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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 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 What’s In Google’s Privacy Sandbox? Nothing, For Now Google Chrome Will Drop Third-Party Cookies In 2 Years

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Twitter's Sarah Personette: 'Business Is The Most Personal Thing In The World'

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, January 24th, 2020 at 6:00 am.

Sarah Personette’s career has taken her on a wild tour around the industry.

After graduating from Northwestern in 2001, she landed an agency job at Starcom – taking the interview on a whim. She was on an upward trajectory when she left the agency world to join an upstart social media company called Facebook.

“My dad said, ‘This is the worst decision you’ve ever made. Why would you leave a senior leadership position for a company I've never heard of?’” she recalled. But Personette wanted to learn about technology and social – an education she wouldn’t get sticking with the agencies.

Since then, she’s circulated through the industry, bouncing back to the agency world when she became Universal McCann’s US president in 2013, at the tender age of 33. She then bounced back to Facebook, and ran through a short stint in publishing as COO of Refinery29.

Now she’s back in the social media world. For more than a year, she’s served as VP of global client solutions at Twitter.

“If you’re the master of your own education, you’re always going to be successful and improving,” she said.

She spoke with AdExchanger about her career.

WebMD Uses Data To Connect Sponsored Content To Customer Journeys

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Friday, January 24th, 2020 at 12:30 am.

People visit WebMD to research their health conditions and treatment, yielding a vast array of data about how people engage with different topics.

The medical site’s knowledge about its readers now informs it nearly 3-year-old sponsored content program, which booked $20 million in revenue during its first year.

WebMD can show clients how the customer journey for their products may be different than expected. By tailoring content to how people actually learn about a pharmaceutical treatment or product, WebMD is seeing better results and high renewals for its programs with advertisers such as Certain Dri, omega-3 supplements MegaRed, Nicorette and NicoDerm.

For example, when WebMD analyzed data while working with Certain Dri, a prescription-strength antiperspirant for hyperhidrosis, it found that many people searched for simpler terms like “excessive sweating.”

“A lot of people didn’t realize this was a medical condition,” said WebMD head of brand studio Solomon Masch. “They were just generally looking at what was causing their symptoms and how to prevent it.”

WebMD created an assessment tool people could use to see if their excessive sweating made them a candidate for Certain Dri. Complete rates were “extremely high,” Masch said.

Randall Rothenberg: The Cookie’s Death Heralds A Better Future For The Web

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, January 24th, 2020 at 12:20 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 Randall Rothenberg, CEO at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Last week Google sent shock waves across the industry when it announced it would phase out third-party cookies for Google Chrome over the next two years.

But from my vantage point, why so shocked?

There is no arguing that cookies have been extraordinarily valuable to the entire consumer economy. Studies show that the ad targeting they have powered has been worth more than $25 billion to the consumer economy by creating more efficiencies and allowing advertising to more effectively reach interested consumers. Say what you want about “those creepy ads that follow you around the internet,” but consumers undeniably buy based on those ads, and they have helped brands, publishers and intermediaries grow.

At the same time, Congress, the European Union, the California attorney general and other governments have said that the third-party digital economy cannot stand as-is. Consumer groups – some of which are pretty sophisticated about how the digital marketing and media supply chain works – have been urging them on and applauding.

Comic: The Industry's Red Carpet

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, January 24th, 2020 at 12:17 am.

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

Amazon Turns Up The Volume On TV Ads; How Apple ITP Shuts Down Tracking

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, January 24th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

Playing With Fire

Amazon is “throwing a whole kitchen sink” of inventory at advertisers across Fire TV and its video ad services, according to a sales deck obtained by Digiday. Big picture: Amazon is pitching OTT audiences at scale, which advertisers desperately need. Fire TV has more than 37 million monthly active users, and Amazon has rev-share deals with apps on the platform. The deck also touts Amazon’s reach in live programming, with a news app and its Thursday Night Football broadcast, which was viewed by 2.6 million people (for at least 30 seconds), up 31% from the year before. The deck also shows the incremental reach of IMDb TV, Amazon’s AVOD channel, though it doesn’t have major traction. Amazon is also selling an Alexa voice integration that allows viewers to interact with or place an order from an ad. More.

Better Safe Than Safari

If you thought Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) for Safari put a stop to the cat-and-mouse game with trackers … think again. Apple has routinely updated ITP to shut down tactics such as fingerprinting and click redirects, and late last year it ratcheted up standards even more to disguise individual pages (so a merchant that previously saw “https://store.example/baby/strollers/deluxe-stroller-navy-blue.html” now just sees “https://store.example/”). At the time, the Safari WebKit team credited Google researchers who had identified ways to use that data for inappropriate tracking. And now those Google researchers are out with a full report on ITP’s vulnerabilities. ITP’s strength is that it’s not a preset list of sites, tags or formats that are blocked: It’s built-in machine learning software that tracks users itself to discover which publishers or tech companies are tracking them as well. By creating individualized tracker-blocking models that target certain sites, ITP creates a way to fingerprint users based on the domains that are blocked. Google information security engineer Artur Janc has a Twitter thread with more details and the full report.

