It’s better to ask for permission than forgiveness.
That’s the philosophy behind Caden, a privacy startup that launched on Thursday with $3.4 million in pre-seed funding from a roster of well-known investors, including Yahoo Co-Founder Jerry Yang, MediaLink Vice Chairman Wenda Harris Millard and Barry Sternlicht, founder of Starwood Capital.
Caden’s founder, John Roa, sold his previous startup – innovation and design consultancy ÄKTA – to Salesforce in 2015 for an undisclosed sum. Roa stayed at Salesforce for around nine months but realized rather quickly that being a serial entrepreneur inside a giant tech company “wasn’t the greatest landing place for me,” he said.
Around that time, there was a lot of chatter about privacy and the future of identity and data online. President Obama had just failed to push through a federal privacy law, but the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe was on the cusp of being adopted (although it wouldn’t go into effect until 2018).
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More than a year after 17 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, the hits keep coming.
A newly unredacted version of the suit – now ballooned to 242 pages – dropped on Friday and provides quite the scratch-off surprise.
AdExchanger has been busy polling the industry and reading up on the latest allegations about how Google ran auctions with undisclosed data advantages, dynamic floors and dynamic take rates.
Together, these tactics shifted hundreds of millions of dollars from publishers and rival exchanges to, who else, Google – allegedly. So tune in to learn more about Project Bernanke, RPO (reserve price optimization) and DRS (dynamic revenue share).
After our Google rant, we shift to another sore spot in advertising: the ad experience on streaming.
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Something is rotten in the state of CTV.
If you’re a fan of streaming, you probably have a few pet peeves that take you out of the zone, like repeat ads or interruptive ad breaks. Nothing ruins a good show more than thinking it’s trying to sell you something.
These problems were solved with a manual approach on linear TV, said Joe Hirsch, CEO of SpringServe, a CTV ad server that was acquired by Magnite last year. Once upon a time, an operator would literally sit and watch the ad breaks in conjunction with the surrounding content before it aired on linear television. There was a real person approving ad breaks on a single, standardized operating system. (Cue the laugh track.)
Connected TV is much more complex because audiences control their own viewing experiences. Watching what we want on more platforms than we care to count calls for automation. In other words, the good ol’ days of someone sampling our content before it’s served to us are long gone.
Industry experts spoke with AdExchanger about streaming audiences’ most common pet peeves – and the technology gaps behind them.
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"On TV & Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today's column is by Kevin Krim, CEO of EDO. After this exclusive first look for subscribers, the piece will be published in full on AdExchanger.com tomorrow.
In 1941, the first true television commercial aired in America, featuring the Bulova Watch Company. Ever since then, marketers have wanted to know the answer to a simple question:
Was that ad worth the money?
That question was once easy to answer. But with the exponential increase in viewing options, new programming and advertising technologies, and changes in consumption behaviors, answering that question has become more complicated.
The era of single-currency television advertising is over. With billions in advertising dollars at stake, marketers must now use multiple premium video currencies to determine the effectiveness and value of their ads.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
The “Solid” In Consolidation
Are you sick of hearing about M&A already?
TOO BAD! We’ve still got multiple deals being announced on the regular.
On Wednesday, the publisher services company OpenWeb – known for operating comment sections and targeting ads by user account IDs – dropped $60 million to buy Hive Media Group, a publisher data and distribution company, Insider reports. OpenWeb was fresh off a $150 million fundraising round in November of last year.
Also on Wednesday, Precisely, a data onboarding and enrichment company, acquired the location data provider PlaceIQ. Terms of the deal were not disclosed by Clearlake Capital and TA Associates, the two private equity firms that bought Precisely last year. But PlaceIQ marks Precisely’s fifth acquisition since then.
A day earlier saw a smattering of smaller deals: Kantar picked up the retail trade marketing analytics company MindIT; Salesforce marketing automation specialist Datarati went to OSF Digital; and The Arena Group (formerly Maven Inc.), an ad tech and digital media owner, bought the magazine title Parade – not to mention Microsoft’s $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. That wasn’t so small, but it was a good deal.
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Google: can’t live with it and … can’t live with it.
Late last week, a federal judge in New York unsealed previously redacted portions of an amended antitrust lawsuit filed by state regulators led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton poking into Google’s allegedly monopolistic ad practices.
Specifically, the suit lays bare the inner workings of what it calls “secret auction manipulation programs to coerce publishers and advertisers to transact in AdX and to coerce advertisers to use Google’s buying tools.”
Project Bernanke, for example, was (reportedly) a clandestine Google program to take advantage of information from publisher ad servers to buoy Google’s own ad-buying technologies. Dynamic Revenue Share is another that allows Google to play with auction take rates to help its own exchange win more auctions, while Reserve Price Optimization supposedly allows Google to peep “insider information” about an advertiser’s historical bids, which could result in buyers paying higher prices.
