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Ad Tech Vets Look To Bring Their Data Expertise To Actual Vets How Oracle’s Rob Tarkoff Will Win The Next Stage Of Data And Ad Tech Reed Hastings Explains Why Netflix Won’t Ever Sell Ads DoubleVerify Takes A Crack At CTV Fraud With New Supply Certification Google GM Sissie Hsiao Is Planning For The Next ‘Jump Forward’ Chrome Is Killing Cookies – But SameSite Still Needs To Be Updated Mark Read: The Future Of WPP Is Interoperable 4 Ways The Death Of The Cookie In Chrome Could Affect Marketers Publishers Sense Opportunity As Chrome Drops Third-Party Cookies

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Curb Taxi Media Lights Up NYC’s Yellow Cabs With Programmatic Ads

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Wednesday, January 29th, 2020 at 9:15 am.

Where there’s a screen, there’s an opportunity for a programmatic ad.

Curb Media Network, the media division of taxi technology provider Curb Mobility, has turned on programmatic access to 1,200 digital screens across its fleet of yellow cabs in New York City.

Curb has operated a media network for years in partnership with 15 thousand cars across 10 major US cities. It began venturing into programmatic three years ago, when it teamed up with out-of-home exchange Vistar Media to enable programmatic sales for Taxi TV, the screens in the back of taxi cabs, which bring in 100 million impressions per month across its fleet.

Curb Media sells its taxi top inventory programmatically, both via Vistar’s out-of-home exchange and private marketplaces. Marketers can purchase via a self-serve platform or through a managed service team, and the ad will appear on taxi tops within minutes after Curb approves the creative.

“That’s one of the key drivers of this partnership: reducing friction on the buy side,” said Chris Polos, head of Curb Taxi Media.

Marketers can buy inventory across Curb’s network of taxi tops as well as the 22,000 Taxi TV screens it operates based on location, day-part and third-party data to trigger dynamic creative.

Apps Are Finally Embracing RTB, And Startups Smell Opportunity

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, January 29th, 2020 at 12:35 am.

It’s taken longer for real-time auctions to make their way into the app world than on the web.

But programmatic is finally starting to take hold and change the way developers buy media thanks to several parallel trends.

And a new crop of opportunistic startups is emerging to help developers take advantage of the shift away from the ad network model.

Two such startups, London-based Dataseat and Kayzen out of Berlin, both raised small seed rounds in mid-January – $2.3 million and $4 million, respectively – from savvy investors hoping to capitalize on this slow but long-overdue transformation.

It’s been lagging until recently because apps, unlike mobile and desktop sites, don’t have a header, and mediation platforms and ad networks historically didn’t support RTB. Partners that wanted to compete in an auction would need their SDK integrated, or the app would need to shift to a server-side setup. This led to slower adoption.

The technical barriers are coming down, however, as ad networks and mediation platforms begin to offer bidding options. At the same time, app developers are pushing for more transparency in their monetization relationships, especially as Google and Facebook introduce more automation into their ad networks, which means less control for developers over the media buying process.

Private Data Clean Rooms Aren’t Just A Walled Garden Tool

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, January 29th, 2020 at 12:15 am.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Peter Vandre, chief analytics officer at Dentsu Aegis Network Media.

The idea of a safe place where marketers can analyze sensitive data has been around at least since the early 2000s. Banks used credit data for direct marketing purposes, for example, but had to comply with new payment card industry regulations. And the healthcare system’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act created patient rights to protect the privacy of medical records.

Walled gardens have brought back data clean rooms to selectively share some of their own data with brands under very limited use cases, within environments they tightly control. As Google increasingly curtails access to user-level data outside its Ads Data Hub, brands will be forced to seriously consider putting more data into the clean room environment for campaign measurement and analysis.

The data clean room concept is becoming synonymous with walled gardens, but with emerging regulations, it may not be practical for brands to analyze marketing data within walled gardens alone. In a private data clean room, it’s possible to establish a secure and privacy-compliant data environment that facilitates individual-level insights, measurement and targeting at an enterprise level.

