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Goodbye, Last-Click Attribution: Google Ads Changes Default To Data Modeling Oracle’s Moat Launches Outcomes API For CPG Sales, With StackAdapt As Initial DSP Partner Why Non-Advertising Businesses Are Going Into Ads Oracle Fuses Together A CDP And CRM For A Lead-Gen Tool Gap’s CMO: “Content Has To Evolve As You Move Through The Funnel” How Online Grocery Seller Hungryroot Benefits From Not Launching An Ad Platform TransUnion Acquires Neustar In $3.1 Billion Deal With An Eye On Identity Meet System1, The Billion-Dollar Ad Tech Biz IPOing Later This Year Why Spectrum Brands Is Bringing Its Amazon Advertising Approach To The Web

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It’s Time To Comment On CPRA Rulemaking – Your Deadline Is Nov. 8

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, September 27th, 2021 at 11:22 am.

California’s new privacy protection agency put out the bat call last week for public comments as it gets ready to create implementation regulations for the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA).

Although the public can submit comments related to any area where the agency has authority, the agency has said that in this case, it’s “particularly interested in comments on new and undecided issues not already covered by the existing CCPA regulations.”

Once finalized, implementation regs help businesses with their compliance efforts by providing operation guidance that fills in any gaps in the original law.

The CPRA applies to any company with annual revenue of $25 million or higher that shares, sales or acquires the personal data of 100,000 or more customers or households. But the law also applies if a company makes at least half of its annual revenue from exchanging or selling personal info – regardless of total revenue.

In other words, this law needs to be on the radar of every ad tech company, marketer and publisher up and down the supply chain.

Comments are due to the agency by Monday, November 8.

But first, how did we get here?

Goodbye, Last-Click Attribution: Google Ads Changes Default To Data Modeling

by James Hercher // Posted on Monday, September 27th, 2021 at 8:58 am.

Is this truly the end of last-click attribution?

Google will no longer use last-click attribution as the default conversion model in Google Ads, its buy-side ad network, the company announced in a blog post on Monday.

The change will mean that, going forward, the default attribution method for any conversion touchpoint – a new product purchase page, app install campaign, display ad landing page – will fall into what Google calls “data-driven attribution,” its algorithmic solution that assigns credit to different impressions over time.

Current conversion actions with last-click measurement will continue to attribute based on the final ad that drove a conversion. And last-click measurement will still be available.

Advertisers can toggle off data-driven attribution and choose one of Google’ five rules-based attribution methods: last-click, first-click, linear (which credits every impression equally), time-decay (credits by the duration between an impression and conversion) and position-based (40% credit each to the first and last impressions, and 20% spread over the rest).

“Rule-based attribution models, as opposed to data-driven attribution, are powered by fixed, static rules that assign credits to touchpoints,” Google VP of buying, analytics and measurement Vidhya Srinivasan told AdExchanger in an email.

Data-driven attribution is a live data model, so how the algorithm assigns credit will be different for every brand or campaign. The attribution scoring could change based on which sites or apps are contributing to conversions, or how consumer patterns change across browsers, apps and devices. The rule-based models are static; One might say stagnant.

But last-click does remain popular – the default until this day. It’s an intuitive model, especially for small and medium-sized advertisers that don’t use measurement vendors or set aside testing budgets.

Google hadn’t made data-driven attribution the default until now because in many situations it wouldn’t meet volume thresholds, Srinivasan said. Again, smaller advertisers see fewer sales, downloads or other conversions, and the product needs data coming in to work.

The World Is Increasingly Nonbinary. Your Marketing Should Be, Too

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, September 27th, 2021 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 Brandon Zelasko, VP of operations at SE2.

The world has always been nonbinary – but now governments and brands are finally taking notice.

New York’s state assembly passed a bill in June allowing gender-neutral birth certificates (the 12th state to do so), and Pinterest became the latest social media platform to add a field for personal gender pronouns to user profiles. Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn all added similar features earlier this year.

This public embrace of gender-nonconforming individuals is a great step forward. However, the behavior and marketing practices of some brands demonstrate there’s more work to do in order to break down the “cis-tem.” [For the uninitiated, the term “cisgender” refers to a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person was identified as having at birth.]

About 56% of millennials and half of Generation Z believe the traditional gender binary is outdated. And yet most marketers still start conversations about targeting by asking whether a product is for men or for women – despite the fact that younger consumers increasingly value brands that don’t classify products by gender. Thinking binarily overlooks potential consumers who identify as neither male nor female, or somewhere else along the gender spectrum.

