Data-Driven Thinking

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.

Marketing analytics and ad ops teams are overwhelmed with data, which is compounded by the accelerated pace of generative AI-produced content.

The industry is too focused on quantity over quality. Unfortunately, it seems there are many people still chasing scale due to a lack of understanding. 

After 12 years of working in – or adjacent to – the ad tech industry, I am coming to terms with the simple answer to many depressing questions.

Digital media and television have been playing by different sets of rules due to the nature of ad delivery and tracking. But these worlds are slowly colliding.

While clean rooms do offer significant value in today’s privacy-first world of data, they are not the be-all and end-all for brands seeking controlled and reliable means of data collaboration.

Arielle Garcia, UM’s former chief privacy and responsibility officer, explains why she decided to leave the large agency holding company model – a model that is rife with competing interests and conflicting loyalties, shackled to the industry status quo by “dysfunctional interdependencies.”

To enable startups to seamlessly integrate with DSPs, ad servers, ad exchanges, measurement platforms and SSPs, a centralized ecosystem and industrywide support are urgently needed.

The proposal to transition ads.txt into ads.json comes with some major problems, and its benefits can be largely achieved in a far simpler way – by reformatting existing ads.txt files.

Of course, the misappropriation of a publisher’s audience data would be unethical. But this is not what contextual providers do.

While our ultimate and urgent goal is to reduce emissions, getting companies used to reporting even when they have higher emissions is a critical step in the process.

The rapid growth, nearly ubiquitous use, and public interest around generative AI – alongside a shifting social media landscape and divisive political issues – will present new challenges for voters, platforms, media and marketers.

Brands need to start preparing for a contentious election season, crafting strategies for how they’ll deal with hot-button issues.

MediaMath failed to introduce essential product features demanded by trading desks, especially in view of an increasingly competitive DSP market.

To get the most out of SKAN 4 and prepare for future advancements, advertisers should focus on these four areas.

Publishers aren’t just off-setting losses with direct-sold programmatic; they’re unlocking the 70% of consumers brands can’t reach in the open marketplace.  

A significant number of solutions that claim to be cookieless, including unified IDs and cohort-based targeting, still rely on IDs. These solutions will find it extremely difficult to achieve the scalability required to become a true successor to cookie-based advertising.

The more time the marketplace has to evaluate the Privacy Sandbox – and, particularly, the Topics platform – the worse those platforms will look.

When an ad tech company goes belly up – and its destiny is being decided by indifferent creditors – it becomes difficult for unfamiliar bankers to capture (or preserve) the value.

U.S. state privacy laws are multiplying at a dizzying rate. Here are the key points to know for the collection and processing of sensitive information for the rest of 2023.

Based on the growing flurry of lawsuits against creators, it’s clear that many of them are dangerously unaware of the legal risks involved in influencer marketing.

The alleged independent third-party ad verification on YouTube and across its network does not actually meet the standards any rational being would have for “independent” or “verification.”

Now that the new California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) has long been in effect, it’s time to clean up your pixel game.

The 70th annual Cannes Lions moved faster than ever to match the speed of the convergence of convergences happening in the industry. Here are five themes that stood out from the event.