Could Apple Or Netflix Buy MGM?; An FTC Crackdown On Influencers May Be Coming

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, January 29th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

The O&O Studio

MGM has held talks with Apple and Netflix to gauge their interest in a sale, CNBC reports. Rumors of an MGM deal have swirled for years, but there’s more urgency now as media tech giants (AT&T, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc.) fuel up on exclusive content. MGM is in a category of companies, including Lions Gate and AMC, that are in no man’s land in the new media landscape: They’re among the largest content libraries available, but they don’t have enough scale to move the needle. MGM’s library includes the James Bond catalog and TV shows “Stargate” and “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” among others – not exactly HBO. And it needs a serious backer. MGM, AMC and Lions Gate are each valued at between $5 billion and $10 billion – too big for an easy acquisition or to avoid regulatory scrutiny. MGM’s value likely tops $10 billion, according to CNBC. A deal in that range would be a coup considering it was bought out of bankruptcy by private equity in 2010. MGM selling in the 11-digit range would put even more heat on the rest of the category to find a platform home. More.

Just Browsing

A seemingly minor update this week by the Google AMP team (check out the blog post) kicked up some dust between engineers for Apple’s Safari WebKit, Brave and Google Chromium. The new AMP feature, called Signed Exchange, caches publisher first-party cookies so the functionality isn’t lost when Chrome introduces its SameSite change on Feb. 4. “My assessment has always been that sites should not load under a faux first party,” tweeted John Wilander, the WebKit engineer behind Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention software. It’s worth checking out the full thread. These browser code-based issues are deep in the weeds, but they sometimes spill over onto Twitter and in blogs, perhaps in part because browser engineers tend to be philosophically open source, so they hash out disputes in public – more like GitHub than commercial product development.

Hear That? Univision Experiments With Dynamic In-Show Audio Placements

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 9:00 am.

You’ve heard of dynamic product placement. So, why not dynamic audio?

Spanish-language broadcaster Univision is experimenting with a new advanced TV product that dynamically swaps out the generic sounds in an episode and replaces them with a bit of branded audio.

T-Mobile is Univision’s first partner for the initiative, which debuted during the Monday night episode of prime-time telenovela “Rubi.” The show, which airs weekdays at 10 pm, reached roughly 3 million viewers during its premiere last week, according to Univision.

Univision plans to extend the placement to a second telenovela, “Ringo,” during the week of Feb. 17.

Every time a certain character’s phone rings in the show, viewers will hear the classic T-Mobile ringtone rather than the generic ringtone used during the original shoot.

At the same time the T-Mobile ringtone sounds, which will happen roughly 60 times during the two novelas in scenes where it makes sense, a little magenta T-Mobile logo will also appear in the bottom left of the screen to reinforce the association between the brand and the sound. A T-Mobile commercial will also run during the following break.

As Marketing Clouds Enter The CDP Category, Simon Data's CEO Charts A Different Course

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 5:00 am.

Like a handful of companies thrust into the CDP category, Simon Data predates the acronym’s hype.

Simon Data co-founder and CEO Jason Davis saw the need for a data layer accessible to marketing while working at Etsy, which acquired his first startup Adtuitive, an automated ad tool for small businesses, in 2009.

He wanted to enable marketing teams to directly access their data in the same way as IT, analytics and business intelligence teams.

“For nontechnical stakeholders, working with IT to get data is hard,” Davis said. “Accessing data is hard.”

Simon Data’s customer base skews toward companies with heavy digital footprints – though many operate in other channels, including brick-and-mortar stores. Customers include Peloton, Casper, BarkBox, OpenTable and ASOS.

The company just raised a $30 million Series C round to add marketing fuel to its tech – although the CDP category is already apparently overflowing with requests from marketers seeking information about the new data organization and activation layer.

Davis talked to AdExchanger about the rise of CDPs and how he tries to cut through the hype.

Ad Tech Vets Look To Bring Their Data Expertise To Actual Vets

by James Hercher // Posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 1:50 am.

Ad tech expertise is increasingly finding its way out of the advertising industry and into seemingly unrelated verticals.

The most recent example is Petabyte, a veterinarian and pet industry technology company that launched last month. The company’s initial product is a vet clinic management solution called Rhapsody.

Petabyte CEO Michael Hyman and President Tim Mahlman also co-founded Vidible (where they held the same titles), and sold that to AOL, where they eventually became senior leaders for Verizon’s Oath (now Verizon Media).

“A big part of what led to the company is that Tim and I were both in ad tech seemingly forever, and we really wanted to do something that had more of a direct positive impact,” Hyman said.

The same interest in a fresh start outside advertising also helped land tech talent that would be hard to procure for legacy veterinary software systems, Hyman said. Petabyte’s VPs of product management and software engineering, Justin Gavel and Pavlo Grinchenko, were advertising product directors at Verizon.

