Data Privacy

How should advertisers approach a wild-child platform like Twitter? David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau – who recently spoke with Elon Musk himself on that very topic – weighs in. Also in this episode: grappling with the term “commercial surveillance,” retail media real talk and marketing in the metaverse.

Android has a Privacy Sandbox, too, and it’s going into open beta next year. Learn why this initiative isn’t generating the same ruckus as its close Chrome cousin, which is being hashed out at the W3C. Plus: a rundown on transparency (or the lack thereof) and the related data land grab in CTV.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Apple Of Apple’s Eye Apple tracks iOS users even when they explicitly choose to “disable the sharing of Device Analytics altogether,” Gizmodo reports.  “Opting out or switching the personalization options off did not reduce the amount of detailed analytics that the app was […]

The “notice and choice” model makes sense in theory, but in practice? It’s a mess. Privacy platitudes need to stop, says Jessica Lee, a partner at Loeb & Loeb. Heck, some practitioners don’t even know how online advertising works.

In recent months, the IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audiences (SDA) have rapidly emerged as a strong contender for privacy-compliant audience classification. But many publishers still rely on time-consuming, manual processes to assign categories to their content, writes Oleksii Borysov, VP of product at MGID.

Political advertising is in full swing for the US midterm elections. We go deep into where candidates are spending their digital ad dollars and how they’re using data, with special guest Grace Briscoe, who oversees some 850 ad campaigns as head of political business for Basis.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Maybe Web 4 Apple has asserted its dominion over Web 3 developers.  In its latest app review guidance, which went live this week, Apple introduced language to clarify that apps “may not use their own mechanisms to unlock content or functionality, such as […]

Bringing data ethics into the marketing department is good for an org’s bottom line, says Jamie Barnard, Unilever’s former general counsel focused on global marketing, and now the CEO of a new privacy compliance startup called (natch) Compliant.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Going Nowhere FAST Streaming TV services want people to pick a show already. Too often, viewers peruse a streaming app for a bit and never actually settle on a show, then try another app.  It’s an underappreciated linear advantage that something is always […]

Transparency. Privacy. Signal Loss. Coming out of Programmatic IO New York, the full editorial team debriefs on the hottest topics driving ad tech conversations in 2022.

Google isn’t bluffing about quitting its third-party cookie habit. That’s because consumer concerns about data privacy and pressure from regulators around the globe have left Google with no choice but to discontinue third-party cookie usage in Chrome, said Dan Taylor, VP of global ads at Google, at AdExchanger Programmatic I/O conference in New York City on Monday.

Google Topics is Google’s proposed replacement, which takes us back in time to broad, interest-based segmented targeting. This means brands are about to return to the “bad old days” of marketing, when many audiences all saw the same message. And this one-message-fits-most approach doesn’t fix what’s fundamentally broken in MADTech: the consumer experience, writes Tara DeZao, director of product marketing, MarTech and AdTech, at Pega.

Almost one year ago, the W3C created a small sub-group called the Private Advertising Technology Community Group (PATCG). And, against the odds, the PATCG has made theoretical progress on a number of key ad tech and privacy logjams in the past year.

Meta has many pots on the boil right now, and for good reason. The advertising industry is bubbling like a pan of oil. Meta has announced major new initiatives to support the metaverse (natch), AI, brand safety and suitability controls and third-party verification for the feed, automated ad products, business messaging, privacy-enhancing technologies, creator tools […]

The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which takes effect on January 1, 2023, and replaces the current California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), throws a curveball to measurement and analytics practices. Gary Kibel, partner at Davis+Gilbert, explains how restrictions on combining data will impact measurement.

There are two sides to every story and two sides to every lawsuit. In late August, the Federal Trade Commission sued mobile measurement and data provider Kochava accusing the company of selling sensitive geolocation data. Here’s what Kochava CEO Charles Manning has to say about it.

CTV is at a crossroads, writes Mark Walker, CEO of Direct Digital Holdings. We’re already seeing streaming become the dominant way TV is delivered, which opens up CTV ads to a wealth of possibilities. With that, the industry will face an existential question: What is the role of TV advertising now that it is connected? 

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Slump Bump When the economy goes south, the ad industry goes south-er, writes Peter Kafka at Vox. It was true during the 2008 recession as well as in 2020, when the pandemic hit and businesses pulled the emergency break on ad budgets. Now, ad-based […]

Data clean rooms and regulation could be topics on The Big Story any week this year. But despite the tsunami of news coverage on both topics, each remains largely unknown or misunderstood.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Unfluential  Meta claims to have taken down a Chinese political influence operation that used fake accounts to agitate and misinform Americans. The China-backed ring of accounts focused on hot-button issues, such as gun control and abortion, from both sides. This was about China […]

The US data privacy landscape is chaotic. The future of the recently proposed American Data Privacy and Protection Act is now decidedly up in the air, and states are passing their own privacy laws in the absence of a federal one, which makes compliance complicated. Federal agencies like the FTC are also trying to fill the data privacy rulemaking void.

The FTC enforces truth in advertising laws with special attention to ads that claim particular benefits to a person’s health or their bank account. But the FTC can only bring so many cases to trial. Which is where the National Advertising Division comes in.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All A-Board The W3C created a board of directors and filed to become a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Hooray!  You seem unenthused.  It may sound dull, but this is important news.  MIT informed the W3C last year that it would no longer host the organization. But […]

How will the high-stakes game of antitrust chicken between Google and the US Department of Justice play out? It could be a first important proactive step toward true structural change – not just at Google but across many of the biggest players in the industry, writes Arnaud Créput, CEO of Equativ.

Recent speeches by DOJ and FTC leaders share a common thread, each organization sees a need for more aggressive market intervention and action to deliver on its mission. Plus: Getting the industry to weigh in on the definition of “premium.”

Clean rooms are riding a wave of momentum as the ad industry looks for ways to use aggregated, anonymized data sets to predict audience identity. Yet, despite a catchy name, clean rooms aren’t necessarily as “clean” as they promise to be, writes Drew Stein, CEO of Audigent.

Earlier this week, AdExchanger asked FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya during his keynote at the NAD’s conference on advertising law in Washington, DC, why the commission decided to sue Kochava rather than any other ad tech company with a location data business. And, according to Bedoya, Kochava was singled out for a reason.

While Google’s recent decision to extend the life of third-party cookies for another year didn’t come as much of a surprise, it nonetheless sent another ripple throughout the ecosystem. As we enter a future focused on restoring consumer trust, the past few years have seen a ton of changes to the digital advertising landscape, writes Mark Pearlstein, CRO of Permutive.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Defining Moments The IAB Tech Lab introduced Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA) in February as a post-cookie, post-ATT option for publishers to create targetable impressions without sending retargetable cookies or device IDs to DSPs. But standardizing contextual data taxonomies can be difficult, and the buy […]

Although the Federal Trade Commission has historically been a fan of the ad industry governing itself, it’s been making moves to signal that the commission might start to reject self-regulatory practices, at least on the privacy front.