Data Privacy

It’s been almost a year since Microsoft first pledged to default-enable Do Not Track in Internet Explorer 10, setting off an urgent debate about the future of third-party ad tracking which continues to this day. The company has endured attacks both withering (“paternalistic,” said Evidon) and mild (“absolutely not helpful,” offered IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg), […]

After Foursquare and its CEO Dennis Crowley struggled for several months to cobble together this week’s whopping $41 million funding round, the social check-in service is still getting heat over whether it will be able to draw revenue and maintain its high $800 million valuation. While emails to Foursquare went unanswered about how it might […]

Last week X+1 secured a new $17 million debt facility with Ares Capital, a cash reservoir the demand-side platform plans to tap for two acquisitions this quarter (one social, one mobile). A global expansion will follow in the second half of the year, including a possible outpost in Brazil, according to CEO John Nardone. By […]

“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 Jay Friedman, COO at Goodway Group. Have you seen recent articles about the Firefox cookie-blocking privacy debate? I don’t blame those of us in the digital media community for going […]

Mozilla’s move to stop third-party cookie tracking in the latest version of its Firefox browser – echoing Apple’s Safari browser attributes – has attracted wide attention across the advertising industry.   And no wonder – Mozilla’s Firefox has about a 23% share among consumers in the browser market. AdExchanger reached out to a selection of […]

Jon Leibowitz, the Federal Trade Commission Chairman who aggressively pushed for more checks on the digital ad sector, will step down this month. Leibowitz was assiduous in his pursuit of what he saw as overstepping by companies engaged in consumer data collection. His language could be inflammatory, as when he said in 2009 that “a […]

The Saturday before Christmas came in as a top three December shopping day for many retailers, including Best Buy, Toys ‘R’ Us, and Walmart. Below we present final holiday 2012 data from location analytics company Placed, which analyzes in-store visits of consumers who have opted-in to a mobile location measuring app. Placed’s location-based network does […]

With print revenues falling faster and online ad dollars failing to fill the void, publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls. As a Guardian UK piece noted this week, 11 of the top 20 U.S. newspapers are either currently asking users for cash to access content, or are about to embark on it. Enliken, a company […]

“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 Matthew Keylock, SVP, Media Partnerships at dunnhumby.  Within an industry rapidly becoming obsessed with unstructured data, are we losing our focus? Unstructured data, data from customer emails, social media, video, and […]

Consumers aren’t as worried about privacy issues and have started to embrace companies targeting them with ads and offers when those messages are relevant, according to Accenture Interactive. In fact, consumers now turn to mobile and personalized targeted offers and marketing elements while shopping and researching purchases. After surveying 2,000 customers in the U.S. and […]

The Data Management Platform is a widely used and often misunderstood product category — adopted in varying measures by publishers, agencies, and third party data brokers. To get more depth on what a DMP should be and whether marketers are realizing the category’s potential, we asked three agency execs this question: “Where is the real […]

When ad industry discussions turn to data, it’s usually about how to target ads, not create them. But Douglas Van Praet, EVP/group planning director at Deutsch LA, speaking at Wednesday’s ANA Creativity conference, offered up some ideas of how science can influence the artistic side of advertising. Following a presentation Van Praet did with Justin […]

Yesterday we covered a Federal Trade Commission settlement with Epic Media Group over allegations of “history sniffing,” and pointed out that the company had many things in common with a new ad company called Kinetic Social. Those similarities include employees, executives, and website copy. Today Kinetic reached out to AdExchanger to address its supposed connection […]

The Federal Trade Commission has settled “history sniffing” allegations with defunct online ad network Epic Marketplace Inc., whose parent company was Epic Media Group LLC. The agreement bans Epic from using the practice and requires it to destroy all data collected by that means. The FTC’s announcement makes no mention of Kinetic Social, a company […]

Media intelligence platform Aggregate Knowledge (AK) recently recently partnered with IBM to plug the AK platform into the IBM Digital Data Exchange. See the release. CEO Dave Jakubowski sees an overarching theme of “interoperability” in the deal as he says IBM marketer clients will be able to unlock what is going on with their website […]