Aki Buys Video Personalization Tech From Distressed Eyeview, Will Reopen The Company

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 at 7:48 pm.

After running out of money and closing its doors in mid-December, video ad tech company Eyeview has a happy ending of sorts.

Mobile ad platform Aki Technologies on Thursday completed its acquisition of Eyeview’s assets, which include a DSP and bidder, an ad server that ingests data signals to inform which video creative to deliver and a video creation module that enables dynamic video creative optimization.

Scott Swanson, Aki’s CEO and co-founder, declined to share how much his company paid for Eyeview’s assets and patents. Four other companies were also vying for Eyeview’s tech.

Since the deal is an asset sale rather than a full acquisition, Aki only gets Eyeview’s technology, and not any of its employees, revenue or contracts. But there’s a silver lining: Aki also doesn’t inherit any of Eyeview’s debt.

Eyeview raised nearly $80 million, but couldn’t convince its VC backers to put in any more money. Fin.

Aki plans to reopen Eyeview in the first half of 2020 as a separate entity, with the intention of integrating Eyeview’s technology stack with its own during the second half of the year.

Podcast: China

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 at 10:44 am.

Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts.

In this episode, we try to unpack the mystery of China: its tech giants, its attention economy and, yes, the role of the Communist Party. Our guide is Humphrey Ho, US Managing Director of China-based agency Hylink Digital.

One key difference between the largest tech companies in China – the so called BBAT companies Baidu, ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent – and FAANG in the United States is how jealously they guard their users. The Chinese walled gardens are far less interoperable and more vicious with each other.

“Imagine there are five city-states,” Ho says. “They are clearly very well-walled but there’s roads connected to all of them. The Chinese user, just like the Western user, has a certain amount of eyeball time on their phones and on their PCs, so a new player like Bytedance coming in and stealing time is the biggest concern of the established players.”

As a result, these competitors block each other’s links and images often don’t load or don’t load properly.

Partly as a result of this, user data flow between platforms and from the platforms to the advertisers is even more restrictive in China than it is in the United States.

Ampersand Launches Solution To Simplify Advanced TV Buying

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 at 9:00 am.

Ampersand, the sales consortium owned by Comcast, Cox and Charter, wants to simplify advanced TV ad buying by pooling the fragmented inventory across networks and cable operators across the United States.

So it launched the AND platform Thursday, an interface where ad buyers can buy, plan and measure advanced TV inventory across Ampersand’s 85 million households and 120 cable networks. That footprint also includes 55% of US addressable homes.

The AND platform connects with Ampersand’s data platform, which houses set-top box data from 40 million homes that buyers can use to target local and national audiences.

Ampersand CEO Nicolle Pangis said the AND interface, combined with the data platform, gives TV advertisers the ability to do the audience-based planning, buying and measurement that’s typically relegated to digital ad buying.

The AND platform has 80 preloaded audience segments that cross linear, set-top box, video on demand, connected and addressable TV inventory. So an advertiser can now buy the same audience across national, regional and local geographies.

Streaming 2.0: The Unholy Trinity Of Curation, Cost And Churn

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 2020 at 12:05 am.

"On TV and Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Mike Bloxham, senior vice president of global media and entertainment at Magid.

The streaming landscape has been defined by access to libraries of content and consumers’ ability to watch their shows of choice on their terms – when and where they want and with or without ads.

Now, with the entrance of Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus and soon-to-be-released services from NBCUniversal (owned by Comcast) and WarnerMedia (owned by AT&T), the streaming market has entered its next phase: Streaming 2.0.

This brave (or scary) new world of streaming can be defined as content plus, where services are marketed as offering something more than content alone. The Disney Plus deal with Verizon, where some Verizon subscribers can receive a free year of the service, is as good of an example as any, and we can expect many more such offers that tie subscriptions to offscreen benefits.

This type of promotional marketing goes straight to the heart of tackling what I like to think of as the unholy trinity of streaming media: curation, cost and churn.

After Google Finally Really Did It, A Necessary System Cleanup

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, January 23rd, 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 Nico Neumann, assistant professor and fellow, Centre for Business Analytics at Melbourne Business School.

Last week, Google announced that it would phase out third-party cookies and even provide a solution to stop fingerprinting over the next two years. The project has been termed Privacy Sandbox and puts another nail into the third-party data coffin, in line with similar browser changes from Mozilla and Apple Safari.

Many companies and experts now fear what the proposed tracking limitations mean for the wider ad tech ecosystem, particularly for third-party targeting, attribution and ad tech downstream businesses.

However, if we take a sober look at the upcoming changes, we can conclude this is a necessary system cleanup that will not only benefit consumers through increased privacy protection but also advertisers.