MRC Updating 'Viewability'; Tech In Cannes

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MRC Updating ‘Viewability’

The Media Rating Council released an update on their efforts to solve the viewability issues of online advertising. Next month advertisers can expect to see a draft version of guidelines for measuring viewable impressions, followed by a report identifying the “discrepancies” between vendor solutions later this year, according to David Gunzerath, SVP and associate director of the MRC. “We’re out there auditing and accrediting companies and…honing in on where the differences are occurring and hopefully shedding some light on this issue,” Gunzerath said. Read more.

Google Consolidating Mediation

Google continues to consolidate its ad products and the latest to get the axe is its AdWhirl mobile advertising platform, which is part of AdMob. The shutdown will take effect on September 30, according to TechCrunch, leaving mobile developers scrambling to migrate to a new platform. A letter to AdWhirl users states: “The open source code for AdWhirl will still be available if anyone wants to run their own AdWhirl service…We encourage you to start using AdMob Mediation prior to 30 September.” Read more on TechCrunch.

Cannes Tech

The annual global advertising event known most simply as “Cannes” is going full-throttle this week. The Wall Street Journal notes the throngs including ad platform firm Turn’s presence and quotes thusly: “‘We signed some contracts with contacts we made during our first time at Cannes last year, so this year we decided to step up our presence,’ said Jean-Claude Muratore, who heads up the French business of Turn.” Read more (subscription). And, visit the Cannes Lions site.

Sponsored Yield

On Digiday, Josh Sternberg covers pricing for sponsored content products across publishers. For Buzzfeed he finds, “$100,000 gets four or five listicles, sorry posts, created by Buzzfeed’s in-house creative services team. Although some buyers said they’ve gotten posts for as little as $5,000 with a minimum spend of $50,000.” Nice yield. And the ROI?… Read more.

Self-Regulation And The NSA

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Anthropic’s Vending Machine Goes Rogue; OpenAI Won’t Take Its Medicine

Skip Graham, Digital Net Agency’s Chief Strategy Officer, expressed his concern that consumers are more complicit with PRISM because of the work advertisers did to convince them data collection was acceptable, according to ZDNet. “We went first and told the public not to worry, to have faith and to trust. We crafted the arguments, molded the opinions, and quieted the skeptics…We convinced the public it was safe, and that self-regulation and not legislation was the answer. The NSA and the current administration is making the same argument now,” said Graham. Read more.

Agency Prez Speaks

Agency MRM’s new prez Michael Mclaren talks “digital” and “direct” with Adweek. On hot trends, Mclaren says, “More and more marketers and the industry are catching up with data-enabled marketing. We’re moving from a world where there was reactive marketing, where you looked back in time at information you collected in order to make smarter choices about what you’re going to do in the future.” Read more.

On B2B Marketers

eMarketer’s Noah Elkin spoke with Google’s Mike Miller about trends in digital business-to-business marketing. Miller said, “We still see a very strong orientation around search. We see some customers using display advertising and some moving into social, although they’re still trying to figure some of that out. We’ve also seen some customers starting to make use of video platforms. For us, that’s YouTube. Mobile is also a theme, although that cuts across each of those platforms.” Read more.

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