How to manage the tradeoff between personalized advertising and privacy is a familiar debate.
Whether personalized advertising – or advertising, full stop – works is a less common direction. But in a debate organized by Facebook (surprise!) between IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg and “Subprime Attention Crisis” author Tim Hwang, Hwang challenged the widely accepted notion that data-driven advertising works.
“We may be in an industry-wide situation where correlation is confused with causation,” Hwang said, a point-of-view influenced by researcher Nico Neumann. “For all this machine learning and AI-driven targeting we’re often finding consumers who would have bought these products anyway.”
So, are marketers just lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire?
Maybe. Hwang compared digital advertising to the housing crisis of 2007, when leading financial experts turned out to be utterly wrong. “That marketers ‘feel’ it’s working raises red flags to me,” he said.
The counterpoint from IAB CEO Randy Rothenberg was unequivocal: “Economists are overall in agreement that advertising works,” he said.
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Late last year, with the end of the pandemic hopefully in sight, Luma was beginning to see investor confidence return.
If anything, that cautious optimism was understated, as this Spring, Luma saw the best quarter in deals that it had ever seen.
This week on The Big Story, we welcome back Conor McKenna, Luma director (not VP, as we misstated in the podcast), to talk about the wild influx of early 2021 deal making that saw seven transactions of more than $1 billion.
Even Luma, despite its optimism, was taken aback.
“Frankly, the seven transactions that happened – and two were for IPOs that were filed and aren’t out – that was surprising,” McKenna says. “You talk about unicorns in ad tech, we’ve had as many in Q1 as we’ve had in the last ten years. And it’s driven by a lot of things lining up.”
In this episode, we’ll delve into the macro, industry and market trends that created the “perfect storm” for ad tech valuations.
But to what extent is all this sustainable? And will the influx of freshly-minted public ad tech companies make ad tech the new strategic acquirers of ad tech? (A prophesy that’s already born out with Magnite using its soaring stock price to fund its SpotX acquisition).
Most importantly: Do Luma executives get veto power over Terry Kawaja’s costume decisions?
“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 Carolina Abenante, co-founder of NYIAX.
The advertising industry is undergoing a paradigm shift, moving toward a model where audience data is currency. But with Google ending support of third-party cookies and casting doubt on industry initiatives like Unified ID 2.0, the ways in which that currency can be created and used remain unclear.
Data clean rooms, or spaces in which walled gardens share aggregated data that does not violate privacy requirements with advertisers, are particularly relevant in a cookieless world because brands have even more to address beyond the initial global privacy laws and data verification requirements that drove initial interest in them. Since Google ended its third party cookie policy, parties who grew dependent on them are now grappling with how to truly manage data, de-identify it and share it in new ways.
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"The Sell Sider" is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today's column is written by Sara Badler, SVP of advertising and partnerships at Dotdash.
Fries or crisps? Elevator or lift? Even among English speakers there are a host of regional differences for the global traveler to wrap their his or her head around when they cross the Atlantic. Extending into EMEA (frites? ascenseur?) makes things even more complicated.
A US-based publisher looking to establish a presence and grow business in Europe and the UK faces similar challenges. There is no one-size-fits-all approach that works globally. Setting up your ad stack and sales teams for success across the pond can be very different from setting up for success stateside.
From header bidder selection and deployment to sales team structure, to consent management platform (CMP) selection and integration, becoming a truly global publisher is a daunting task. The details in execution matter – but it’s also important to start with these three steps:
Step 1: Customize your ad stack to the region
When expanding into any new region, setting up the internal ad stack for operational success should be a publisher’s first priority. Rates and demand can fluctuate wildly from country to country and region to region. At a high level, we have found that there is generally less demand at lower rates across the board in EMEA versus the US. To account for this price difference, publishers need to adjust floors in their ad server accordingly.
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Raising CAID
Procter & Gamble took part in early tests by Chinese trade groups and tech companies to bypass Apple’s upcoming privacy changes, according to The Wall Street Journal. P&G experimented with the so-called CAID (China Advertising ID), which uses unique device attributes to identify users (i.e. fingerprinting), as a possible workaround to the expected loss of iPhone audience data later this month. A P&G spokesperson told WSJ that it aims to “deliver useful content consumers want in a way that prioritizes data privacy, transparency and consent. That means partnering with platforms and publishers – both directly and through our advertising associations across the globe.” More.
