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EU Opens Google Antitrust Probe – Including YouTube’s Barring Of Third-Party DSPs How Apple’s New ‘Hide My Email’ Feature May Plague Publishers And Ad Tech Antitrust Regulators Are Turning Up The Heat On Big Tech. Here’s Your Cheat Sheet AdExchanger's Comic Caption Contest Winner: Adam Berkowitz Why Amazon Fire TV Cleared Out Third-Party DSPs – And What That Means For Programmatic Your Quick And Dirty Guide To IP Address Targeting After Apple’s Declaration Of War Google Still Dominates Advertiser Perceptions SSP Report, But The Field Has Toughened Ecom Brands Are Connecting Their Warehouses To Ad Tech With Whitebox AdExchanger's Comic Caption Contest!

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Outbrain’s CEO On Its IPO, Ad Quality And Why He Brushes Off The ‘Chumbox’ Label

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021 at 10:00 am.

It’s been a whirlwind year of acquisitions, near mergers, SPACs and pre-IPO filings for companies in the content recommendation space.

In September 2020, the proposed mega merger between Outbrain and Taboola fell apart. In January, Taboola announced plans to go public via a special purpose acquisition company. Three months later, Outbrain filed confidential S-1 paperwork for an IPO of its own. And in early June, RevContent was bought by Star Mountain Capital, a specialized assets management firm focused on the lower middle market of the ad tech sector.

Why so much activity in just ten months?

According to Yaron Galai, CEO, chairman and co-founder of Outbrain, the time is ripe because the markets are mature and so are a lot of the ad tech players eying their exits.

“There are many companies that are both sizable and profitable,” Galai said. “Both are very good reasons to go public.”

Galai is legally required to stay mum on certain details related to Outbrain’s pending public offering until it’s cleared by the SEC. For instance, it was reported that Outbrain is seeking a $2 billion valuation, which Galai couldn’t comment on.

But he did say that the plan is to complete the process and for Outbrain to be a public company by year’s end.

AdExchanger caught up with Galai for a few hot takes.

How To Evaluate An Identity Solution

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021 at 12:30 am.

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

Today's column is written by Joanna Catalano, Chief Growth Officer of Piano.

As Google closes the door on the era of the third-party cookie, the time is now for publishers and brands to prepare.

So what exactly is the right technology to deliver personalized customer experiences?

Knowing what to look for in an identity solution provider can be a challenge in itself, but clear criteria can be helpful. Here are my five recommendations for evaluating and testing providers as the clock winds down on third-party cookies.

1. Does the solution respect consumer privacy laws?

When approaching an identity solution provider, make sure that part of the discovery process is how that vendor stores and manages consumer data. Ask direct questions about how their practices align with GDPR and CCPA.

Make sure the vendor has the ability to integrate with consent management platforms (CMPs), which allow sites to obtain the appropriate legal consent from users to process personal data across their domain(s). These solutions allow users to give permission on how their data is handled when engaging with site content. It’s even better if the solution uses simple language around opt-in (ensuring that the user actually understands it) and enables consent to be captured in a progressive fashion to demonstrate value exchange.

Three Trends Signaling Permanent Advertising Budget Shifts to Retailer Ad Platforms

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021 at 12:30 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 Andrea Leigh, VP of strategy and insights at Ideoclick.

Brands reimagined their media plans during the pandemic, and many must now reconcile their previous approach with emerging digital ad opportunities they tried and adopted in that time. It’s not a coincidence that we are seeing a rise of retail media networks, such as Walmart, Target, CVS, Instacart and, of course, Amazon, since brands see the value in reaching online shoppers and grocery customers.

It’s worth noting that these retail ad platforms were born out of necessity. The shift from in-store shopping to ecommerce cut into retail profit margins. Customers expect free shipping, so retailers are now responsible for costs to the end consumer, and often coming back. To help relieve their profit margins, retailers are monetizing web site and app traffic with the launch of ad platforms.

Consumer brands must place their bets right now. And there’s no sure thing. Will online grocery shopping deflate when states and stores reopen? Are 2020 budget shifts the new normal?

I predict that new digital ad platforms, and retail media in particular, are still gaining steam, and that traditional advertising channels will not re-earn budgets from marketers who have tried data-driven alternatives.

Data is an Obsession

Every advertiser knows the saying, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I don’t know which half.” Traditional advertising platforms tend to provide ‘soft’ metrics that leave brands wondering, versus the concrete data they derive from digital platforms.

However, retail ad platforms provide richer data, such as impressions, clicks, online conversions and attributed in-store sales, to demonstrate that a campaign actually performed. To marketers, these direct KPIs are an addictive drug, creating a virtuous cycle of always-on campaigns.

And while offline advertising typically locks brandsa into fixed rates, digital platforms have much more flexibility. Advertisers can set and adjust custom budgets for items and keywords, and everything can be adjusted at a moment’s notice. This was an advantage that helped online ad platforms keep budgets flowing last year, when budgets were often being cut.