But the devil, as always with Google, lurks in the details – and for those who want to dig in, the (nearly) fully unredacted suit is available for perusal here.
It’s a tangled web. So we asked the experts: Will these revelations actually change the way publishers and advertisers spend with Google, or is Google too entrenched? And how much ammunition do these disclosures give regulators in their quest to rein in Google?
- Nicole Lesko, digital COO & head of data strategy, Dotdash Meredith
- Ana Milicevic, principal and co-founder, Sparrow Advisers
- Chris Kane, president and founder, Jounce Media
- Alessandro De Zanche, audience and data strategy consultant
- Jana Meron, SVP, programmatic and data strategy, Insider
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AI can help mitigate bias in advertising – but it’s still early days.
On Wednesday, IBM Watson Advertising and the 4A’s released findings from a six-month research project that used AI to analyze data from The Ad Council’s “It's Up to You” COVID-19 vaccine education campaign.
The data set consisted of 10 million impressions and more than 108 variations on ad creative derived from predictive dynamic creative optimization.
IBM Watson Advertising used the data to develop an open-source toolkit called AI Fairness 360 as part of an incubation project with LF AI and Data Foundation, a nonprofit within the Linux Foundation that supports open-source work related to AI, machine learning and deep learning.
AI Fairness 360 uses 10 bias mitigation algorithms to measure ad campaigns and campaign-related decision-making processes against more than 70 fairness metrics. For this application, the toolkit was used to apply post-processing bias mitigation so researchers could understand how to equalize the outcomes of a similar campaign in the future.
Rather than just looking at the creative or audience reach, the toolkit aims to take the complexities of the digital ad ecosystem into consideration.
For example, it looks for bias in the processes driving an ad campaign and weighs factors such as the advertiser’s development process for the campaign, the publisher’s methodology for serving ads to its audience and the processes of other parties and machine learning workflows involved in the supply chain.
In some cases, it may also be able to find unconscious bias programmed into AI-driven solutions.
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By Karim Rayes, chief product officer at Tremor International
This article is sponsored by Tremor Video.
For a long time, opacity was the norm in the programmatic industry. Budgets went in, media placements came out the other side, and few questions were raised in between. But as technology improved and the focus on ROI increased across display, mobile and video, the onus was placed on technology platforms to prove the value of media-dollar recipients across platform fees, data providers, various other middlemen and the content creators themselves.
Now, again, as standards improve and marketers seek to utilize CTV campaigns for purposes beyond just brand awareness, there is a growing demand to understand what’s happening downstream after ad exposure and holistically measure campaigns across channels and screens.
These expectations are challenged in the nascent world of CTV. While marketers previously found comfort in the uniformity of linear TV measurement, they are encountering walled CTV supply sources that require coordination of multiple relationships and budgets to reach audiences across devices, with different standards of taxonomy and measurement.
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Rewards app Fetch is looking to fire up its first-party data strategy with the hire of long-time Facebook veteran David Sommer as its first-ever chief customer officer.
Sommer comes to Fetch after nearly 11 years at Facebook as head of industry, CPG, retail partnerships and shopper marketing. Before Facebook, Sommer was a managing partner of GroupM’s CPG, retail and shopper marketing practice.
Fetch, which allows users to upload their receipts from retail stores and restaurants to earn points that can be redeemed for gift cards, cash back and other rewards, has 13 million active users, mainly in the US.
Users can earn extra points when they buy products from one of Fetch’s more than 500 global brand partners, including L’Oréal, Bayer, General Mills, Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, Unilever and Kimberly-Clark, which owns Cottonelle, Viva paper towels, Scott brand toilet paper, Kleenex, Kotex and Huggies.
Brand partners work with Fetch on a pay-for-performance model. As consumers buy participating products through the app, brands pay the value of the points plus an agreed-upon markup.
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With the looming threat of privacy crackdowns across the globe – and big platform changes coming – contextual advertising is starting to look pretty good again. And not just on the open web – on TV, too.
On Wednesday, Precise TV, a kid-safe contextual advertising platform for YouTube, announced a partnership with video data platform IRIS.TV to bring its contextual targeting capabilities to television. Precise TV, which focuses on helping advertisers with their performance goals, says its technology is fully compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
Precise TV’s technology relies on conversion pixels and six years’ worth of data from many different verticals and clients, including point of sale and contextual conversion data.
“We can match the taxonomy we built for YouTube into connected TV,” said Denis Crushell, chief commercial officer of Precise TV. “And [we’ll] know what content categories will deliver there based on the thousands of campaigns we’ve already run on YouTube.”
Precise TV also has a research panel of about 6,000 families. It’s able to overlay purchase intent data with first-party audience data, but only for campaigns that aren’t serving ads to children.
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