturally, that’s where we are looking. Salesforce CRM is already tied into our email and Slack, and it pushes to our OMS. Not to mention all the historical data, contacts, and status-to-close are already in Salesforce. I wonder if Boostr or other CRMs are working on an ASA.

  • I honestly had not thought of Salesforce, which is kind of funny, considering that, of course, that’s a place they could play in this. I hate the platform, so maybe that was a factor. I know for certain that Boostr and FatTail are working on their solutions. I haven’t heard from any of the others.
  • Furthermore, if a CRM is not pushing into an ASA, then they are just dooming themselves. – Do you need a CRM to manage everything if a separate ASA is running all of the sales decisioning?

So in a year or so, we will have AI selling to AI, running AI creatives… and everyone is going to start blaming pubs for their campaigns not performing as well as they used to? Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t programmatic start to automate the buying and selling process of ads on site, but then it expanded to be more complex. And with that complexity (and sheer volume of sites) we had to bring in people to sell our sites to programmatic buyers and networks. And now we are trying to streamline it by using AI to Programmatically buy and sell… So we are programmatically transacting programmatic.

  • Well, my hope is we don’t replicate programmatic at all. As I’ve said before, my programmatic strategy is to not serve programmatic. I think my new version of this is my auction strategy is to not participate in auctions.
    • I like that strategy

I would say we are working on agentically transacting digital advertising including programmatic. While Large Language Model / Generative Artificial Intelligence IS just software the premise is that it is distinctly different enough software that it warrants its own separate terms and distinction from all the other software including traditional machine learning. Advertising done through it becomes its own budget class kind of like Social was just user generated content on the internet but was categorized as something totally different, same with search which you could argue is still just internet advertising but warranted a distinct category and budget. I tend to think right now that if it works the agentic automation will become the new premium in a premium and remnant setup with programmatic handling remnant with far less auctions and duplications because the budget won’t want the cost and the pub won’t need to go to such crazy yield levels for backfill.

It depends on the goal. While we can toss out the garbage and start composting, I don’t know that is practical or the best way for most companies who will do the building to get to market. If I were doing the investment I wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel because it’s expensive and time consuming and my opportunity will be lost to others who find better ways to roll the wheel.

I agree but there is one part I can’t quite wrap my head around yet. I will have a sales agent. It will have all my rules for what inventory can be sold at what rates. In the premium world you described, Nike’s buyer agent is going to interact with my sales agent – maybe they get a drink together, who knows – but as I understand it, Nike will ask for what Nike wants and my agent will respond and for the sake of this argument, they agree on a price. Everyone wins. Love it. I will probably have rules in my sales agent that says, “you know, we haven’t sold X inventory at the rate we set, let’s lower the floor on it. Nike’s buying agent is probably going to have the capability of looking for or listening for deals. We didn’t sell the home page takeover for next week, let’s grab it for cheap. We are just glad it didn’t go unsold. Not as much of a win-win, but bargains are bargains. But at what point do I want to put my inventory up for auction unless I’m the one running the auction? For right now, programmatic and agentic will live side by side, but if I’m a buyer, I don’t know that I need the auction. I want reach at the lowest price possible, but agentically I shouldn’t have to play that game. If I’m the seller, I definitely don’t want the auction unless I’m the one running the auction. Just trying to understand.

I think to start agents will execute the same concepts we already have but more fluidly. I.e. they can create IOs, PMPs or open market buys. It’s a new layer of automation that still depends on all our old technologies. Theoretically we can build all new technologies. I would say that is not likely the first step, especially since at the end of the day all participants in buying and selling have to make it into the ad server (or the webpage) to actually deliver. SSPs and DSPs could automate their buy and sell side concepts without having to build into the publisher’s tech. If I were taking a stab at this, I’d start there. Programmatic will be agentic as well. If a human does the job today, it will be an agentic job tomorrow. Programmatic solves for price discovery and testing rather than negotiation.

Can I suggest that approach might be a mistake? It might be more realistic but there is an opportunity to fix a system that doesn’t actually work for the advertiser or the buyer. Maybe not my best analogy but I know that a part of work is eating shit. I am not looking to eat more shit faster or automating the process. My hope is that some of the things you have spoken out against we can address up front vs hope we fix later. There are some things where we should take a stand. I want to be clear that I’m talking about a specific type of agent – a selling agent (the AdCP model). AI and agents in the wider definition will be used throughout all the transaction types. But there is a direction that this isn’t programmatic agents but a different model.