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Google Grows Its Sellers.json File To 1.2 Million Publishers Prog.IO Digital: P&G’s Media Strategy, NYT Reconciles Subscriptions With Ads – And How To Build A CDP Amazon Is Primed To Set A Nearly $10 Billion Sales Record On Prime Day This Year House Report Calls For 'Structural Separation' Of Big Tech (It’s 449 Pages, So Here’s Your Much-Needed TL;DR) Snap Sales SVP Peter Naylor On Upstart Competition, Why Snap Avoids Exchanges And The Wide Release Of First Commercial Group Nine Offers Its First-Party Data To Power DR Ads On Instagram, Facebook Google, The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Amobee, Adobe and Adform Lead The Pack In Gartner’s 2020 Ad Tech Magic Quadrant Dovekey Privacy Sandbox Proposal Could Represent A Mini Detente Between Google And Ad Tech It May Seem All Quiet On The CCPA Front, But Don’t Get Complacent: CCPA Enforcement Has Begun

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Here’s How Moves By Google And Apple Will Impact The Relevance Of Marketers’ Creative

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 12:54 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 Malik Roberts, technical solution lead at Ad-Lib.

As consumers, our data is becoming more private and less accessible. We’re becoming more difficult to track as we move around the internet, consume content and flick between devices.

These changes make it more challenging for marketers to address consumers in a contextually relevant and privacy compliant way. As a result, marketers must think more seriously about how they acquire and leverage the data available to them. In short, it’s putting them in the relevancy hot seat.

Before the roll-out of policies such as GDPR in the EU, Apple’s deprecation of mobile identifiers and Google’s looming depreciation of third party cookies, advertisers were able to cherry-pick technologies and find a way to make them work with no real concern for whether or not passing data between platforms would be a blocker.

For example, third party DCO vendors could take their tag and add it to Google's demand-side platform in place of a creative asset. This way, when the buying platform is ready to show a creative it makes a call to the third party server to fetch the creative asset. This sort of “piggybacking”, whilst historically commonplace, has become increasingly problematic as the demand for stringent governance around the control and processing of data has grown. When the buying platform communicates with the third party DCO platform, it is likely passing user-level data in order to achieve scale or streamline workflows. There is also the issue of user consent which becomes difficult to manage when your owned server or buying platform has no visibility on the cookie being dropped (and is therefore unable to block it!)

Ghostery And Google: When Your Destiny Depends On Another Platform’s Whims

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 12:35 am.

As an anti-tracking company and the creator of a privacy extension for the web, you’d think Ghostery would be all about the elimination of third-party cookies.

But Jeremy Tillman, president of Ghostery, is wary of Google’s motivation for phasing out third-party tracking in Chrome.

“You have to think about the second-order effects of these types of changes,” Tillman said. “What is better for privacy and the user experience from one perspective, can be not so good for competition and the free market from another.”

Ghostery’s research has found that tracking scripts from Google are present on just more than 60% of all page loads. Facebook follows at 27.1%.

“It’s been a big advantage for them for a long time,” Tillman said. “And now, as companies need to depend more on first-party relationships, here’s Google and others positioning themselves as the solution to do that.”

AdExchanger caught up with Tillman for a few hot takes on R&D in an age of uncertainty, potential antitrust action and why it’s getting harder to build extensions for the Chrome browser.

SiriusXM Completes Stitcher Acquisition; Group Nine Media Diversifies Its Revenue ... With Pet Insurance

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

Done Deal

SiriusXM completed its $300 million purchase of Stitcher on Monday, its latest move to build the satellite radio company into a podcasting empire. The Stitcher app gives listeners access to podcasts from the likes of Freakonomics Radio, the Oprah Winfrey Network and Conan O'Brien on an ad-free or ad-supported basis. It also offers ad inventory from hundreds of podcast shows. The deal follows SiriusXM’s $3.5 billion purchase of Pandora in 2018, and its summer acquisitions of podcast management platform Simplecast and AdsWizz, which will be the company's new ad tech arm and power Pandora’s advertising efforts. "With Stitcher and its varied assets, we are now a one-stop shop able to meet the needs of podcast creators, publishers and advertisers, while also providing listeners with access to great shows, series and programming," SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer said in a statement. TechCrunch has more.

