Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Signal, Please
TV may not rely on third-party cookies, but that doesn’t mean the television industry isn’t feeling the impact of signal loss.
The phaseout of third-party cookies is having a “trickle-down effect” on the TV world, says Lauren Fisher of Advertiser Perceptions, speaking at the Cynopsis Measurement and Data conference in New York City on Tuesday.
According to Ad Perceptions research, 72% of TV buyers say they plan to change their measurement strategies due to signal loss, and 69% are moving more money into walled gardens.
At the same time, TV advertisers are demanding more data interoperability from programmers – which buyers won’t find readily available within garden walls. Yet that’s where they’re moving their money.
“Advertisers are saying one thing, but doing another,” Fisher says.
Although walled gardens keep their first-party data to themselves, they do provide reliable measurement within their own portfolio. But the need to measure the same audiences across multiple publishers will eventually win out.
“The media companies that make [cross-publisher measurement] easier for advertisers will have an edge,” Fisher says.
Probation Panopticon
An Indiana man’s family claims he was unjustly jailed for violating pretrial bail conditions after the court-mandated anti-porn app he was ordered to use flagged prohibited behavior, Wired reports.
After entering a not-guilty plea for possession of child pornography, the man posted bail and was barred from accessing electronic devices as a stipulation of his pretrial release.
To ensure compliance, the court required his family to install an app called Covenant Eyes on their devices, even though the developer prohibits its use in criminal proceedings.
Covenant Eyes is an online accountability app that monitors every action a user takes on their device and sends that data, including screenshots, to an “accountability partner” – in this case, Monroe County probation officers.
After Covenant Eyes flagged a site visit to Pornhub on the man’s wife’s phone, he was imprisoned for violating bail. But the wife claims neither she nor her husband actually visited the site. Rather, she says her Chrome browser made a network request to Pornhub’s servers as part of a background app refresh for frequently visited tabs. This type of false flag is a known vulnerability of the app, which Wired corroborated.
Despite the false positive issue, and the privacy implications of monitoring an entire household to keep tabs on a criminal defendant, the use of accountability apps is spreading. Courts in Washington, Montana and Ohio have all ordered defendants to install Covenant Eyes at least once.
Get Shorts-y
YouTube is opening up its partner program, including its shopping affiliate program, to more creators by easing its prerequisites, TechCrunch reports.
Creators can apply to the YouTube Partner Program if they have at least 500 subscribers, three public uploads within the past 90 days and either 3,000 watch hours within the past year or 3 million YouTube Shorts views within the past 90 days. The new criteria apply to creators in the US, UK, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea, with a larger rollout planned in future.
As for the shopping affiliate pilot, US creators who are part of the YouTube Partner Program and have a minimum of 20,000 subscribers can now nab a commission if they tag products in videos and Shorts.
The growth of YouTube’s creator monetization offerings, particularly ad revenue sharing with Shorts creators, is part of its aggressive strategy to grow Shorts – which it needs to do in order to compete with short-form video titan TikTok and Meta’s Reels.
But Wait, There’s More!
Publishers cut 17,436 jobs this year, more than the amount of jobs lost in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the most publisher cuts for any year on record. Meanwhile, tech companies have cut 136,831 positions, the most since 2001. [Challenger, Gray & Christmas]
Publishers report flat Q2 revenue and dim hopes for the rest of the year. [Digiday]
AI researchers warn of “model collapse” if AI models are trained on AI-generated content. [VentureBeat]
You’re Hired!
InfoSum CEO and WPP vet Brian Lesser joins Ogury’s board of directors. [release]
GroupM agency Wavemaker names Sindhuja Rai as APAC CEO. [Campaign Asia]
Scope3 promotes Brenda Tuohig to chief commercial officer. [release]
Mood Media’s Vibenomics hires Brian Quinn as head of global ad sales. [release]
