Data Privacy

The ripple effects of Google’s decisions dominated AdExchanger’s top story list in 2021.

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.

Keeping Track Third-party trackers were hosed by GDPR, right?  Perhaps not.  A University of Oxford study found that third-party trackers in Google Play and Apple iOS apps remain relatively unchanged. “The same handful of third-party tracking companies have similar prevalence and prominence,” according to the Internet Policy Review journal. The number of apps with zero […]

The “Big Tent” Backlash The IAB announced last week that advertising and media agencies will now be able to join the industry trade association as members. All the big agencies are already partners out of the gate.  The IAB makes the case that online advertising must span many categories to work effectively, and the industry […]

As the CPRA tightens CCPA’s restrictions, are companies that process data for online behavioral advertising still considered “service providers” based on the CPRA’s new definition and parameters? Richard Eisert, partner and co-chair of advertising, and Zachary Klein, associate, both at Davis+Gilbert, dig in.

Nothing in ad tech is ever easy. Despite previously signaling interest in serving as an administrator for Unified ID 2.0 earlier this year, the IAB Tech Lab is still on the fence about taking on this role for the open-source initiative to replace third-party cookies with email-based IDs.

An Axe To Grindr Norway’s data protection authority (DPA) fined Grindr $7 million for GDPR violations. The Norwegian watchdog says Grindr passed data to third parties without consent, and that it shared data on sexual orientation, which is prohibited regardless. The full text is worth reading.  Grindr, an LGBTQ dating app, objected on the grounds […]

Criteo is buying IPONWEB, the engineering company that built most of the underlying infrastructure for the ad tech ecosystem. The deal represents a huge chess move on the part of Criteo. So, what does Criteo get from acquiring the company responsible for building the foundation of programmatic advertising as it exists today?

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Thanh Do, product marketing manager at Permutive. It’s no secret that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework has rocked the advertising industry. Before the introduction of opt-in consent, 70% of users enabled cross-app tracking. […]

Amazon The Impervious Google and Facebook are reeling from data privacy changes. Tim Cook warned investors that Apple underestimated part shortages and would not meet demand until next year. Macy’s slimmed its store inventory. Disney’s production schedules are delayed by months and even years. And Amazon is – doing great. The ongoing supply-chain drama, COVID-19 fallout […]

Legal Beef Byron Allen’s $10 billion discrimination suit against McDonald’s was dismissed by a federal judge on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reports. Allen owns Allen Media Group, whose brands include The Weather Channel and Bally Sports Regional Networks, among others. He alleged that McDonald’s discriminates against Black-owned media companies in its TV ad investments. […]

First-Party Time  As first-party data sets grow, marketing operations are reining in their ad costs and boosting ROI, The Wall Street Journal reports. For example, PepsiCo has amassed around 75 million user records from its consumer base. This data saves tens of millions of dollars on ad spend, according to Shyam Venugopal, the SVP of […]

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 […]

Roast turkey wasn’t the only thing to gorge on this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s top antitrust regulator, published a 125-page document outlining the next phase of its ongoing antitrust investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox. (You can read the whole shebang here.) The document contains an updated set […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is by Roman Garbar, marketing director at Tenjin. While the eyes of the world were recently locked on the rebranding of Facebook to Meta, something with more immediate and concrete implications for the advertising world was happening. […]

Although privacy and online advertising are often framed as mortal enemies – or at least mutually exclusive – it doesn’t have to be the case, says Lindsey Shepard, CMO of Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. “The advertising ecosystem online is fundamentally broken right now – I believe that,” says Shepard (although, you can call her “Shep”). […]

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 […]

Unified ID 2.0 testing could hit a serious snag in Europe. Although beta testing of UID2 in the US and Canada is already well underway, multiple sources tell AdExchanger that The Trade Desk is having trouble lining up an independent administrator to govern and police the use of UID2 in territories where GDPR is the […]

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

The Location Equation Location data companies have seen an uptick in inquiries from government officials and public health groups, The Washington Post reports. It’s no surprise – health officials and local governments had to track the effects of quarantine measures as well as next-order impacts on public services, such as transportation. Though the applications are […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Richy Glassberg, CEO and co-founder of SafeGuard Privacy. These past few years have seen a whirlwind of change – and not a few upheavals. So business leaders can be forgiven […]

Despite Apple’s ATT curveball, Zynga is having its best revenue and audience growth year since the company was founded in 2007. The social game developer, whose titles include Words With Friends and the FarmVille franchise, grew its advertising business 99% year-over-year in the third quarter to $134 million. Total quarterly revenue was $705 million, a […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is by Nate Woodman, founder of independent consulting firm Proof.   AdExchanger readers should be familiar with the term “weaponized privacy.” The idea explains the primary effect of Big Tech raising the walls of their […]

Programmatic and privacy don’t have to be mutually exclusive, even though they’re often treated that way, according to Joe Root, CEO and co-founder of London-based publisher technology startup Permutive. “A privacy-first web is about removing the data leakage that’s inherent in programmatic,” Root said. Permutive aims to stop that leakage with technology infrastructure to preserve […]

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 […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant. Progress is not a straight line or a smooth path, as many in history have reminded us.  It seems to be the case for data […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis. Snapchat disappointed us all last week and Facebook did the same on Monday. The social media giants keep making the headlines as they struggle to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Slow Burn Amid a continuous onslaught of negative headlines, Facebook reported slower revenue growth on Monday as a result of, yep, Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework. And Facebook warned that the road ahead will remain rocky. Facebook’s Q3 revenue grew 35% to $29.01 billion, missing expectations […]

Shortchanging YouTube? Are advertisers caught up in the CTV hype? Mike Shields thinks so. In a recent Substack post, he suggests advertisers ditch the various CTV walled gardens and head over to YouTube instead. There are thousands of streaming services, but YouTube and Netflix still corner about 47% of the market and haven’t lost share […]

On Friday, a New York judge unsealed most of the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google – and the devil is in the unredacted details. According to the judge, P. Kevin Castel, Google’s argument that the filing needed to be redacted for privacy reasons didn’t hold water. The multistate suit alleges anticompetitive ad tech policies and […]