Heavy Petting

So here’s a new publisher revenue stream we didn’t expect: pet insurance. Group Nine Media-owned pub The Dodo is getting into pet insurance, thanks to Group Nine’s minority stake in pet insurer Petplan, which will be renamed “Fetch by the Dodo” in May 2021. “For digital media, I think we all have the challenge of needing to be good at multiple things at once,” Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer said. The Wall Street Journal points out that Petplan already has 250,000 paying subscribers, 50,000 of which are new members since May 2019. The deal between Group Nine and Petplan also includes brand licensing and marketing services deals whereby The Dodo will promote Petplan’s products and services for a fee. Other Group Nine non-ad revenues include selling TV shows, licencing its properties for children's books and – prior to the pandemic, of course – live events.

NBCU And Innovid Collaborate On Ad Quality Controls For Peacock

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Monday, October 19th, 2020 at 11:00 am.

Bringing online buying practices to OTT isn’t as simple as plugging in a buying platform and revving it up.

If a display ad doesn’t load or an online video buffers on a browser, it’s annoying. If an ad on the big glass doesn’t show properly, it breaks the user experience.

NBCU knows these quality control issues could undermine its recently launched streaming service, Peacock. To contend with the challenge, the broadcaster said Monday that it’s devised a solution with TV ad tech company Innovid that will help ensure a smooth user experience for its streamers.

When Peacock first launched, it was forced to reject about 40% of the creative it got from advertisers because so many of the tags were faulty. Accepting creative with bad tags disrupts the viewer experience with black screens or jittering or pixelated ads.

“What Innovid has done is created new ad tech quality control infrastructure that has gotten the acceptance rate up to 95%,” said Ryan McConville, NBCU’s EVP of ad platforms.

CTV Measurement Is Doomed Unless Google, Roku, Apple And Amazon Collaborate

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, October 19th, 2020 at 12:47 am.

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

Today’s column is written by Rob Aksman, chief strategy officer at BrightLine.

Unlike in the tech-inhibited world of pre-connected TV, CTV has the power to unlock precise measurement and targeting at scale.

In most US households today, TV content is consumed over IP, running through high powered devices, each with their own unique identifiers. And a cadre of technology companies, industry groups and open forums are more than capable of together delivering on the promise of data-driven TV.

But for all that promise, nothing has happened that’s meaningfully scalable.

The root of the problem is that four companies – Google, Roku, Apple and Amazon – control the fate of whether we free up the downstream value of CTV for brands. Moreover, they haven’t shown the incentive or desire to participate in the industry forums!

There is no shortage of opportunities for them to contribute. The content owners have tried to address the issue of measurement and targeting with numerous committees, initiatives, councils, and panels, put on by the IAB, independent trade groups, or standards groups. But the big four never seem to be in the room where the conversations happen (or the room where nothing happens as is the case).

These four companies power the devices where most CTV streaming takes place, and as the developer and owner of those operating systems and standards, the downstream destiny of so many others starts and ends with them.

Vista Equity Partners CEO Nabbed For Tax Fraud; IAB Europe's TCF Disputed In Belgium

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, October 19th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

Paying The Piper

Robert Smith, CEO of Vista Equity Partners, agreed on a $139 million settlement with the Department of Justice due to his role in a tax evasion scheme involving the use of undeclared offshore accounts. According to Axios, Smith’s admission of guilt has left Vista staff members feeling that they were lied to about the scope of his legal problems. Smith was ensnared after federal prosecutors charged Texas billionaire Robert Brockman, with whom Smith has a business relationship, for his role in a $2 billion tax fraud scheme. Vista has been active in the mar tech and ad tech space, having acquired a portfolio that includes Mediaocean and Integral Ad Science. Vista also bought Marketo for $1.8 billion, later turning around and selling it to Adobe for $4.8 billion. Smith, meanwhile, was previously heralded for paying off the student loans of Morehouse graduates in 2019.

TC … effed?

Belgium’s data protection authority (DPA) is calling into question the legality of IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework, TechCrunch reports. The TCF, now in its second iteration, is the industry’s solution for sharing consent while still complying with GDPR. But according to the Belgian authority, the TCF itself fails to comply with the GDPR principles of transparency, fairness and accountability, and also enables the unlawful processing of data, including special category data, such as health information, political affiliation and sexual orientation. It’s important to note that the Belgian report only represents the data authority’s preliminary views and is not legally binding, at least not yet. In a statement, IAB Europe respectfully disagreed with the findings and noted that it’s been in close contact with DPAs across Europe over the past three years as it’s worked to refine the framework. If the Belgian interpretation of TCF is upheld, it “would have a chilling effect on the development of open-source compliance standards that serve to support industry players and protect consumers.” And without the TCF, the future of RTB in Europe is a big question mark. [Related in AdExchanger: “UK Data Watchdog Has 'Significant Concerns' About Real-Time Bidding And The Transparency And Consent Framework”]

Facebook Accelerates Plans To Go Bidding Only For Audience Network Due To Coming IDFA Changes

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, October 16th, 2020 at 1:23 pm.

