Criteo Divests Travel Business; TAG Sees Impact On Fraud

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Bon Voyage

Criteo is selling some of its travel marketing technology and accounts to Koddi, a startup that specializes in travel metasearch bidding. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Criteo will retain some travel industry retargeting accounts, including major clients like Expedia, reports industry trade Skift. The business Criteo is divesting comes via its HookLogic acquisition, including almost 30 employees who focus on hotel services. Travel ad tech has seen a recent flood of acquisitions, with Airbnb and Sojern snapping up AdBasis and Adphorous, respectively, in the past month. Koddi, like other travel advertising startups at the center of this M&A, specializes in applying data-driven travel booking to platforms like Google Hotels and Facebook’s Dynamic Travel Ads (DTA). [More from AdExchanger on Sojern testing Facebook DTA products.]

Trust In TAG

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and the 614 Group released a study that claims ad fraud on TAG-certified distribution channels is reduced 83% below the industry mean, from 8.8% to 1.5% on average. TAG worked with Moat, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science to examine 6.5 billion impressions across display and video from GroupM, Horizon Media and IPG Mediabrands. “No matter how good one company is at identifying fraud, there is no silver bullet,” TAG CEO Mike Zaneis tells AdAge. “We need every entity in the supply chain to identify and flag what they are buying.” More.

Wrong Direction

Sketchy ad networks and SSPs aren’t the only culprits generating automatic mobile redirects. Major buy-side platforms and exchanges are complicit in serving ads that automatically redirect users away from legitimate web pages and try to get them to download malicious apps when they land on a URL, Digiday reports. Digiday didn’t clarify which exchanges are the culprits, but said DSPs often overlook the creative review process to bring as many ads onto their platform as possible. The problem is so pervasive, one programmatic specialist at a news publisher said he shut off all exchanges besides Google’s AdX and was still serving unwanted redirects. But what choice do publishers have, when turning off exchanges leaves tons of money on the table? “That’d be like cutting off your nose to spite your face,” the publisher said. More.

Meal Ticket

Walmart signed an exclusive affiliate deal with BuzzFeed’s Tasty app, the media offshoot for food-centric content, to link to the kitchenware and groceries listed in recipe and cooking videos. Check out the Walmart release. “Content and commerce are coming together in more seamless and impactful ways,” Sumaiya Balbale, Walmart’s VP of digital marketing and ecommerce, tells Business Insider. The deal also ups Walmart’s exposure with young, urban, digital-first consumers, who aren’t among the retailer’s current core of loyal shoppers. Mobile affiliate startup Button handles the deep-linking that connects Walmart and BuzzFeed. More.

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