The Road to ATS London is a series of specialist posts on technology, data and the business models emerging in the programmatic eco-system, all to be published in the run up to ATS London. Tickets for ATS London on Monday September 14 are now on sale. We do sell out every year so make sure you get your ticket while still available.

It is now only six weeks out from ATS London 2015, and we continue to build to the industry's biggest programmatic event.

In this post we will turn our attention to the publisher - with specific focus on our panel at this year's ATS London.

Having barely navigated the move to digital, publishers have again had to re-org and build a strategy for yet another iteration of the media buying process, namely programmatic.

From the arrival of the ad net right through to the rise of the holistic yield optimising ad server, publishers continue to deal with a lot of change. How are they faring? And can they survive?

We have assembled a number of c-level publisher execs to discuss the key issues affecting their businesses.

The panel of distinguished speakers includes:

- Nicole Holtsmark Head of Programmatic Trading & Audiences, Telegraph Media Group
- Robert Bradley Director, Digital Ad Revenue & Data Global, CNN
- Tim Gentry Global Revenue Director at Guardian News & Media
- Steph Miller Head of Media Sales at Zoopla Property Group Plc

What will they talk about? Well, it has been a huge year for publishers as they look to consolidate (in most cases) and grow business in the programmatic market.

What will the key areas of discussion be?

The rise of the publisher co-op, Pangea and the AOP-backed consortium

It is strange that it has taken this long for UK publishers to group together - given the French (La Place Media) have been doing it for nearly three years.

Why now? Good question. It could be a case of competing publishers finally agreeing on how to work together.

Or it could be a case that publishers finally realise that a scaled programmatic offering is not possible without collaboration.

In any case we now have not one but two publisher co-ops in the UK: the first is the super premium collective, consisting of CNN International, the Guardian, the Economist, the Financial Times, and Reuters; the other is an AOP-backed offering that is still to unveil specific details on how it will work.

Publishers it would seem, see value in opting out of the Google/Facebook programmatic duopoly. Let's see how that will fare, but judging by the success of La Place both would seem to have a decent shot at some sort of programmatic longevity.

The publisher ad stack

With so many big vendors trying to dethrone DFP, are we going to see big publishers invest in a single stack and move ad servers?

It is a good question. The inflexibility of the DFP ad server is well documented. Dynamic allocation, which Google heralded as a unique publisher innovation only serves to help Google win bids for the Google Ad Exchange.

The fact that holistic ad serving is still not a standard is still quite unbelievable.

Many have built hacks to work around DFP, most notably De Telegraaf, in the Netherlands. Publishers should have the option to open up all of their ad impressions to all demand in the market.

Header bidding seems to be a new assault on DFP's closed programmatic model.

It will be interesting to see what happens when AppNexus and others finally come to market with an ad server that can do this.

I suspect this will spur Google to offer something similar. But how many publishers are actually looking to move away from DFP? Not an easy task to migrate off an ad server. Yet there is definitely an appetite in the market for some kind of competition for DFP.

Data co-ops - can publishers make a scaled play in the cross-device market?

Cross-device targeting is a difficult thing to achieve even for those logged-in data power houses. For premium publishers to achieve it on their own is almost possible.

Can data co-ops work? Who knows. We will get the inside track on what the UK's top publishers think about the opportunity and whether or not it is even viable.

Can publishers make mobile work?

There are so many big Silicon Valley media companies vying for publisher attention at the minute. Their objective? To become the distribution piece for struggling publishers in mobile. Facebook, Google, SnapChat, Linkedin and Apple are all battling for publisher attention.

The prize is quite significant. With publishers making little or no impactful revenue in mobile those media giants with significant eyeballs and scale are making publishers question their mobile strategies.

Should they abandon their own mobile presence in favour of a distribution deal with the likes of Facebook? Are they at risk of empowering companies that are competing for ad revenue?

These questions and more will be fielded by our expert publisher panel ATS London London 2016 on Monday, September 14.

If you are interested in attending ATS London be sure to get your ticket today - as we sell out well in advance of the event.