Do Not Track Meltdown; Steinberg Joins Weather

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Do Not Track Meltdown

Do Not Track will have to wait for next year. After 14 months of sometimes harsh debate via email, phone and in-person meetings, the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) working group charged with creating specs for the browser mechanism has all but ground to a halt. To try and advance the process, the W3C has brought in Peter Swire, a privacy official in the Clinton White House, to mediate between privacy and industry advocates. But even the new guy acknowledges a resolution in 2012 is unlikely. Meanwhile the ad industry may see an opportunity to reinvigorate its self-regulatory program. As IAB general counsel Mike Zaneis tells the New York Times, “We’ve seen the W3C falter. So industry is redoubling its efforts to come up with a meaningful standard for browser controls.” Read more. WSJ story (subscription).

Direct Sales Be Damned

All the cavilling about online advertising being a cheap, direct response medium comes mostly from those with an “old media” ad bias, argues Triggit’s Zach Coelius in an Adweek opinion piece. Read it. “The automation of the buying process enables advertisers to buy more efficiently at larger scale,” Coelius writes. “More of their growing ad budgets can be passed to publishers, rather than being spent shuffling paper.” A punch to the agency gut. Time for an AdExchanger “ripple dissolve” from 2011: the fun starts at 30:30.

Agile Ad Ops

So many ad tech vendors to sort through, so little time. What’s a publisher to do? Mimi Wotring, SVP Strategic Development & Operations for quadrantONE, advises publishers in an AdMonsters post to focus and prioritize. And quickly. “In this new ad tech era, the modus operandi for modern day publishers is to focus your teams on the technological innovations that stand to further your business objectives,” she says. “I know it sounds simple, but I am proof that with so much going on, it is easy to get lost in the vacuum of technological innovation with no clear plan, just endless meetings and demos with potential partners.” Hoover more.

Google Clips Coupon

Google has snapped up Incentive Targeting, which supports targeted coupon delivery for retailers, in particular grocery chains. As TechCrunch reports, the company has been funded to the tune of $4.4 million and will most likely reside within Google’s mobile commerce group. Here’s the company’s one-liner on itself. “Incentive Targeting sells highly relevant, high value grocery promotional campaigns through a self-service website.” More.

comScore’s Impression

In a company blog post, comScore says that a new Media Ratings Council’s “take” (see AdExchanger) on Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) viewability metrics initiative has holes. Besides itself, comScore identifies viewable measurement study participants Double Verify (sued by comScore), Google, Moat (sued by comScore), and RealVu. Anne Hunter, comScore’s VP, Advertising Effectiveness Products, says her company is the only one that is accredited to provide metrics for cross-domain iFrames which block some data about viewability. She adds, “While the cross-domain iframe measurement is certainly not the only issue in viewability tracking, it is the most significant significant one.” Read more.

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Steinberg To The “Hiring Channel”

Good god! That David Kenny guy just extends his hand and a swarm of star-studded digerati steps into his Weather (Audience) Company cocoon. Fox News’ digital ad vet Jeremy Steinberg is the latest Kenny addition (Steinberg talking “audience” on AdExchanger last Jan.). His new title is SVP, digital ad sales at The Weather Company (fka “The Weather Channel”). Steinberg will also run his new company’s increasing programmatic efforts. In Adweek, Curt Hecht, chief global revenue officer of The Weather Company, talks about his latest direct report – read it. Fox News contributor Karl Rove has told insiders that he believes Steinberg is staying.

Your Stack, My Algos

On All Things D, the opinions were flying yesterday. Digital, enfant terrible and Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise sends a hatchet Google-way seeing mediocrity ahead with Google’s tech stack. Wise concludes with a bit of veiled self-interest, “… the marketing community really needs to ask if Google is the best business to provide the end-to-end tech stack that marketers want. For Google’s tech stack competitors which don’t have ad inventory to sell (Adobe, for example), the chief reason to create a tech stack is to provide marketers with a suite of useful, integrated products, and to make money in the process. That’s a setup for a win-win (pending good execution, of course).” Adobe buys Mediaocean – you heard it here first! Read more. And, in an unrelated piece, Rocket Fuel CTO Mark Torrance kicks targeting data to the curb: “If I were told I had to either give up all the third-party data I might use, or give up my use of algorithms, I would give up the data in a heartbeat.” Poor data. Algo lovers unite.

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