Most products are ungendered, yet marketers thrust gendered attributes onto products in a misguided effort to make them more marketable, perpetuating the fallacy of binary genders.

Does Nielsen’s MRC Relegation Spell A Brave New World For Sports Sponsorship?

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Monday, September 27th, 2021 at 12:04 am.

"On TV & Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today's column is by Brian Kim, CEO at Relo Metrics.

Everybody knows the old adage, nobody gets fired for buying IBM. In the television or sport industry, until recently, the same could have been said for the decision to work with Nielsen.

The measurement giant's recent loss of its Media Rating Council accreditation, and the frustration over its ratings service, marks the end of Nielsen’s dominance of broadcast audience tracking. But it heralds an opportunity for a more transparent and digital-minded alternative. And the clearest opportunity is in the field of sports sponsorship measurement, which has been held back by ineffective metrics and a lack of transparency.

Nielsen's solutions have always rested on its extrapolation of core broadcast ratings from its panel of 40,000 households. But in our multichannel media landscape, Nielsen’s focus on traditional TV and panel-based solutions misses a huge piece of the sports measurement pie, leaving brands with an incomplete picture of the value of their sponsorship investments.

Twenty-odd years ago, an entire family might have happily sat down to watch an important game – the U .S . Open final, for example – in its entirety on that channel. Today, consuming live sports events like that is the exception, rather than the rule. Many people watch highlights of the game on their social feeds, even TikTok. Others may dip in and out of the game, which could be streaming on a PC or tablet.

Google Eyes Search Deals With Instagram And TikTok; Streaming Wars May Benefit Social Media

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, September 27th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

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

Searching Social

Google is negotiating potential deals with the parent companies of TikTok and Instagram, ByteDance and Facebook, respectively, to index posts on those platforms in Google search results, The Information reports. Right now, social video search responses are almost entirely sourced from YouTube. Sometimes, those YouTube videos are fuzzy reproductions of TikToks or Stories posts, even when users are explicitly searching for content from TikTok or Instagram. The user experience is bad, and it’s untenable considering Google’s antitrust scrutiny. Google will fork over a sizable chunk of change. It has a similar deal with Twitter, which made $509 million from data licensing and other non-ad revenue in 2020, though its deal terms are not disclosed. ByteDance and Facebook are reluctant to expose valuable data to Google’s scraper algo. But TikTok stars and Instagram influencers would like a potential deal, regardless of the tensions between the parent companies. “You post something on Instagram and two days later it’s forgotten about,” says Katerina Horwitz, who co-runs a travel and lifestyle account. “If it’s searchable, the content can live for longer. People can just find it later if you have the right keywords.”

Streaming Social

Social media may be a major beneficiary of the streaming TV wars. Free, ad-supported platforms are a go-to place to find new subscribers, since major broadcasters and tech companies started investing heavily in CTV numbers, even acquiring subscribers at a loss, because they value the potential market share over the current profitability. The top three companies in terms of share of voice on social media in the past 90 days are Disney+, HBO Max and Hulu, according to the social media analytics company BrandTotal. The mix isn’t consistent. Hulu is all-in on YouTube, where it placed 94% of all social impressions in the period. Netflix held the top spot on Instagram, while Paramount was the leading Facebook advertiser in terms of share of voice. MediaPost has more.

Cookieless Is Top Of Mind As Teads Bides Its Time Before Another Run At An IPO

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 11:07 am.

Teads might not have its stock ticker yet – the company decided to postpone a planned IPO this summer – but there are lots of other items on the immediate agenda, says Pierre Chappaz, the company’s founder and executive chairman.

The programmatic video platform, which is best known for originating the outstream ad unit, has its eye on conquering cookieless by striking data partnerships, like the recent one with Acxiom in September to make the latter’s data available through the Teads Ad Manager. And it’s evaluating potential M&A with the backing of its parent company, French telco Altice.

But Teads is also profitable today and growing organically, Chappaz said. During the 12 months ending in June, Teads saw its revenue increase 36% to $645 million.

Of course, if Teads was publicly traded and its stock price popped, it’d have a lot more money to do those deals. Just ask Magnite.

“That is one of the benefits of being a public company,” Chappaz said. “But we also have an existing shareholder in Altice with great M&A experience that’s been supportive of our ambitions. They’re with us for the long term.”

Chappaz spoke with AdExchanger.

App Targeting Isn’t Good Enough For Modern CTV Buying

by AdExchanger Content Studio // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 9:05 am.

Alex Chatfield, VP, Marketplace Development, Xandr

Once upon a time, desktop display advertising was the central way for brands to reach digital audiences. It was a simple process: “I want to appear in The New York Times. I will target nytimes.com. My ad is live on nytimes.com.” While desktop display still plays a prominent role in digital campaigns today, the video and CTV space is growing as brands’ strategic buying format of choice.