Twitter Talks
Clubhouse is eyeing a funding round that would value it at $4 billion, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, and the outlet has subsequently learned that Twitter was in talks to acquire the popular audio app. Twitter and Clubhouse were in talks recently about Twitter taking over the much buzzed about app for roughly the same valuation, though discussions are no longer ongoing. After the talks with Twitter failed to proceed, Clubhouse began to explore whether it made sense to raise financing at a $4 billion valuation instead, and is currently trying to raise funding from investors. Twitter’s Clubhouse competitor, called Spaces, launched in late 2020, though it’s still in beta form and not all users can create or host public discussions.
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Allison Schiff contributed
Twitter is expanding its relationship with Nielsen to boost its ability to plan and execute video strategies.
The company will integrate Nielsen Media Impact (NMI) and Nielsen Ad Intel — solutions that help advertisers to measure and plan campaigns across a variety of media platforms — into the Twitter Amplify video ad platform, where advertisers can buy pre-roll and sponsorships alongside premium video content, which is professionally produced video hosted on Twitter from a range of publishers such as the NBA, NFL and NBCUniversal.
The integrations are meant to make it easier to justify buying Twitter’s premium video inventory, as well as optimize audience reach and frequency alongside other top video platforms.
Nielsen Ad Intel analyzes global ad spend and tracks ad campaigns across platforms, so Twitter can make the case for brands to reallocate dollars to its platform.
NMI is a cross-media planning solution that uses Nielsen data to provide insights into audiences and adjust media spending to improve reach and frequency. So Twitter advertisers can build planning models showing how different media mix scenarios (say, moving dollars from TV to Twitter) will affect reach and frequency.
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Our guest this week has spent his entire career in ad tech. Since 1997, Manny Puentes has worked at a series of companies ranging from ad servers to publisher networks to programmatic platforms. In 2016, he founded Rebel AI to solve the growing problem of domain spoofing. It evolved as a data activation platform.
Fast forward five years and Puentes has sold the business to Logiq, a provider of technology and services around ecommerce, marketing and fintech, for $8 million in cash and stock.
In this episode, Manny is skeptical that hashed email addresses can be a viable identifier for this industry going forward.
“I think it’s great that there are really smart folks out there around this project [Universal ID 2.0], and I think that it’s a good start,” he says.
But he points out that the transfer of encrypted email from platform to platform requires that somebody holds that original email address before it is hashed. The existence of the email and its association with offline data is inherently insecure.
“Email is worse than the cookie,” he says. “Think about all the places you go today that you’re putting your email into. Think about all the offline data you can link up with email. People say that it’s hashed and encrypted, and I get it. But it’s just another ID and this ID originated with something that can be linked with offline data.”
On Thursday, Publicis-owned Epsilon became the latest company to support Unified ID 2.0.
UID 2.0 is an open-source industry initiative, originated by The Trade Desk, that aims to develop an alternative to third-party cookies by replacing them with hashed or encrypted email addresses.
Specifically, Publicis clients can activate Epsilon’s proprietary CORE ID (which stands for Conversant One-to-One Relationship Engine, if anyone asks) against The Trade Desk’s demand-side platform. The Trade Desk will become the exclusive DSP for Epsilon’s CORE ID offerings and other Epsilon-owned platforms.
The CORE ID represents more than 200 million people tied to pseudonymous data, most of which comes in the form of first-party consented transaction records from Epsilon’s clients and partners.
Expanding the availability of CORE ID beyond Epsilon’s own platforms “will further align the ad tech ecosystem around the individual,” said Joe Doran, Epsilon’s chief product officer.
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“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 Yigael Chetrit, global CTO at SRDS.
Privacy regulations are moving quickly, and publishers need to make decisions about the kind of data to collect and how to monetize it.
But having access to data doesn’t always mean that it should be shared, or used for that matter. The real challenge comes with knowing what to do with the data once it’s been acquired.
New data collected, new data use cases
First-party data is a broad term, and it’s important to be specific. Publishers need to think strategically about the data they’re collecting, and planning to collect, as they develop a better understanding of their audiences.
The current subscription models that allow publishers access to first-party data will shift. In exchange for website access, consumers will provide more data than they have grown accustomed to, potentially including full names, email addresses, physical addresses, age, gender, occupation, interests, purchase behavior, as well as much more demographic info, depending upon the site and the vertical they represent.
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