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It’s IPO Day For AppLovin, And CEO Adam Foroughi Explains Why First-Party Helped The Company Get There Dollar Tree Launches Its Retail Media Network (We May Have Just Hit Peak Retail Media Network) Influential W3C Working Group Calls Privacy Sandbox Proposal ‘Harmful' Nielsen, Deloitte, PwC And P&G All Helped Draft The CAID Spec Criteo Is Ready To Test The Single Sign-On Software For Unified ID 2.0 Facebook Analytics Will Shut Down On June 30 – Here’s Why That Is (And Isn’t) A Big Deal FLoC Origin Trials Kick Off In The United States And Other Regions Fox Inventory Viewed Through Comcast Set-Top Boxes Is Now Programmatic And Addressable Google Will Not Run FLoC Origin Tests In Europe Due To GDPR Concerns (At Least For Now)

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The Big Story: Confusion Around Project Bernanke

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 1:02 pm.

Hey kids, are you trying to read the blacked-out redactions on a PDF? Simply copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word, and then read everyone’s legal secrets. It’s the digital hack to reading invisible ink.

Google learned that lesson the hard way recently when, in responding to the Texas-led antitrust suit, it accidentally revealed the existence of its secret program Project Bernanke, where it used learnings from publisher ad servers to strengthen its own ad buying technologies.

Sounds straightforward, right? Not really. As with all things ad tech, the devil has entwined itself in the details. In this episode of The Big Story, the AdExchanger team does its damndest to untangle that serpent.

There is a lot we still don’t know about Project Bernanke, including how exactly it worked and at whose expense. In corresponding with Senior Editor Sarah Sluis, Google indicated it tried to help advertisers, which makes sense given that advertisers are the ones with the money.

So as you listen to this week’s episode, please pardon our dust. Typically, we try to work things out before the podcast, but sometimes, we’ve got to figure out what’s going on in real time.

Saving Personalization, With Criteo Chief Product Officer Todd Parsons

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 11:54 am.

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

Within the retargeting category, Criteo has been the most successful player by a wide margin. It built a global retargeting empire from its home base in France, conquering the US market and many others too. It was a neat trick.

Now the company is trying to pull off two more. First, it’s working to save the lucrative retargeting business by developing a single sign-on (SSO) solution for consumers that will run across publisher websites. Second, it’s pivoting toward ecommerce to make itself less reliant on retargeting.

This week on the AdExchanger Talks podcast, Chief Product Officer Todd Parsons shares an inside view of the SSO skunkworks project. And he explains why Criteo assumed responsibility for this effort – which will be key to the eventual success of the industry-wide Unified ID 2.0 initiative.

“Without retargeting we really wouldn’t have a shot at stitching together first party data on any identity framework,” he says. “It just wouldn’t happen.”

The Gist Raises $1 Million To Grow Sports Newsletter

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 5:00 am.

The Gist Ellen Hyslop The Gist co-founder Ellen Hyslop believes women care about sports news – they just don’t care for the way it’s presented.

When Hyslop captivated her friends with her account of the Toronto Maple Leafs making it to the NHL playoffs, they all realized they had stumbled onto a winning idea. More women deserved to hear about sports in a way that resonated with them. So in 2018, they founded The Gist.

The Gist speaks to its audience like “their witty, sports-obsessed best friend,” Hyslop said.

If traditional sports news is dominated by men writing about mens’ sports, The Gist’s all-female writing staff populates its thrice-weekly newsletter with news about male and female sports. In a chatty tone peppered with emojis and GIFs, The Gist also tracks equality and inclusiveness in sports closely – because its readers care about those issues.

Like Morning Brew, The Gist writes ad copy for advertisers that appear in its newsletter.

Hyslop also reads the ads in The Gist’s podcast, which she hosts.

Email newsletters originally appealed to Hyslop because the barrier to entry was so low, they could test their idea. They promoted the site by spray-painting their Instagram handles on the streets of Toronto and calling local spin studios asking them to offer free classes to people who referred friends to the newsletter.

As Data-Driven TV Takes Off, SpotX's New Tool Refines Audiences For Advertisers

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 12:59 am.

The advent of data-driven TV means that media owners have richer data sets to help advertisers find their audiences.

But if media companies are going to make their data available, they need better tools to prevent data leakage, whether that be from their own valuable data sets or the personally identifiable information coming from their customers.

On Friday, SpotX – which, if all goes as planned, will soon be part of Magnite – said it has enhanced its data solutions suite so media owners can better curate the audiences they send to advertisers.

Is this a new solution or an upgraded one?

It’s an upgraded solution. The original product, called Audience Lock, was released in 2017. “On the surface, Audience Lock seems like a clean room, but isn’t,” said Michael Laband, SpotX’s SVP of platform. “The difference is that a conventional clean room is used to match data sets between two different parties, while Audience Lock makes sure that a media owner’s advertiser clients only get the data they’re supposed to get.”

Audience Lock obfuscates sensitive information, Laband said. For example, a media owner can layer on first-party data, such as subscriber or registration data, and the technology will restrict certain types of sensitive data, like an IP address, from passing.

IHeartMedia’s Black Information Network Is Monetizing The Old-School Way: Sponsorships

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 12:35 am.

The idea for a radio network specifically geared toward the Black community had been floating around at iHeartMedia for several years.

2020 made its need apparent.

When the pandemic took hold early last year, communities of color were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in terms of infection, hospitalization and mortality rates. Black-owned businesses were hit especially hard.

Then the death of George Floyd in May 2020 brought home that “we just couldn’t wait any longer,” according to Tony Coles, a longtime iHeartMedia executive and president of the Black Information Network (BIN).