In 2020, US CTV spending was up more than 40% with no signs of slowing soon, making it a competitive area with potential for savvy buyers. Unfortunately, the premium video marketplace is more complicated than yesteryear’s desktop display world and requires new tools. The rapid shift to premium video has resulted in an education gap with many desktop display buyers on a steep learning curve and applying legacy techniques to this new channel.

App lists and site lists are blunt instruments in a nuanced market

Premium video content is largely consumed today via applications, downloaded either on a consumer’s CTV or mobile device. Unlike the web, where a site has a single address that you can target, applications have a unique address, or app bundle ID, for each app store that a consumer might use to download it. For buyers, this represents a challenge, as they have to gather and maintain a list of every app bundle ID in order to fully target a single app like Discovery GO.

How Rakuten Rewards Is Adapting To A New Affiliate Model – The First-Party Ad Platform

by James Hercher // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 12:05 am.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.

Rakuten Rewards, formerly Ebates, is an 800-pound gorilla in the affiliate marketing business.

But what’s the point of being biggest if nobody wants to be in the affiliate business?

Since its acquisition by the Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten and the rebranding from Ebates, Rakuten Rewards has set its sights beyond the affiliate category.

“We're busting out of the affiliate marketplace, because we can target using our own first-party data,” said Rakuten Rewards President Kristen Gall.

By combining its owned-and-operated content and logged-in audiences for targeting, Rakuten Rewards built a first-party media platform.

AdExchanger caught up with Gall about Rakuten Rewards’ first-party ad platform strategy, and how its value has evolved to meet changes made by the walled gardens Amazon, Google and Apple.

AdExchanger: What’s new for Rakuten Rewards since the rebrand in 2019?

KRISTEN GALL: Understanding how people navigate the ecommerce ecosystem is incredibly valuable. Over the past couple years, we’ve realized the wealth of first-party data we're sitting on.

We used to be a one-size-fits-all resource, where you [as a merchant] upload your cash-back rate on our site. And that worked. But what we've been able to launch over the last year and a half is a program called Personalized Rewards, with granular one-on-one audience targeting for merchant partners. It's more akin to how they use Facebook or Google to define an audience to reach for acquisition, retention, retargeting, etc. We use cash back as the lever along with media.

Comic: 2021 Bingo Card

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 12:04 am.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...

IMDb TV A Golden Goose For Amazon; Criteo Finds Google FLoC Lacks Scale

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

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

AVOD FTW

When people think of Amazon video assets, it’s Amazon Prime, Twitch and Fire TV. But IMDb TV, formerly Freedive, has quietly become an important piece of Amazon’s video strategy, and may even be a golden goose of its own someday, VideoWeek reports. As a free, ad-supported content library, IMDb TV can grow CTV supply without signing new users in the hyper-competitive subscription streaming market (where Amazon’s champion is Prime). IMDb TV also connects directly to Amazon shopping, with purchase or ad-to-cart features through Fire TV sticks or Alexa-enabled devices, and with closed-loop sales attribution. That makes IMDb TV a natural extension for Amazon-based sellers, many of whom create product demos and other videos for their Amazon store pages but aren’t TV or CTV advertisers. Ecommerce media agencies are enthusiastic about IMDb TV for just that reason. They work with shopper marketers, not national brand marketers that buy TV ads. But extending product videos to an Amazon CTV app is within their wheelhouse. AdExchanger has more.

What’s In A Cohort? Seriously.

Criteo published the third post in a four-part series examining Google’s FLoC Original Trials. The consistent thread is that FLoC lacks the scale necessary to draw significant conclusions. Since there are relatively few publishers testing FLoC, a site like Weather.com sees users from about 4,000 cohorts per week, while the median site only picks up two cohorts per week. FLoCs are also unintuitive, because they don’t target people; they target “a cluster of browsing activity,” in Google’s words. A cohort of “cooking enthusiasts” will include people who visited recipe and kitchen supply sites. But the overall browsing patterns of that group fluctuate week to week, because the tech is making random connections across thousands of users’ browsing histories. A Google academic paper showed how FLoC-based campaigns could achieve 95% of the performance advertising effectiveness of third-party cookies. And Criteo reproduced the methodology, which it could do because it works with Expedia as a site owner and many travel-booking marketers, so it could algorithmically track the similarity of users in a travel cohort. But the opacity and low volume of FLoC IDs on programmatic exchanges is a blocker to in-depth examination of Google’s claims.