Forget about asking for permission to collect cookies. Google will have to ask for permission to not collect them.
On Friday, the UK’s competition regulator – the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) – announced that Google has agreed to address concerns about its plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome.
The compromise comes following a joint investigation launched in early January into the Chrome Privacy Sandbox proposals by the CMA and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK’s data protection regulator.
Collaboration between competition and data protection watchdogs was a significant development because it directly acknowledges the blurring line between power brokers and data brokers in the tech sector.
Playing ball
Broadly, Google has committed to involving both the UK’s CMA and the ICO as it works towards killing cookies in its browser. The CMA will now launch a review as to whether to accept Google’s proposed commitments, which would be legally binding and apply globally. Companies have until July 8 to submit their comments.
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The ecommerce marketplace management startup Whitebox launched an analytics product on Thursday that spans the world of ad tech and that of warehouse and delivery services.
There is a boom crop of ecommerce tech companies that manage advertisements and product listings on Amazon and other online marketplaces (but mostly Amazon). Amazon ad agency Teikametrics acquired marketplace analytics company Adjusti.com, Jungle Scout acquired Amazon ad tech startup Downstream, and Tinuiti also acquired Amazon specialist outfit The Ortega Group, all in the past 18 months.
A differentiator for Whitebox is that it owns both a fulfillment network and delivery warehouses in Baltimore, Memphis and Las Vegas.
The new analytics product, called Omnifi, unites Whitebox’s ecommerce ad agency on one side and the warehouse data on the other, said CEO Marcus Startzel.
Whitebox’s roots are in warehousing and delivery. Startzel joined two years ago after a four-year stint as CRO of AppNexus. And it’s not a coincidence that Whitebox brought in an old ad tech-hand to steer the company.
“What we think of as the modern commerce platform needs to have that agency side and experience in the ad tech space, as well as the capabilities to do direct-to-consumer fulfillment,” Startzel said.
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The system prompt required by Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework doesn’t leave a ton of wiggle room.
Apps have just a brief customizable text field above the fateful choice – “Allow tracking” or “Ask app not to track” – where they can share how they use data and why that data sharing might benefit a user.
But there are some nuances that can’t be expressed in a single sentence.
Listen, please
Take Audiomack, a free youth-focused music streaming service with 5 million daily active users across its app and mobile web experience.
Audiomack has a compelling reason to ask for an opt in: Unlike an ad-supported mobile game, which only has a small cost of revenue when people play – basically, the marginal expense of paying for bandwidth and servers – Audiomack has a hard cost to pay each time one of its users streams a song.
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Not Chump Change
Another day, another fine against Big Tech. And this one could be the largest ever, or at least in Europe. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon faces a potential $425 million penalty proposed by a European Union privacy regulator, the data-protection commission, or CNPD, in Luxembourg – home of Amazon’s European headquarters. Though specific allegations were not disclosed, the CNPD claims that Amazon’s collection and use of personal information violated the GDPR. The proposed fine would represent roughly 2% of Amazon’s reported net income of $21.3 billion for 2020, and 0.1% of its $386 billion in sales. Under the GDPR, regulators can fine up to 4% of a company’s annual revenue. This fine requires approval by other EU privacy regulators, which could take months and ultimately result in a lower — or higher — penalty. The fine comes a month after Amazon won a major court fight over $303 million the European Commission alleged that Amazon owed in back taxes to Luxembourg. Read on.
All Fun And Games
The mobile game publisher Voodoo acquired the mobile marketing company Bidshake this week. Terms were not disclosed. The deal’s significance is that it marks yet another expansion by mobile gaming companies into mobile ad tech. The loss of third-party IDs and Apple’s IDFA privacy measures mean that companies with first-party data footprints will have a major advantage in mobile advertising. Game publishers are seizing the open ground vacated by independent attribution and ad tech; And they can put those companies to use with first-party data. The same thing is happening from the other side, too. The mobile marketing platform AppLovin has been on an acquisition spree, including last year’s blockbuster deal for the mobile game studio MachineZone.