IHeartMedia launched BIN in June with the goal of creating a national, 24/7, audio-based news service dedicated to providing objective, accurate and trusted coverage in a Black voice for a Black audience.

Since last spring, BIN has expanded into 31 markets across the country, including both iHeartRadio-owned stations and numerous stations not owned by iHeart. BIN content also streams online and through the iHeartRadio app.

BIN is funded by long-term brand partnerships, including Lowe’s, Verizon, 23andMe, GEICO, McDonald’s, CVS Health, Bank of America and Sony.

AdExchanger spoke with Coles and Gayle Troberman, CMO of iHeartMedia.

Amazon DSP, Ad Console Report Strong Growth in Q1

by Tony Rifilato // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 12:05 am.

Amazon’s demand-side platform saw tremendous growth in Q1 as ad spend on the platform soared nearly 90% year over year, fueled in large part by its powerful audience targeting capabilities that proved attractive to advertisers during an ecommerce boom.

Ad spend growth was strong across all ad formats, particularly display available through the Amazon DSP, and “sponsored display” available to sellers through its Ad Console, according to Tinuiti’s Amazon Ads Benchmark Report, released Thursday. Advertisers have increasingly leaned into the platforms to reach audiences both on and off Amazon.

The report comes a week after eMarketer reported that Amazon’s advertising business grew by 52.5% during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, pushing its share of the United States digital ad market past 10% for the first time and fortifying its position as the No. 3 ad publisher, behind Google and Facebook.

Tinuiti, a digital marketing agency, reviewed a number of factors that impacted the quarter, including the effects of severe winter storms in February that temporarily drove ad sales down, as well as political events such as the Jan. 6 US Capitol riot that dampened consumer interest. But despite those hurdles, sales rebounded quickly the report found.

Comic: Always Be Paddling

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 12:04 am.

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

Publicis Returns To Growth; Facebook Futzes With The News Feed

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, April 16th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

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

All Organic

Things are starting to look up at Publicis Groupe. After getting battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the holding company saw a return to organic revenue growth in Q1 as marketers were confident enough to restart projects, especially in the US. The Wall Street Journal reports that organic revenue increased by 2.8% during the first quarter of 2021, beating revenue expectations. The growth was fueled by clients in the US, Asia, Europe and Latin America investing more in digital marketing services to reach customers and prepare for the coming changes in consumer tracking and ad targeting. “Clients are realizing that digital channels, ecommerce and direct-to-consumer are going to be more core to growth,” said Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun. Epsilon, the data company Publicis acquired in 2019, saw organic revenue grow 4.7%, due in part to recovery in the automotive sector and increased demand for digital media and data services. Publicis is eyeing other acquisitions abroad that would bolster Epsilon’s international operations – which are growing at a rate of 25%. In Q2, Publicis expects to recover a majority of the organic revenue it lost during the same period in 2020 when the pandemic was just kicking off in earnest.

Testing 1, 2, 3

Facebook keeps on tweaking its news feed. TechCrunch reports that Facebook is testing a new feature for discovering businesses in the feed. The experiment is limited to the US, at least for now. Users can tap on ads or topics they’re interested in underneath posts to explore related content from businesses. It’s interesting that Facebook is playing around with this idea on the eve of Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency changes, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has blasted in the past as harmful to small businesses. Not everyone is convinced by his argument. But to be fair, small business owners have expressed concerns over how Apple’s new privacy framework will impact their ability to target ads on Facebook and elsewhere. This new test is an example of how easily Facebook can adjust its news feed to gather more on-platform engagement data from its users, if necessary.

It’s IPO Day For AppLovin, And CEO Adam Foroughi Explains Why First-Party Helped The Company Get There

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2021 at 2:09 pm.

AppLovin is hoping to get some lovin’ from a white hot public market that’s been rewarding technology stocks with massive valuations.

The company announced its IPO on Thursday, offering 22.5 million shares at $80 a pop. Trading will begin on the Nasdaq under the ticker APP. (Update: Shares opened at $70, below the target, and fell into the $60s.)

The stock pricing values AppLovin, which filed its S-1 in early March, at $28.6 billion. That price is only slightly more than the $28.1 billion Facebook made in ad revenue during the last quarter of 2020 alone.

But the fast-growing $189 billion global app market is big enough for companies not named Facebook and Google to take a slice, especially if they have first-party data, including transaction data, AppLovin CEO and founder Adam Foroughi told AdExchanger.

“The first-party data we gather from our large-scale content business gives us a material advantage in the ecosystem,” Foroughi said. “It may not be a data advantage to Google or Facebook, but it definitely is compared with other companies.”

Google To Release Brand Safety Blocklists That Update Themselves Automatically

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2021 at 11:00 am.

Google is adding a new tool to its suite of advertiser controls that aims to make it easier for ad buyers to dynamically block sites and domains that don’t meet their brand safety standards.

These dynamic exclusion lists, announced on Thursday, will be available to all Google Ads users “within the coming weeks,” which is every large technology company’s code phrase for “soon-ish.”

Google advertisers can already exclude specific sites, content and entire topics from their campaigns, but there hasn’t been an easy way to manage static blocklists without manual curation.

Even though most advertisers know in a general sort of way the types of content and even some of the URLs to incendiary sites they want to avoid, there are others sites they’re not aware of that aren’t a fit for their brand but don't violate Google’s publisher policies.

Staying on top of it is a big job even for the largest advertisers, let alone smaller advertisers that just don’t have the bandwidth, in-house expertise or resources to regularly monitor and update exclusions.