Definitions of some common terms

Ad hash: Many of the problems in today’s advertising ecosystem stem from the absence of a universally recognised identification system across players. Advertisers bid in multiple ad exchanges under multiple identities and this leads to double-spending inefficiencies, data discrepancies, and lack of accountability and user control. By creating a cryptographic hash of each ad file, Novum eliminates those problems and generates a unique ID for each ad. These IDs, which we call ad hashes, are recorded on the blockchain so that all participants and creatives can be easily verified. This strengthens the security of the ecosystem as abusers can be quickly identified and banned. It prevents double-spending as advertisers will no longer have multiple identities outbidding one another. The ad hashes also help to eliminate ad repetition on the same page and allow users to effectively block ads they do not wish to see.

Novum Protocol: The communication protocol enabling direct ad serving and first-party data analytics between advertisers and publishers.

Novum Edge: The Novum platforms for Publishers and Advertisers are two separate software products that we give to publishers and advertisers. Unlike traditional ad platforms that host everything on their centralised servers, Novum is fully distributed. This means that each publisher and advertiser essentially becomes a node in the network being fully responsible for their ad serving, targeting, verification, and data processing. This not only allows complete transparency and reliability by not outsourcing trust to any third parties, but also adds the great benefit of infinite scalability to the ecosystem. The distributed nature of our solution is what allows us to offer real-time data updates every five seconds, cryptographically verified targeting, and complete security of bidding strategies and campaign data.

Novum Cloud: A service dedicated to our clients who cannot install the platform on their own servers or clouds. Instead, they can choose to host the platforms on an Novum-managed cloud for a monthly payment.

Bidders: Bidders are the only middlemen in the Novum supply chain. Their role is to meet the supply and demand by always determining the highest bidder. While doing that, they need to guarantee speed, efficiency, and reliability.

Novum Ecosystem: Includes all advertisers and publishers executing media buying and selling through the Novum Protocol, as well as all bidders and third-parties utilising it.

Novum RTB: The technology used by the majority of our clients for auction-based programmatic real-time bidding advertising.

The Novum Public Marketplace: Our public marketplace that enables publishers and advertisers to announce and explore pricing and offers for programmatic Direct Deals.

Direct deals: Programmatic guaranteed media buying and selling through directly agreed upon by Publisher and Advertiser pre-defined delivery criteria and prices.

Hard data: We call all data that can be deterministically measured hard data.

Soft data: Any data that are probabilistic or extrapolated and cannot be verified with 100% confidence are referred to in our documentation as soft data.

Behavioural targeting: Behavioural targeting takes into account the user's behaviour - presumed and extrapolated data about his or her intentions, bahaviour, classification, and demographics data.

Contextual targeting: Contextual targeting is based on the context of the environment in which an ad is served. This includes the content and topic of the page, the publisher's type and category, as well as any hard data known about the user's device and its environment.

Hypercontextual targeting: We call the ability to target a specific list of URLs hypercontextual targeting. Those lists can be uploaded by the advertisers or created automatically by Novum’s technology based on predefined sets of criteria.

Static ads: To facilitate a better user experience, Novum removes the disruptive ad formats and third-party tracking scripts. We run beautifully-designed script-free static creatives which do not distract from the content and allow for much quicker page loading times.

Heatmaps: Advertisers can leverage the heatmaps available in their platform to detect bot traffic and accidental clicks. The coordinates for each click are recorded and the click density visualised in an interactive overlay. Click bots typically produce random noise or a concentration of clicks in certain areas (usually in the top left or central pixels). In the absence of bot traffic, clicks should be concentrated on CTA buttons, logos, and parts of the creative that attract more attention. Watch our tutorial on using heatmaps.