Google Loses Its Spot On IAB Europe’s Board; YouTube Scores A Copyright Win In The EU

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021 at 12:03 am.

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

Shunned

IAB Europe just elected its new board of directors and guess who didn’t make the cut? Google. For the first time in years, Google will not have a representative on IAB Europe’s board. [You can check out the newly elected crop here.] It’s been a tough couple of weeks for Google in Europe. It’s been fined in France, had its wings clipped in the UK and, on Tuesday, the European Commission launched a wide-ranging investigation into Google’s allegedly monopolistic behavior in the digital advertising sector. And now it’s been snubbed the membership of IAB Europe, which votes a new board into place every two years. It’s noteworthy that Google doesn’t have a spot. The IAB Europe electorate appears to be making a statement. There’s no doubt that nearly every member, be it advertiser, publisher or ad tech company, partners with Google in some way … and so perhaps they feel Google already has enough power as it is.

Copyright Or Wrong

The European Union may have opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s ad tech, but YouTube just scored a major victory in the bloc. Per CNBC, The EU’s top court on Tuesday ruled that YouTube and other online platforms should not be held liable for copyright-infringing in certain situations. The EU recently introduced copyright reforms, including one that would require the likes of YouTube and Facebook to install filters to block users from sharing copyrighted material. YouTube and others have long been at odds with artists and musicians over how to fairly compensate them for work that gets distributed on the web. Music producer Frank Peterson filed a lawsuit against YouTube over recordings that were uploaded in 2008 which he claimed to hold the rights for. Despite the favorable court ruling, YouTube and other platforms could still be liable if they have knowledge that protected content is available illegally on its platform and fail to take action.

Twitter Integrates Its CrossInstall Mobile DSP With MoPub

by Tony Rifilato // Posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 at 3:11 pm.

Twitter is integrating the CrossInstall mobile-only DSP it acquired last year with MoPub’s ad exchange platform in a push to woo more performance-based marketers.

CrossInstall, which came along with its own bidder and proprietary creative ad formats, has been renamed MoPub Acquire and its team will now be part of MoPub, after having operated as a standalone business since Twitter bought the company in May of last year.

The MoPub exchange sees 2.1 trillion ad requests per quarter and supports 56,000 mobile apps.

Twitter acquired CrossInstall after it had been gunning for more performance ad dollars with mixed success.

A year ago, most of CrossInstall’s clients were gaming companies, such as Machine Zone, Jam City, SGN and PuzzleSocial. But since being acquired by Twitter, the DSP has broadened to non-gaming app developers as well.

“There are a lot of really successful app developers out there that just need to acquire more users and that’s what we plan to help them with,” Georgia Herdener, the head of MoPub Acquire who joined Twitter with CrossInstall, told AdExchanger.

EU Opens Google Antitrust Probe – Including YouTube’s Barring Of Third-Party DSPs

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 at 9:38 am.

Another shoe has dropped.

On Tuesday, the European Commission, which is the main executive body of the EU, opened a formal investigation into whether Google unfairly advantages its own ad tech services.

The Commission, which was rumored late last week to be on the verge of launching an official probe, will focus on display advertising, where Google offers multiple services to both advertisers and publishers.

“Google is present at almost all levels of the supply chain for online display advertising,” said Margrethe Vestager, EVP of the European Commission in charge of competition policy, in a statement. “We are concerned that has made it harder for rival online advertising services to compete in the so-called ad tech stack.”

Sounds familiar. Regulators in Europe, the US and around the world have been poking into similar charges with gusto.

How Apple’s New ‘Hide My Email’ Feature May Plague Publishers And Ad Tech

by James Hercher // Posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 at 12:38 am.

Hello, subscribers, are you there?

Newsletter operators may ask that question more often, after Apple announced new privacy protections for email users earlier this month at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Specifically, Apple introduced “Hide my Email,” a feature that generates fake email addresses that forward to someone’s real address, so people can sign up for newsletters or complete digital registrations without giving away their email to any company except Apple.

The general sentiment right now is uncertainty.

If Hide my Email becomes a popular feature among iOS users, it could be a wrench in the gears of first-party data collection and online identity resolution. But will it reach critical mass? Perhaps not.

For one thing, the feature seems to apply only to a narrow slice of the mobile consumer base – Apple audiences who have the latest iOS, are logged in to iCloud and use the native Apple Mail app as their email service.

Two years ago, Apple introduced a single sign-on service that let iOS users store login credentials with Apple, which is mandatory for any apps that offer other login services like Google or Facebook, and that single sign-on also blocks the email address from the developer or publisher, said LiveRamp SVP of addressability and ecosystem Travis Clinger. But it’s not a much-used service and never impacted LiveRamp’s identity graph, he said.

But for newsletter providers, Hide my Email may be an analytics disaster for any entirely different reason.

