Some programmers understand JavaScript. They get it. They see through the ugliness to behold magic potential deep within your browser. Other programmers just think that first group is touched in the head. If you are a programmer you have an opinion about JavaScript. If you are not a programmer you likely don’t care all that much. That is, unless, you are in the business of buying or selling advertising online. Then you should care a great deal because JavaScript is the reason you have a business model in the first place.
Web Advertising, thought to be the only way to monetize this freely collected warehouse of information and services, cannot happen without a little event involving Netscape and Sun back in December of 1995. Earlier that year Microsoft had introduced the Internet Explorer browser as direct competition to Netscape’s Navigator. There was bad blood in the water from the start, mainly due to the incompatible natures of the way IE and Navigator displayed the same website. Both were secretly working on a proposed standard language to allow websites to do anything more demanding than showing some text and a picture. Microsoft had vbscript derived from Basic in the works. Netscape whipped up a language called LiveScript, partnered with Sun to get the Java clout, quickly renamed the language to JavaScript for PR, and launched it to the world. Netscape had the market share to win hearts and minds, forcing Microsoft to support a modified version called JScript. JavaScript was then handed over the the European Computer Manufacturers Association as a standards committee who again renamed it to ECMAScript to clear up confusion about the fact that JavaScript really has nothing to do with Java.
With one standard language behind the major browsers (eventually) we were able to do some cool things with our websites. AJAX, the crazy new buzz all the kids are talking about, is using JavaScript to do cool stuff to avoid refreshing a web page. So what does this have to do with your Ad sitting on someone’s site? Everything.
You see, a content provider is very unlikely to ever see your ad personally. Despite common sense, they do not insert your ad into their web page themselves. Most ads served from a page go through an advertising network like Federated Media. The network slurps up space on content providers and you pay them to put your ad out to the world. That means that, at a technical level, it is impractical for a network to email new ads to the content people to have them inserted manually. Usually these are entirely separate companies. To facilitate things, Ad Networks use Ad Hosting companies like AdJuggler (or similar technology internally) to store the ads and to generate JavaScript tags. These tags are like special instructions you give the wait staff to hold the mayo and have the dressing on the side. The wait staff sends the special order to the kitchen just like the content provider combines their content with the JavaScript tags and send them down to your browser.
Here is where it gets interesting. Your browser reads the JavaScript tag and follows the instructions. In this case, it will go out to the Ad Hosting company and pull down the ad that is associated with this tag, the one the advertiser paid to have up on your site. This is somewhat analogous to Network TVs allowing syndicated stations to insert local advertising to which the Network has little involvement. A content provider can be just as shocked as you are when your ad shows up associated with inappropriate content. Slow ads, broken ads, misappropriated ads are typically unrelated to the content that the provider is serving up; one has little connection with the other. It is the Ad Networks job to facilitate that part of the agreement and a good network will do that part fairly and professionally.
The answer to ad placement, traffic patterns, click through rates, Share of Voice are much more complicated than we want them to be. Understanding the little dance going on behind the scenes helps, if only a little.