Data Privacy

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Mike Brooks, SVP of revenue at WeatherBug. WeatherBug has participated in dozens of closed-door partner and ecosystem meetings regarding Apple’s impending iOS 14 release, and one thing has become painfully clear: App publishers bear […]

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

Baby Steps Facebook will block political ads in the week leading up to the US Presidential election in an effort to suppress misinformation. The platform will also flag posts that come from candidates either claiming victory before the official results are finalized or trying to dispute the outcome. Facebook has already restricted the ability to […]

The rumors are true: Apple is going to postpone the enforcement of its planned IDFA restrictions in iOS 14 until sometime early next year. That sound you just heard? It’s the collective exhale of relief coming from mobile developers and measurement vendors who had been scrambling to adjust to the changes. In a statement provided […]

“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 Laura Desmond, founder and CEO at Eagle Vista Partners. The current COVID-19 crisis has been an unprecedented game-changer for marketers. The last decade was driven by business and digital transformation, from […]

SKAdNetwork is Apple’s homegrown solution for attribution. Apple itself verifies when clicks lead to installs and shares that information directly with ad networks through an encrypted postback and without the need to pass an IDFA. That should make app marketing in iOS 14 pretty much impervious to fraud … right? Well, yes and no. It […]

It feels a tad early to be buying pumpkin spice lattes (even though you apparently can). But one thing it’s definitely not too early to do? Get ready for Apple’s IDFA changes in iOS 14. And even the biggies need to prepare. Last week, Facebook got very vocal about its plans, which involve not collecting […]

Even as mobile ad platforms get their houses in order as Apple restricts IDFA in iOS 14, there are still a lot of open questions that remain, said David Gregson, a product manager at Twitter’s MoPub who’s directly involved with the mobile exchange’s response plan to Apple’s updates. “There’s still a lack of clarity about […]

Like all companies invested in the mobile ecosystem, Google is getting ready for iOS 14. But the company is playing its cards close to the vest. As opposed to Facebook, which yodeled from the rooftops about the negative impact Apple’s IDFA changes will have on publisher monetization through Audience Network, Google quietly updated its AdMob […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Programmatic Please Programmatic ad spend is up from the trough of the pandemic. Through the end of July, total programmatic spend grew 11% since April, and the number of advertisers running programmatic ads increased 36% since January, according to MediaRadar. That’s a rebound from […]

Facebook’s strategy for dealing with the changes coming in iOS 14 is to simply stop collecting the IDFA. But there’s nothing simple about it. Facebook’s ad partners have a lot of steps they have to take to prepare themselves for Apple’s update if they still want to run app install campaigns through Facebook. On Wednesday, […]

After announcing via two blog posts on Wednesday that it will no longer collect the IDFA for iOS 14 devices, Facebook sent a follow-up message to its ad partners with more detail about what that will mean in practice. Here’s the full text: ******************** Today (August 26, 2020), we are providing details about our approach […]

The ad tech industry is innovative, resourceful, agile – and so full of BS that it’s become a meme. Ad tech vendors often boast about their scale, claim that their solutions have HAL 9000-level AI and gloss over the difference between correlation and causation. In some cases, they’re purposely trying to obfuscate and overcomplicate what they […]

Jerome Turnbull, director of media buying at AppLovin, shares his home office with his pet chinchilla, Speedie. That’s just the way people gotta roll in the WFH world. When Jerome, who joined AppLovin through its acquisition of Machine Zone in May, isn’t hanging out with Speedie or tending an aquarium populated by blue velvet shrimp […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. These Boots Were Made For Frauding There’s nothing more creative than … a fraudster. White Ops recently uncovered a scheme involving a family of Android apps that trick people into downloading them with the promise of free stuff. Starting in late 2019, the apps began showing […]

Facebook is preparing its partners for Apple’s IDFA restrictions – and there’s no sugar coating it. Considering the uncertainty of the situation, Facebook has decided not to collect the IDFA for any of its own apps on iOS 14 devices or to request the IDFA from apps in Audience Network, the company said in a pair […]

With third-party cookies soon to leave the scene, the ad industry is casting about for an alternative identifier, one preferably based on first-party data, collected with consent. Email in particular is being heralded as a way to maintain identity in the face of third-party cookie loss. And numerous industry solutions are being built with email […]

It’s the dog days of summer. The afternoons are sultry and the pace is slow. Ice cubes melt and tinkle in glasses, cats nap under porches … and it’s easy to forget that the earth is shifting and splitting under the ad industry’s feet. As managing editor Ryan Joe notes in this week’s episode, the […]

“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 Paul Cimino, president at Cimino Collaborative Consulting. Safety and privacy have become driving forces in advertising. New laws, ad blocking and OS/browser changes have turned the industry upside down. I […]

With iOS set to get a lot less measurable, developers are considering putting more of their performance budgets into Android. The impetus is Apple’s move to start requiring an opt-in for its proprietary advertising ID, the IDFA, beginning with iOS 14 in September. Without ready access to the IDFA, apps are limited in their ability […]

“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 Gary Kibel, a partner in the digital media, technology and privacy practice group at Davis & Gilbert. There’s an election this November, and there will be a huge issue on the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em Those that want to survive the streaming wars are making friends with the competition. Apple is bundling TV Plus content with CBS All Access and Showtime at a discounted price of $9.99 per month, Bloomberg reports. CBS […]

Hallelujah, the attorney general’s implementation regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have been approved by the Office of Administrative Law (OAL). I’ll let California AG Xavier Becerra tell you about the joyous news himself: The final #CCPA regulations ▪️instruct businesses on how to comply with the CCPA ▪️provide tools to empower consumers to […]

Apple has a tendency to ask for forgiveness, not permission. Scratch that. Apple doesn’t apologize. Known for unilateral decision making that can throw entire industry sectors into a tailspin (just ask the mobile ad ecosystem), many of Apple’s recent moves fit a pattern of behavior. Developers have long considered Apple’s App Store policies inscrutable and […]

Ad tech companies are starting to make their voices heard at the W3C as the clock ticks down on third-party cookies in Chrome. At an Aug. 6 meeting of the W3C’s Advisory Board – the closest thing the W3C has to a board of directors – a handful of ad tech companies, agencies and data […]

Johnny Ryan, a professional thorn in the side of big tech and ad tech, left browser company Brave this week to go nuclear on data rights. He’s now a senior fellow at Open Markets Institute, a think tank focused on antitrust issues, and a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, a Dublin-based […]

The Trade Desk’s stock was up nearly 5% in after-hour’s trading on Thursday, despite posting a 13% year-over-over dip in revenue in the second quarter. To what does TTD owe this optimism? Two words: connected TV. “We believe that the COVID pandemic has permanently accelerated the growth of CTV,” CEO Jeff Green told investors on […]

Did you hear the one about Microsoft maybe buying TikTok? No, really, there’s a potential deal in the works. Amid ongoing drama over TikTok’s Chinese ownership and threats from the Trump administration of a ban on the app in the United States, the technology company most associated with office software could become the owner of […]

Hypercasual dominated the mobile gaming charts even before the pandemic. Installs of hypercasual games, characterized by extremely lightweight, free-to-play mobile titles, more than doubled between December 2019 and March of this year, according to joint research from Adjust and Unity. Once lockdowns started, the growth accelerated, with play sessions up by 72% in March. But […]

Jam City is jamming, despite COVID-19. The LA-based casual mobile game studio plans to hire artists, producers, data analysts and people focused on creative strategy. Gaming is one of the few verticals that’s growing during the ongoing health crisis. People started playing more games when stay-at-home orders were announced in March, and the behavior has […]