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Mar tech platform Zeta Global, or shall we say ZETA, became the latest unicorn to canter into the public market Thursday with its shares modestly priced at $10.
Although Zeta’s stock came in at the low end of the pre-IPO anticipated range of $10 to $12, and the first trade clocked in at just over $9, the company is still valued at more than $1.7 billion.
Despite a bull market for advertising and marketing technology stocks, investor exuberance is not guaranteed. Last month, tech stocks, including The Trade Desk, plunged en masse before recovering some.
Market corrections happen. But Zeta is playing the long game, said Steve Gerber, Zeta Global’s president and chief operating officer.
“We think about investors in the same way as we do about our customers,” he said. “We’re in it for the long haul and we want to win together.”
Zeta filed its S-1 paperwork in late April. The company reported $368.1 million in 2020 revenue, a 20.3% year-over-year increase, with EBITDA up 62.7% to $39.6 million on a net loss of $53.2 million.
AdExchanger caught up with Gerber on IPO day.
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Advertising revenue in the United States is expected to increase by 22% to $279 billion in 2021, a sign that the industry has turned a corner following the uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to GroupM’s mid-year forecast released Thursday.
Digital advertising revenue will grow even faster, by 33%, in 2021 – building on last year’s 10% rate of expansion – and account for 57% of all advertising in the United States.
Total ad revenue will increase to $388 billion by 2026.
The forecast marks an improved outlook from GroupM’s year-end US forecast in December, when it expected a smaller 12% increase in advertising growth in 2021.
“By the end of the year, you could see that this [turnaround] was happening – we had more confidence,” said Brian Wieser, GroupM’s global president of business intelligence. He titled his report “Welcome to the Roaring ’20s.”
This year’s turnaround was driven by an economy and advertising market that rebounded more strongly than had been anticipated. The report excluded the impact of political advertising.
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🏆 We're hosting a comic caption contest and the winner gets a sweet prize. 🏆
Submit your caption idea as a comment on this post by 5 pm ET on Wed., June 16 for the chance to snag a free ticket to Programmatic IO – in IRL – taking place in NYC on Oct. 25 and Oct. 26. We can promise it'll be way more fun than Tim Cook is having with Zuck.
The winning caption will be posted along with the comic on our site on Fri., June 18.
(Art by Nate Neal)
IP address is a tell for several things, namely a user’s location – and it can be used to triangulate identity via fingerprinting.
But soon that will no longer be the case, at least not in Apple’s ecosystem.
Apple raised the privacy bar at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, and IP address was in the crosshairs. Starting later this year, Apple said it plans to nix pixels in its Mail app and block IP addresses in Safari. Apple also introduced a VPN-like feature that makes it impossible for Apple – and ISPs and advertisers – to see browser behavior.
Plus, “burner emails” will make it easy to create throwaway email addresses that could foil universal email-based IDs.
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Mobile demand-side platform Jampp was acquired by Affle on Wednesday. It's a mobile marketing company with a presence in India and Singapore.
There’s nothing like a little uncertainty (ahem, Apple) to spark M&A.
The mobile advertising industry has been experiencing a massive wave of consolidation in the wake of privacy-related platform changes.
Since February, AppLovin has acquired Adjust, Digital Turbine bought AdColony followed by Fyber, Zynga snapped up Chartboost and Vungle grabbed GameRefinery and TreSensa. (Vungle also bought AlgoLift in October of last year.)
“One of the main rationales in joining forces is being able to attack app advertiser problems from different angles and having a wider product set to help them throughout the user life cycle,” said Diego Meller, co-CEO and co-founder of Jampp, which was among the last independent mobile DSPs on the market.
“A lot of the consolidation we’ve seen recently has been about…looking to have multiple pieces of the puzzle,” he said.
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