AppNexus Waves Off MRC Accreditation For DSP; Another P&G Media Review

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You Down With MRC?

AppNexus lost its MRC accreditation and will not pursue reaccreditation for its DSP services. The company will separately look to reaccredit its publisher ad server business but is dropping its buy-side certification because of the cost and because it duplicates MRC-approved measurement vendors that AppNexus supports. Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, Meetrics and Moat are already monitoring the buy-side business, AppNexus communications director Madeleine Kennedy tells Ginny Marvin at MarTech Today. “Our primary DSP competitors, including MediaMath, The Trade Desk, Google DBM, and DataXu, appear to have made a similar calculation,” she says. More.

New Hairdo

It’s less than two years since Procter & Gamble consolidated its US media business with Hearts & Science, but the Omnicom agency is already defending the account as P&G puts its hair care brands under review. P&G is rethinking its media agency relationships and taking more media planning and buying in-house, AdAge reports. Omnicom launched Hearts & Science in 2016 as a hybrid creative-media-data agency designed for P&G’s needs [AdExchanger coverage]. Hearts & Science has won other blue-chip accounts, like AT&T, but P&G’s move demonstrates how fickle brand business can be as the agency-of-record model gives way to constant evaluation and easily detachable contracts. More.

Missing The Mission

Local news: You can’t make a living, but you could make a killing. The Denver Post is in open revolt against its hedge fund ownership group, Alden Capital, after a crippling round of layoffs at the top Colorado newspaper. The controversy has brought attention to the issue of newspaper ownership and profitability. Alden and other hedge-fund-backed media operators like GateHouse Media snapped up hundreds of local papers in the past few years, often followed by steep cutbacks. But local journalists say the hedge fund owners have figured out a neat and very profitable trick, because newspaper subscriptions can be milked for years even after debilitating newsroom cuts. The Denver Post says Alden uses the narrative around newspapers struggling to gut the paper and channel profits into unrelated investments. Read the editorial. And there’s more at Columbia Journalism Review.

Take A Hike, Eh

Facebook suspended Canadian political consultancy and tech firm AggregateIQ after discovering an affiliation with SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who revealed Cambridge Analytica had accessed the data of 87 million Facebook users while working with the Trump campaign, said he helped found AggregateIQ while working for SCL. “In light of recent reports that AggregateIQ may be affiliated with SCL and may, as a result, have improperly received (Facebook) user data, we have added them to the list of entities we have suspended from our platform while we investigate,” Facebook tells the National Observer in a statement. More.

But Wait, There’s More!