Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
A CrowdTangled Web We Weave
Meta will shut down CrowdTangle, a news benchmarking service Facebook acquired in 2016, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Academic researchers and nonprofits can access a new version called the Meta Content Library.
You’d be forgiven for wondering how CrowdTangle managed to avoid deprecation before now. It’s a tool that would track which news stories are most popular across Facebook and Instagram on a daily basis, and both of those platforms have deprioritized news.
But, more to the point, CrowdTangle was a daily embarrassment for Facebook, since it revealed that the top news stories were often posted by discreditable right-wing outlets and accounts.
The CrowdTangle data is set to disappear in August – right in the thick of the US presidential campaign, when many researchers will be tracking news and disinformation trends on the platform.
The new Content Library has potential, says Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University. Yet researchers are largely pessimistic.
“Meta has a track record of making big promises to researchers, getting positive press coverage and then backtracking,” Tromble says.
How Do You Do, Fellow Redditors
Reddit is rolling out ads that mimic the look and feel of megathreads, a popular organic Reddit format where users explore topics in depth, Ad Age reports.
These ad units, called free-form ads, include a mix of media options: images, GIFs, video and formattable text of up to 40,000 characters, including embeddable links and spoiler tags to selectively hide text.
Kraft Heinz, Leica and Just Eat Takeaway have tested the format.
Reddit is in a period of experimentation as it finally IPOs. And community subreddits are already a popular place for Redditors to seek product advice. Contributors are known to make impassioned arguments for or against a given product, which has earned Reddit a deserved reputation as a source for independent recommendations without affiliate links. The new free-form ads monetize that existing consumer habit.
But despite Reddit’s fairly large active user base that relies on it as a consumer product research hub, Reddit – unlike Amazon, Google and Meta – typically can’t claim attribution credit for the sales it helps drive.
Even without growing its user count, Reddit can make up a lot of ground toward profitability by effectively monetizing its current activity.
Meet The Mark
In advance of the ANA’s annual flagship media conference in Orlando next week, the trade group announced plans to produce a “programmatic benchmarking report” for the programmatic supply chain, Digiday reports.
The project will start with data contributed by up to 35 brands, many of which were involved in the ANA’s transparency research last year.
This initiative is part of the ANA’s larger effort to push brands to demand log file access from their ad tech vendors. Last November, TAG TrustNet, which partners with the ANA, launched a program that rates ad tech vendors on a green, yellow and red system to demonstrate which companies share log file and campaign reporting data and which don’t. It’s basic, but helps advertisers select vendors based on log file access, among other things.
The forthcoming ANA benchmark won’t necessarily unlock information regarding each company’s supply chain. Instead, it will prod advertisers to take action if their access to campaign reporting data is below standard.
ANA EVP Bill Duggan says the report will also benchmark MFA exposure, fraud and viewability rates.
“The participants will get to evaluate their own programmatic supply chain and compare it to the benchmark,” Duggan says.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant and all that.
But Wait, There’s More!
IAB 2024 State of Data report: 95% advertising and data decision-makers on the buy and sell side expect continued signal loss and/or privacy legislation in 2024 and beyond. [release]
Yet advertisers expect Google to delay its cookie phase-out, according to an industry survey. [Marketing Brew]
Samsung Ads joins ISBA’s cross-media measurement Origin program in the UK as a founding CTV member. [release]
Walmart shops its AI software to other retailers to diversify its revenue. [Bloomberg]
The FTC sends more than $527,000 in refunds to consumers deceived by “review hijacking” on Amazon. [release]
You’re Hired!
Fyllo | Semasio appoints Ying Miao as CFO and Zac Pinkham as CCO. [release]