“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 Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai.  Pricing a shared asset like data can be counterintuitive. Data is a non-rival good, like a toll road.  Even though people expect to pay for and […]

The two leading presidential campaigns are exposing website visitor data to third parties via URL and page title information, according to Jonathan Mayer, a privacy advocate and Stanford graduate student. Mayer examined the information made available on the two candidates’ campaign websites, and found “both leak.” What’s more, he says the information visible to third parties […]

Having grown an ad network business in two years to a nearly $30 million run rate in 2011, most ad technology executives would have been satisfied.  But, CEO Andy Monfried saw another future for his company, Lotame, and decided to focus on being a data management platform (DMP) only for publishers and marketers to manage data. […]

There was a time when the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) was the only self-regulatory game in town. Formed in 1999 to enforce self-imposed rules for online advertising, its visibility has been at a low ebb since heightened attention from the FTC and Congress sparked a new umbrella group, the Digital Advertising Alliance. The NAI is […]

Business and consumer privacy interests are flinging letters at the Federal Trade Commission, decrying what they see as shortcomings in the Worldwide Web Consortum’s (W3C) process for setting the browser tech specs for Do-Not-Track.  In recent weeks the agency has received a letter from Republican lawmakers criticizing the standards making process and the FTC’s role […]

“The Sell-Sider” is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jim Spanfeller, CEO, Spanfeller Media Group, a new age media company. Today’s media buyers and sellers are playing on a whole new field, where preying on consumer behavior is the norm and big data is the apparent […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Tom Chavez, founder and CEO of Krux Digital. When he was running the Right Media Exchange, Ramsey McGrory posited what I call the McGrory Conjecture during a panel […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Matthew Keylock, SVP, Media Partnerships at dunnhumby.  Display advertising has suffered the same ailment plaguing much of digital marketing – frequent irrelevance is easy and cheap. This trend […]

It was three months ago that Jack Bamberger joined GroupM agency MEC as president, digital for North America. He was in some ways an unusual choice, having far more experience on the media than the agency side. Of his last 20 years, 13 were spent at Time Inc., Meredith Corporation, and Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media. […]

Daily deals site Groupon can’t even produce its first quarterly profit without disappointing shareholders. Though the company’s revenue gained 45 percent year-over-year to come in at $568.3 million in Q2, that was short of analysts’ expectations of $578 million. And while profits were $46.5 million versus a $101 million loss in Q2 2011, investors quickly […]

TARGUSinfo and its AdAdvisor unit appear to have settled in as NeuStar Information Services.  The implications of last November’s acquisition of TARGUSinfo by Neustar (valued at $650 million) reach far beyond data for display ad targeting. Yet, considering Neustar’s data and some of its other units such as IP address targeter Quova, new areas of […]

One particular area of hope for Yahoo has been its acquisition of data management platform interclick, for which it paid $270 million November 2011. But the financial boost it provided was deemed “disappointing” by CFO Tim Morse  during the company’s Q2 earnings call last week. AdExchanger spoke with Peter Foster, Genome’s GM, on the integration of Yahoo’s data […]

Ross Cohen has been tapped by Viacom as its first SVP of Digital Inventory Strategy, as the company that owns MTV Networks looks for better ways to manage advertisers’ and agencies’ growing demand for audience buying. Cohen, a former VP and business development exec at Worldnow, will report to Rich Eigendorff, Chief Operating Officer for […]

For agencies and marketers, there’s a pervasive lack of synthesis among available consumer data. It would seem particularly frustrating for Steve Plimsoll, chief technology officer, Mindshare Worldwide, but he sounds much too excited about the next eight years, when he believes that problem will be solved. Plimsoll is taking steps to position his media shop […]

Before Google and Facebook set the tone of how display ad spending was doing, there was ValueClick. The ad network is still a key display bellwether, but it’s also facing a number of challenges as it aims to meet the challenges posed by real-time bidding and social media. ValueClick’s Q1 earnings were a mixed bag […]