Data-Driven Thinking

The question isn’t whether Google will fall, but whether its time is near. And, if so, what will finally bring it down?

The anonymous alphanumeric string made and lost fortunes in its short but eventful life. It was best-known for something it wasn’t actually designed to do: targeting ads.

“Standard advertising services” shouldn’t include recording intimate patient-doctor conversations to help drug companies guide doctors on how to push opioids.

Are the big players building a more privacy-friendly advertising ecosystem in the right way? Or are they just cementing their control?

How can we establish guardrails for the use of generative AI while supporting creative exploration? As banal as it sounds, the answer is to create a comprehensive gen AI policy.  

The push for more privacy-compliant ad targeting, combined with recent advancements in the use of on-device signals like location and biometric data, could mean the industry is finally primed to unlock mobile’s true value.

Lawmakers are busy playing politics, and it’s getting in the way of creating safety guardrails for children’s privacy online.

With the encroaching reality of AI, marketing professionals should be included in strategic planning, given the roles we play in shaping public image and maintaining a brand.

Crisis is often fertile ground for change. And boy, the marketing world is in desperate need of change.

Until universal standards are set and adopted by retailers, marketers need to ask some boring yet fundamental questions about the metrics currently in use if they want to assess and compare performance across retailers. 

Self-supervised learning is at the heart of generative AI, and it’s perfectly suited to address the signal loss we’re increasingly facing in digital advertising today.

Welcome to Scandi-Land, where the cookieless future has been our online media reality for the last five years. Here are three lessons for media planners, buyers, sellers and platforms who are going to have a tough time navigating the thicket of change.

Google has had to rely on vectors other than an increase in search volume for growth. Without proper protective legislation in place, however, the result could be a dangerous one. 

AI’s speed of innovation and deployment have raised concerns about risks and harm to people and businesses. Here are some tips for how to use it responsibly.

Advertisers’ attempts to engage consumers could end up leaving them cold. After all, not all attention is created equal.

“What frustrates me most about this situation is how easily it can be remedied in a way that will benefit all parties,” writes Lou Paskalis about the Google Search Partner network brand safety debacle.

Researchers at Insider Intelligence estimate social commerce will become a $100 billion market by 2025, up from $67 billion this year. The question is how to win in this fast-moving landscape.

Lawmakers’ categorization of what is sensitive (and what is not) is a silver bullet. What might be noncritical to one person could be extremely sensitive to someone else.

While LLMs are demonstrating their usefulness for marketing, they are less well suited to solving challenges in performance advertising, which require learning from numerical data, not words.

The first ever AdExchanger comic offers a look at how the ad tech industry has – and hasn’t – changed in the 13 years since it was published.

In the absence of a federal privacy law, advertisers can expect a steady stream of state privacy law announcements. Just fill in the blanks.

Traffic-shaping algorithms push almost all bids to cookied traffic. And the time to adapt to cookieless traffic is almost running out.

Attention metrics are fast becoming a priority for advertisers, especially as a cookieless world looms large. But the technology requires more standardization before it can reach its full potential.

it’s hard to believe anyone in ad tech truly expects consumers to signal how they would like each corporate entity to track them across every property on the web.

By understanding the metrics that really matter to them, brands can ensure they’re getting the most out of their advertising investments and fostering genuine, transparent relationships with their agency partners.

There’s a misguided desire to find a third-party cookie replacement with as little disruption as possible, and confusion reigns about data collaboration alternatives, their capabilities and the differences between them.

GA4 is a true ground-up rebuild, with the focus now on customer experience across both websites and apps. But although GA4 has a lot of potential, it also brings some challenges that marketers haven’t been shy about voicing.

No one in the C-suite except the CMO cares about reach, impressions, likes, shares, followers or anything else that isn’t directly tied to performance. Instead, they care about clear measures that show progress against specific, measurable problems and ROI.

In the coming weeks, you will see stories from us about the ongoing war, and we’ll do our best to treat the subject with respect. This is no time to shy away from reality.

After attending the Federal Trade Commission’s virtual roundtable about the impact of generative AI on creative fields last Wednesday, all I can wonder when I see an AI-generated creation is whose work it’s based on.