The company is getting the band back together with investors, as well as former Oath engineers. Petabyte raised $8 million in December in a round led by Greycroft, the VC firm’s third investment in a startup led by Hyman. It is not a coincidence that Mahlman has also held an “entrepreneur in residence” position with Greycroft since 2011.

Those investors, like Petabyte’s founders, see a chance to compete in a category that hasn’t faced data-savvy competition.

“When you take a group of people who have been doing ad tech for 20 years and build another advertising business, you end up with the same thing,” Hyman said. “What we want is to introduce the veterinary world to the transparency and UIs we take for granted running multi-million dollar ad campaigns in a space.”

Diverse Faces Are Not The Same As Diverse Voices

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 12:05 am.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer at Publicis Groupe and author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” (Harper Collins, publishing on Jan. 28, 2020).

All leaders, and particularly those in marketing and media, face many challenges today, including organizational designs built for the past vs. the present, hierarchical command-and-control management styles that do not resonate with a new generation and employees who question their intent.

One key change that companies are making to address these issues is to ensure that they have a more diverse work force that will resonate with the marketplace and with their talent.

Ensuring diversity is not just the right thing to do, but is proven to be good for the bottom line as a representative workforce is a competitive advantage when talent is key, change is widespread and new ways of looking at things become critical.

However, ensuring a diversity of faces is a necessary but insufficient step. Not only do companies need different faces around the table, but they also need diversity in thinking. We need to ensure that every person in a firm and around the table has a voice.

WeatherBug Wishes Apps Would Get With The Programmatic Program Faster

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 12:05 am.

Mike Brooks, WeatherBug’s SVP of revenue, is a mobile programmatic evangelist.

“We’ve seen a huge positive impact from adopting a unified auction, and we like to be vocal about it,” Brooks said. “We talk about programmatic to anybody who will listen, because this is the way of the future.”

In early 2018, the weather app, which is owned by location data company GroundTruth (previously xAd), started to migrate away from the waterfall toward a unified auction setup with help from its mobile ad exchange, InMobi. WeatherBug eventually removed six SDKs from its app, which reduced latency and improved CPMs.

Brooks also controls how WeatherBug spends its marketing budget, giving him insight into how growth connects with retention and monetization. The team structure is also starting to de-silo.

“We have a meeting every two weeks with the entire team – everyone from finance to marketing, even engineering,” Brooks said. “You can be a lot smarter about how you invest if there’s a feedback loop.”

AdExchanger spoke with Brooks about why ad networks are still so pervasive in the app ecosystem, WeatherBug’s revenue diversification strategy and the imminent death of location data in the bidstream.

Does The Web Need More Browser Engines?; Tracking Consent Is Still Very Messy

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, January 28th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Under The Hood

Does the web need more browser engines? The recent trend has been toward browser engine consolidation. Google helped this along by growing Chrome’s market share, but Microsoft gave up on its own web-rendering software and moved to Chromium at the end of 2018. Chromium is open source – so the underlying tech is visible to everyone and any developer is free to build on the platform. That’s an important differentiation from Internet Explorer, the old Microsoft browser engine that held dominant share through the mid-aughts, a period when web innovation “effectively halted” because Explorer was closed-source software, writes Daniel Appelquist, Samsung’s director of web advocacy. But Chromium isn’t exactly “open,” even though it is open source and companies such as Microsoft and Samsung are contributors. The platform’s governance is still controlled by Google Chrome developers and other Google employees. Without competitive browser engines, Chromium won’t need to implement changes. Developers may argue from “a moral high ground” when it comes to new Chromium APIs and standards, but what forces those suggestions into live code is alternate browsers implementations, according to Appelquist. More.

Jump To Conclusions

Consent, data privacy and measurement are a convoluted mess right now for digital advertising companies. One example is Jumpshot, the analytics subsidiary of the cybersecurity company Avast, which has been using the Avast user base and its visibility into online behavior to package data for advertisers, according to a report by Vice and PCMag. The data is anonymized, and Avast has an opt-in message saying it shares data with Jumpshot. Avast has a big advantage since a security service has a legit reason for data collection, compared to audience targeting companies that must gain explicit consent – an idea referred to as “legitimate interest” under GDPR. But Avast users likely don’t know how their data is used for marketing measurement, or that the data is used at all. More. Avast has also partially divested itself of Jumpshot. Ascential, which owns the Cannes Lions festival and MediaLink, picked up a 35% stake in Jumpshot last July, valuing the subsidiary at $173 million. Ascential has an option to buy another 16% next year, and would take over as majority shareholder.