No Delay For CCPA; Criteo’s Fortunes

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Sorry, Not Sorry

Apologies, ad industry, it looks like enforcement of the California Consumer Privacy Act will kick off as planned on July 1. Trade orgs, including the Association of National Advertisers, requested that the attorney general hold off on enforcing the law until January, considering COVID-19 and the fact that the AG still hasn’t finalized the implementation regs businesses need to comply with the law. But California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office remains committed to the original timeline, and the train keeps chugging with enforcement now just three months away. Comments on the regs’ third draft were due on Friday. If there are no major changes, a final version should be ready in the coming weeks. Last week, Google also politely acknowledged and declined a request to postpone its phase-out of third-party cookies.

Catch A Falling Knife

Criteo’s stock market plummet may or may not have bottomed out, but investors are interested now that its valuation has almost fallen below its cash on hand. BMO Capital Markets analyst Dan Salmon upgraded the stock to “Outperform” on Monday, not over any optimism for the company, other than its cash relative to its stock price. Criteo’s market cap closed Monday at about $478 million, compared to its $419 million cash position at the end of 2019, up $54 million in the year. Criteo is still profitable and a cash generator, so its valuation is tough to square with that of The Trade Desk, which has a similar annual revenue but a market cap of almost $9 billion. It also wouldn’t be the first time an ad tech stock dipped below the value of its cash holdings, a feat achieved by Rubicon Project in early 2018, before a bounce back.

Commingled

VideoAmp released a commingled data set for TV advertisers with set-top box and ACR data. The device graph includes data from two of the largest smart TV OEMs, 38 MVPDs and satellite provider Dish, said VideoAmp CRO Michael Parkes. TVs are tied to a household, not an individual, so commingling and deduplicating two different sets gives clients a more accurate view of consumer behavior. “A lot of people talk about using set-top box and smart TV data, but very few are combining those into a unified data set,” Parkes told AdExchanger. Buyers can access the data through any DSP, and use it to target audiences and measure for cross-screen reach and frequency. VideoAmp is working on an integration with Google’s ADH and other walled garden clean rooms. Read the release.

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