Starting in Q2 2021, bidding will be the only way to buy ads in iOS apps through Facebook’s Audience Network. At that point, waterfall-based buying will no longer be supported.

Facebook says the goal had always been to become a bidding-only demand source ever since in-app bidding first launched in Audience Network in 2017.

But Facebook is accelerating these plans in preparation for Apple’s impending IDFA changes, which are being delayed until early 2021. The move to bidding-only in Audience Network and the rollout of Apple’s changes are both slated for the first half of next year.

In Facebook’s estimation, waterfall management, already an onerous process, will get a lot more complicated on iOS 14 as ad network performance based on historical CPMs will no longer necessarily indicate future success.

Moving to a unified auction model should help publishers make sure they’re getting the best price for their impressions as networks scramble to adjust to an environment of device ID sparsity.

Google Grows Its Sellers.json File To 1.2 Million Publishers

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, October 16th, 2020 at 10:03 am.

After a disappointing debut in June, Google released an updated version of its sellers.json file Thursday afternoon.

Sellers.json is a mechanism developed by the IAB Tech Lab that buyers can use to verify which exchanges and SSPs are authorized to sell a publisher’s inventory.

Google’s expanded file now includes information for 1.2 million publishers, and support for all publishers selling through AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager.

“This has been an ongoing effort that we’ve been working on since we first launched our sellers.json file,” Per Bjorke, Google’s senior product manager in charge of traffic quality, told AdExchanger.

Sellers. … still working on it

Complaints about Google’s first stab at sellers.json centered on the fact that the file included only a fraction of its publisher base. And of the publishers that were included, many were missing domain names and/or had their business name listed as confidential.

Prog.IO Digital: P&G’s Media Strategy, NYT Reconciles Subscriptions With Ads – And How To Build A CDP

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Friday, October 16th, 2020 at 8:00 am.

Day Four of AdExchanger’s Programmatic.IO Digital conference brought the goods with perspectives from up and down the supply chain.

There was insight into P&G’s media spending strategy, a deep dive on how The New York Times reconciles ad sales with the buildout of a team, a knowledge drop on how identity infrastructure works – and way more.

P&G’s strategy to disrupt brand building

Eric Austin, P&G’s senior director of global brand building and media innovation, kicked off the day by outlining the CPG giant’s media prerogatives.

With the goal of driving productivity as the backdrop, P&G continues to invest in running its own media campaigns, rather than using a media agency.

“That leads to better value and faster decision making [and] all around better results and productivity,” Austin told AdExchanger Executive Editor Zach Rodgers.

The CPG is also trying to only spend in closed-loop environments, which leads to better value from its programmatic campaigns and the ability to optimize based on sales conversions.

P&G is also interested in growing its CTV and OTT footprint, Austin said: “We look at this as high-quality inventory, because it has high attention metrics.” Right now, P&G considers CTV and OTT as primarily a reach extension vehicle for its TV buys.

Building A Privacy-Conscious Publisher

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, October 16th, 2020 at 12:05 am.

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

Today’s column is written by Sara Badler, senior vice president of programmatic revenue and strategy at Dotdash.

If ad-tech acronym overload was not seriously impacting your mental health two years ago, it certainly may be now. Geopolitical and big tech-led privacy initiatives have resulted in a whole new suite of regulations and corresponding acronyms.

CCPA, GDPR and IDFA have joined the old standbys as need-to-know terms, with their impact and implementation impacting all aspects of the buy and sell sides. A rigorous privacy strategy has become table stakes for any publisher or marketer.

For publishers, balancing privacy and revenue is not impossible. Through vigilant adherence to privacy guidelines, thoughtful data and content segmentation and intelligent partnerships, publishers can maximize revenue by leveraging the tools they already have available to them while still adhering to the ever-shifting privacy regimes across regions and platforms.