Cookies, Who Needs 'Em; Agency Ad Tech

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

Cookies, Who Needs ‘Em (Cont.)

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) is the latest ad group to dismiss worries about the “Corleone kiss of death” Mozilla has seemingly planted on the third party cookie. It said in a statement, “In spite of the doom-saying, Mozilla’s move to block third-party cookies in the newest version of Firefox does not spell disaster for the advertising and publishing businesses. If anything, it sheds more light on the need for an ecosystem-wide solution… Ultimately, this is about fostering a healthy environment where consumers feel safe online.” OPA’s membership is mostly large “premium” publishers. More.

Agency Ad Tech

In an opinion piece on Ad Age, Criteo President Greg Coleman offers ad tech advice to the CMO and gestures to agencies thusly: “Recognize that some advertising agencies will push their own technology and do not find value in proper testing to find the best ad-tech solution for your business. Find the time yourself to discover the latest breakthroughs in advertising technology solutions.” Read more.

Tracking ATD Pulse

VivaKi (Publicis), Xaxis (WPP), Amnet (Aegis), and Cadreon (IPG) came together for an agency trading desk panel at Advertising Week Europe. See the entire 50 minute video on VivaKi’s Marco Bertozzi’s personal blog here. Each agency panelist rep revealed that their programmatic business was fully real-time bidding (RTB), display business, except for WPP’s Xaxis who said they’re “programmatic” in Europe, but a small part is RTB.

TVs Online Upfront

In The Wall Street Journal, the Upfront approaches for television buyers and TV may not be a winner this year. The WSJ’s Suzanne Vranica and William Launder plumb the industry, “In some cases, the Web could take a share of those dollars. ‘Advertisers have seen a significant shortage of ratings, and some are willing to take some money and move it online,’ said John Muszynski, chief investment officer at Publicis’ Spark SMG.” Read more (subscription).

Too Big Data

The New York Times’ Steve Lohr looks at “big data” and its impact on consumers. Summarizing from a World Economic Forum white paper (PDF) called “Unlocking the Value of Personal Data: From Collection to Usage,” Lohr writes, “The report contains echoes of earlier times. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, passed in 1970, was the main response to the mainframe privacy challenge. The law permitted the collection of personal financial information by the credit bureaus, but restricted its use mainly to three areas: credit, insurance and employment.” Read more.

Slo-Mo Revenue

On The Monday Note blog, Frédéric Filloux reviews the slow transition of ad revenue to mobile in comparison to traffic. Using recent French news site data, he outlines, “Not only do audiences massively flock to mobile (more visits), but people spend more time in their favorite media app (with an even greater increase in page views) but, also, each viewer brings less and less money as ad revenues grew slower than visits — by a factor of two — and slower than page views — by a factor of three.” Read more.

Aggregating Audience

Site rep firm and owner Buzzmedia is changing its name to SpinMedia after its magazine-brand-owning namesake, Spin Magazine. The NY Times Ben Sisario takes note and says that the total reach of SpinMedia’s many sites (41 million according to comScore) will exceed competitors such as Gawker and BuzzFeed. Read it. The revenue plan is for a — surprise — native ad strategy with branded content.

Tracking Quantcast

On Marketing Land, Danny Sullivan writes that Quantcast has dropped a popular part to its web analytics feature set. He says, “Quantcast launched the feature in December 2006. One thing I loved about it versus other comparison tools out there was that if two sites ‘Quantified,’ used Quantcast’s tracking code on their sites, you were getting about as direct comparison as possible. There was no wondering if the figures were perhaps off for one site versus the other, as can happen with other tools.” Quantcast tells Sullivan it’s coming back. Read more.

But Wait. There’s More!