The Big Story

It’s NewFronts season. A week of programmatic pageantry where the data-driven video and streaming media ecosystem plays dress up in an attempt to recreate the glitz and glamour of the age-old TV upfronts. But across the Atlantic, the industry is hard at work dealing with the harsh realities of the online era as advertising becomes a means of “psychological warfare.”

Twitter’s ad prospects just got even more dicey with news that Elon Musk will buy the platform. Plus, quantifying ad tech’s carbon footprint.

As data-driven advertising undergoes an unwanted rebrand by privacy advocates to “surveillance advertising,” we take the pulse of privacy professionals and talk about how they talked about ad tech at a recent privacy conference in Washington, DC. Plus: The rise of in-game advertising and what it needs to do in order to level up.

WarnerMedia and Discovery concentrate power in the CTV space, even as CNN+ makes a slow start. Plus: understanding the tech pipes powering retail media businesses.

The Privacy Sandbox proposals are moving forward in an organization whose governance is in the air and whose leadership is disengaged. We unpack what’s going on at the W3C with working group member and IAB Tech Lab advisor Alex Cone. He also weighs in on what went wrong with FLoC.

Retail media is reaching the C-suite, with advertising (and first-party data projects) coming up in retailer earnings. Then, we talk about the $16 billion deal to buy Nielsen. 

We analyze the WTF moments from BuzzFeed’s first earnings report – including the negative effect of Facebook’s audience declines. Plus: We dive into Google Ad Manager’s acronym soup and share an audio TL;DR on Google’s publisher-focused signals, including PPIDs and ESPs.

Google Analytics is removing the IP address from its global product. We get into the data privacy whys, as well as what Google Analytics is building in its place, in this week’s episode. Also: The EARN IT act and how American Express overhauled its attribution model in anticipation of loss of signal.

When the time comes to take up arms, the best weapons – or tools – are the ones you’re most familiar with. And in Ukraine, advertising is becoming a weapon of choice wielded against misinformation, explains MGID CEO Sergii Denisenko. He joins the podcast from western Ukraine to report on the situation, and how the ad community can help. Also in this episode: Black creators weigh in on equitable (and not so equitable) payment for influencers.

This week, there’s only one big story: the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine. The worlds of media, marketing and technology are reckoning with their role in a time of war. Difficult theoretical questions of content moderation and information access are all of a sudden not-so-theoretical and advertisers, too, must consider their role.

Signal loss is muddying Meta’s algorithms and causing short-term pain (and stock dives) for the company formerly known as Facebook. Its partners and advertisers are feeling it, too. But signal loss is also prompting digital transformation and creating strong tailwinds – depending on who you are in ad tech.

It’s the beginning of the end of the Android Ad ID. What Google’s mobile privacy sandbox announcements means. Plus: Why Facebook’s ad approval process irritates telehealth company, wisp.

Activision-Blizzard, ZeniMax Media, Bungie, Zynga, MoPub, Adjust, Glu Mobile: Each multi-billion acquisition happened in the past year, as creative game developers and the ad tech businesses that monetize their apps come together. Plus: What’s new in the SSP market? Google’s iron grip on the category is strong as ever, but there’s room for growth.

Audio advertising is maturing (or going through puberty?): Spotify is the latest platform to weather a content controversy (over Joe Rogan’s misinformation). Meanwhile, competitor SiriusXM is building first-party identifiers. Plus: the quiet Olympics, and why B2B advertisers love the Super Bowl.

Google tells its side of the story in a motion to dismiss the antitrust case it’s facing – but where does the truth lie? Also: Google unveils its cookie-free Topics API, a rundown on California’s follow-up privacy law (CPRA) and a quick explainer on the latest privacy bill to hit the Hill: the ominously named Banning Surveillance Advertising Act.

More than a year after 17 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, the hits keep coming. A newly unredacted version of the suit – now ballooned to 242 pages – dropped on Friday and provides quite the scratch-off surprise. AdExchanger has been busy polling the industry and reading up on the latest allegations about how Google […]

A sneak peek at ad tech IPOs that might happen in 2022, along with a deep dive into Instacart’s advertising ambitions and why T-Mobile bought rideshare advertising company Octopus Interactive.

The ad verification space is full of green fields to expand into. Case in point: 2022 immediately kicked off with an acquisition by IAS and $100 million in funding for Human. Plus, interoperability and first-party data come together in NBCU’s first-party data platform.

One of the most compelling soap operas of 2021 was the TV measurement debate. As the year ends, here’s one of our best reruns: the moment Nielsen lost its MRC accreditation.

2021 brought both bounty (IPOs) and challenges (targeting). As ad tech surfed the wave of IPOs, it also weathered attacks on targeting and measurement, as online privacy increasingly became a priority for governments, platforms and people.

Vox Media buying Group Nine Media is the latest media mega merger to watch. Plus, Criteo buys IPONWEB. Both acquisitions are part of a strategy to find space unoccupied by Big Tech (and impervious to the demise of third-party cookies).

BuzzFeed’s debut on the public market disappointed, but its advertising business is growing (and it’s planning more acquisitions). Plus, digital advertising in 2021 grew faster than it has in the history of advertising. We explain why.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the tentpoles that kick off that final stretch of Q4 spanning Thanksgiving and Christmas. But this Black Friday/Cyber Monday combo was not as record-setting as in years past, according to Adobe and others who track sales data. There are many reasons behind this change. Not only has the pandemic […]

Netflix has finally put to rest rumors (hopes and dreams) that it would one day monetize with advertising – but now Zoom is stepping up to the plate. The Zoom CEO rejected the idea of monetizing its free video conferencing during the beginning of the pandemic. But the company is now changing course with plans to […]

Brands need first-party data, and they’re solving for that need through a mix of creativity, personalized products and the power of good old-fashioned celebrity endorsements. Which is why everyone in ad tech and digital media should take note of these initiatives, which span everything from personalized Oreos (dubbed the Oreo ID) to celebrity endorsements designed […]

The direct-to-consumer cookware company Made In noticed its social media dashboards went a bit screwy after Apple tightened its privacy controls this year. Luckily, Made In uses all of its own dashboards – which didn’t go haywire – and tracks identity changes closely, CEO Chip Malt shares as special guest on this week’s The Big […]

The business practices of both Facebook and Google came to light in unflattering ways over the past week. Last Friday, a judge unsealed the 173-page antitrust complaint against Google – and there was a lot of interesting info underneath those black squares. Many of the details allege that Google manipulated the auction to ensure market share […]

Mobile advertising companies are being snapped up at eye-popping valuations. But wait … isn’t Apple torpedoing the ability to target and measure app advertising with its AppTrackingTransparency framework, SKAdNetwork and other privacy-focused policies? We untangle that contradiction on this week’s episode of The Big Story, where the editorial team is joined by special guest John […]

Attribution on Facebook ain’t what it used to be. The Facebook that enabled hundreds of creative versions, targeting variations and near-instantaneous optimization – all fed by data – is changing. Apple took a big bite out of Facebook’s attribution capabilities when its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) required apps to collect a user opt-in to track their account […]

Facebook weathered two storms this week: a whistleblower and a sweeping outage across multiple platforms. First, the Facebook whistleblower revealed herself as Frances Haugen, who spoke with 60 Minutes about how platform changes like a 2018 decision to prioritize posts that “spark conversation” amped up divisiveness on the platform. Then, on Monday, Facebook, Instagram and […]