In addition to offering users the option to anonymize their email addresses, Apple will remove the tracking pixel attached to emails – which is how senders see if a recipient opened their email.

Open rates are like the “check engine” light for newsletter and email list operators, said Dan Oshinsky, an email consultant and former director of newsletters at The New Yorker and BuzzFeed, in a blog post on the Apple email news. In other words, open rates on their own don’t tell you much, except that something is going wrong.

If a newsletter is suddenly going to spam folders instead of the inbox, for example, that would surface as a suspiciously low open rate. Email service providers like Google and Apple also make decisions about whether a sender should go to spam based partly on how well they maintain their email lists (aka weeding out unresponsive emails). Without the open rate data, it becomes much harder to prune email lists for disinterested accounts.

Intergral Ad Science Prepares IPO; Apple Antitrust Investigations Pile Up

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 at 12:03 am.

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

Another IPO

The ad tech IPOs keep rolling out. This time it’s Integral Ad Science Holding. The New York-based ad verification and measurement company announced the terms of its IPO on Monday, saying that it plans to raise $240 million by offering 15 million shares at a price range of $15 to $17 when it begins trading on the Nasdaq. That price would put Integral Ad Science’s market value of $2.5 billion, and an enterprise value of $2.6 billion. By comparison, competitor DoubleVerify went public in April – one of the biggest ad tech IPOs in recent memory – and is currently valued at $5.4 billion. IAS is riding a wave of ad tech resurgence and is aiming to mimic DoubleVerify’s successful IPO, in which the company’s stock rose 33% on its first day and last closed 43% above issue. Read the release. [Related in AdExchanger: Investing In Measurement, With DoubleVerify Bull David Blumberg]

Targeting Apple

Apple, you’re next. Germany’s competition authority, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), has set its sights on the iPhone maker to determine whether Apple’s business practices in its App Store and iOS software are anticompetitive under a recently updated competition law. The new law enables regulators to intervene proactively against anticompetitive practices of large digital companies. The FCO investigation will focus on the App Store because it “enables Apple in many ways to influence the business activities of third parties,” TechCrunch reports. Apple joins Amazon, Facebook and Google on the list of companies that the FCO is looking at this year. The FCO also noted that it has received a number of complaints against Apple “relating to potentially anti-competitive practices” — such as one from the advertising and media industry against Apple restricting user tracking with the introduction of its iOS 14.5 operating system; and a complaint against the exclusive pre-installation of the company’s own applications as a possible type of self-preferencing.

Data Ethics, Then And Now

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Monday, June 21st, 2021 at 8:28 am.

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

Similar to the Brood X Cicada hatch of 2021, the eruption of privacy-related news has been incubating for a long time.

In this week’s episode, Sheila Colclasure, IPG-owned Kinesso’s global leader on digital responsibility and public policy, talks through the history of data governance and how we got to our current disruptive moment.

Early in her career, Colclasure worked in the US Senate, before going “off hill” and spending the next 21 years of her career in the marketing data aggregation business with Acxiom, LiveRamp and Kinesso.

“So many things have changed and so many things are still the same,” she says of the arc of data ethics and governance over her two decades on the job.

This episode covers two broad areas. First is the flurry of privacy-related laws that have been passed in Europe and the US. Colclasure says Kinesso is pushing for a federal law that will help companies standardize their data collection. In DC, significant political will exists to get this done, she says, because of the administrative challenge multiple laws pose.

“We’re seeing these state laws pass in a patchwork. Some of those laws compete,” she says. But the goal for industry should not be to defang state laws with a less restrictive national standard, she said. “I don’t think we want something weaker than California. The goal is to create accountability. We should be conscious marketers and we should have data under control.”

Heads Up, Publishers: Google Is Overhauling Its Channel Partner Program On Sept. 30

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, June 21st, 2021 at 1:00 am.

Google’s AdX is a primary demand source for many small- and mid-size publishers.

But the way they access that demand is about to change as Google gears up to revamp the partner program that smaller ad sellers use to access AdX.

Pubs need a direct integration with Google in order to tap into AdX. Because many don’t have the requisite number of monthly impressions to qualify, Google created a program in 2014 called Scaled Partner Management (SPM) that allows publishers to use channel partners – think companies like CafeMedia, Primis or AdThrive – to handle the syndication of AdX as a managed service.

Although Google doesn’t publicly share the exact minimum impression requirement for access to AdX and the count can vary by market and publisher type, publishers need somewhere within the range of 10 million to 20 million page views a month to qualify for a direct integration.

Starting on Sept. 30, Google will replace SPM with a new program called Multiple Customer Management (MCM), which is designed to simplify the Ad Manager experience and give publishers a few more buying-related bells and whistles, including access to programmatic direct and open bidding. (Click here for a more detailed timeline of the SPM phaseout.)

By the end of September, any publisher that monetizes non-owned and operated inventory in Ad Manager through a channel partner will be required to use MCM.