Twitter Is Extending Its Ad Network; Epicurious Forms An Anti-Ad Blocking Strategy

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Little Birdie Told Me

Twitter is extending its ad network. While the Twitter Audience Platform (TAP) previously allowed brands to drive to branding goals via ad units like promoted tweets, it’s now allowing more performance-focused formats, like mobile app installs. TAP will use the tech behind TellApart, acquired in 2015, for campaigns optimizing via clicks or conversions. At the same time, TAP will expand from mobile app to mobile web and desktop. Advertisers can slot in IAB standard ad units as well as Twitter’s native formats. Read the blog post. And, more in Marketing Land. Related: Facebook Audience Network added video to its list of formats.

Epicurious About Ad Blocking

Condé Nast-owned Epicurious has cooked up an anti-ad blocking strategy. Epicurious now refuses to serve up its content to ad-blocking audiences unless they turn it off or register (sweet, sweet deterministic data). It’s a risk because, as Digiday points out, only 7% of Epicurious users block ads and plenty of other websites have recipes. Still, it’s less aggressive than other Condé properties. Both Wired and GQ require users switch off the ad blocker or pay a fee. Read more.

Surprise!

Princeton researchers released a study looking at the 100 most-visited sites in January to see which ad tags are most prevalent. The results? (Drum roll…) Google owns the 10 most-loaded trackers. And Facebook owns the next three. In all, the study found 81,000 third-party trackers across the surveyed sites, though only 123 of those trackers could be found on more than 1% of sites. “The effect is accentuated when we consider that different third parties may be owned by the same entity,” the report states. “All of the top five third parties, as well as 12 of the top 20, are Google-owned domains. In fact, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are the only third-party entities present on more than 10% of sites.” The Verge has more.

What’s The Deal?

Advertising and marketing M&A made up 45% of deal activity in media and communications in Q1, according to a Deal Insights report from PwC. Though total deal value was the lowest it’s been since 2014, deal volume was up 6% to 183 transactions over the previous quarter. PwC also noted large ad holding companies threw their hats in the ring this quarter with five new deals “after being largely absent from deal activity during 2015.” More.

Marketing MediaMath

“MediaMath is known as a demand-side platform but isn’t really understood in much depth beyond that,” CMO Joanna O’Connell says in a lengthy interview with CMO Australia. Six months into the job, the AdExchanger alum says her strategy includes “helping MediaMath get credit … for the great work we’re doing for clients, and for the innovations we’re driving.” After that, “there are those ideological battles I want to fight, such as the power of being a neutral player and … the value of having a single platform in which many channels can run.” More.