One of the hotly-discussed innovations at Dmexco 2016 was ‘header bidding’, a technology which promises to unify advertiser demand for publishers, and help them to boost digital ad revenues.

M&M Global teamed up with PulsePoint to gather a group of programmatic experts, to help answer key questions around this year’s trending topic.

So is header bidding a long-term strategy, or a short-term fix?

“Header bidding started off as a hack, to get around the way the big ad servers worked. It was a hack, and now it’s a robust piece of technology, but it’s a means to an end,” says Gareth Shaw, vice president, programmatic operations EMEA at PulsePoint.

“For me it is about unifying demand. Some are now building unified demand into their ad servers, so you might not need to work with a header bidder. The bit that isn’t going away is unifying demand.”

Emily Palmer, head of programmatic, EMEA at Thomson Reuters, adds that header bidding could help other parts of her business’ programmatic strategy: “We’re still in this space where publishers are trying to get back some power that they lost in the early days of RTB. Some game-changers could be around PMP Guaranteed (Private Marketplace), where you can have the best of both worlds – though it could complicate things as well.”