Identity

Social plugins, your cookie-dropping days are numbered – on Safari, at least. At its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple announced that the third-party widgets that litter the internet will no longer be able to place cookies on visitors using Safari. “We’ve all seen these like buttons and share buttons and these comment fields,” said Craig […]

Oracle has acquired Grapeshot, a UK-based contextual targeting startup, the companies announced Tuesday. Grapeshot provides pre-bid insights based on the media being considered. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Grapeshot will join the Oracle Data Cloud, where it will be combined with Moat to strengthen the company’s brand safety service. The company initially focused […]

Dish Network hopes to perform attribution and cross-device targeting using non-cookie-based browser data, said Brad Stamulis, Dish’s director of digital marketing. The satellite TV provider is using a solution called fTrack, from online ad platform Flashtalking, which recognizes consumers based on about 50 data points – including browser type, user location, screen size and orientation, […]

This is the second in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the first story (“2018 Will Be A Year Of Reckoning For Mobile App-Install Fraud”) and […]

Placed, the Snap-owned location data company, is giving away its analytics tool for free. Starting Thursday, brands and media planners can use a public version of its insights service to view foot traffic trends for around 2,000 businesses in the US. Placed pulls the aggregated data from its audience of around 300 million monthly active […]

Pixability, a platform that originated as a tool for identifying high-performing YouTube channels, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company will refund advertisers for views that run on YouTube inventory that is not brand-safe or fails to meet an advertiser’s agreed-upon brand safety terms, either through cash or TV-like “make-goods.” Although Pixability […]

At Crayola, the lines between paid and earned are blurring. “The interaction between friends and family is so valuable – and it just can’t be garnered from paid media,” said Marisa Scurato, who oversees the brand’s strategic digital marketing efforts. “But we do believe that those things go hand in hand.” Crayola consumers create a lot […]

Cross-device provider Tapad is offloading its media business with Brand Networks, a social marketing tech firm that serves large retail brands and enterprise clients. The deal, announced Tuesday, is structured like a partnership rather than an acquisition, said Tapad CEO Sigvart Voss Eriksen. Tapad’s managed media and creative teams will join Brand Networks to help […]

TGI Fridays has a growing appetite for artificial intelligence (AI) and personalization. AI tech is a strategic investment area for the casual dining restaurant chain this year, said James Washington, TGIF’s product manager for digital platforms. Top-of-the-agenda use cases include improving the dining experience and enhancing the brand’s cross-channel messaging strategy, both of which hinge […]

The cookie is under pressure. On Tuesday, Amsterdam-based cross-device vendor Screen6 released a tool that CEO David de Jong says can add cookies to cross-device graphs in real time before they have a chance to decay. Device fragmentation, Apple’s recent moves to prevent third-party tracking in iOS 11 and environments where there are no cookies, […]

Online retailers are losing revenue right under their noses thanks to a devious form of ad injection only visible to infected site visitors. “I didn’t even know we had a problem,” said Jason LeBoeuf, director of ecommerce at athletics footwear brand Asics. The Asics website was the victim of customer-journey hijacking, a sneaky practice by […]

Unlikely insights into consumer behavior can help move the needle, and location data is a rich source of unlikely insights. On Tuesday, UK-based location data company Blis released an analytics tool in beta called Smart Trends that blends point-of-interest (POI) data and offline movement data to draw conclusions about how people interact with physical locations […]

L’Oreal doesn’t like the word “programmatic.” “We prefer ‘precision marketing,’” said Lubomira Rochet, L’Oreal’s chief digital officer. Precision, Rochet said, is about something deeper than targeting or frequency capping or the sequencing of messages. While important, those are tactics, not the cornerstones of a strategy. “But precision advertising goes beyond programmatic,” she said. “For us, […]

When Snap acquired location-based data company Placed over the summer, agencies got excited about the prospect of intermingling the data sets – but that won’t be happening anytime soon. Placed will not share any advertiser or partner data with Snap, Placed CEO and founder David Shim told AdExchanger. “Keeping the data set separate is important if […]

Safari may represent a relatively low share of browser traffic, but Apple browser’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) could have an outsized effect if it redefines which technology companies can access cookie data. ITP, a cross-site tracking restriction feature with the new iOS 11, builds on Apple’s pre-existing rejection of third-party cookies with a machine-learning-based algorithm […]

Although the industry is settling on a few practical uses for beacons, primarily as a helpmate for attribution, they’re just one marketing data point among many – a tactic. “Beacons are only one piece of the equation, a component of a larger effort,” said Chris Cunningham, CRO of proximity and location data aggregator Unacast. “There are […]

Marketers are open to spending on location data, but they lack the proof to show that their efforts are working. “It’s a dilemma,” said Kevin McGinnis, CEO of Pinsight Media, a Sprint-owned mobile analytics company with access to anonymized first-party mobile carrier data from Sprint subscribers. That’s why Pinsight, which helps its advertiser clients gather […]

Six ad industry trade groups have called for Apple to rethink an upcoming change to Safari that will unilaterally block some first-party cookies. Apple’s Safari browser started blocking third-party cookies by default earlier this summer with the release of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a machine learning-based feature that discourages cross-site user tracking. But an extension […]

Where a person goes can be used as a solid signal of intent, but that signal gets stronger and more predictive when location is combined with shopper marketing data. Although the insights aren’t always intuitive, they’re always useful, said Kim Riedell, a Digilant vet and SVP of Advantage Media, the media-buying arm of Advantage Solutions, […]

Mobile data exchange adsquare is proposing an alternative method to cross-device matching: starting with device IDs rather than cookies as the core identifier. On Tuesday, adsquare introduced mobile cross-device capabilities into its exchange through partnerships with Tapad, Drawbridge and Adbrain. Crosswise is coming soon. Rather than building mobile audiences based on cookies, the industry’s de […]

Ask Facebook for access to its data and the official answer is going to be, “Nope.” But under certain circumstances, a limited number of advertisers and agencies are tapping into impression-level Facebook campaign delivery data, AdExchanger has learned. The data-sharing arrangements are euphemistically referred to as “clean rooms.” These clean rooms are safe spaces where […]

Location policy changes for Apple’s iOS 11 update coming in September and Android O, which is still in developer preview, will alter the way consumers dole out location data and have ripple effects for mobile marketing. The most consequential new policy will be on iPhones and iPads, where a blue bar at the top of […]

Marketers know they need to wise up on cross-channel identity and attribution technology. But it’s hard to know how to approach the vendor landscape when it feels like the entire LUMAscape is blowing up your inbox every morning. “’Barbarians at the gate’ is an apt analogy – sometimes, that’s how it feels,” said Simon Shulman, […]

Apple’s announcement on Monday that its Safari desktop browser would block third-party tracking information by default worries the ad tech industry – even though Safari represents less than 5% of paid search clicks, according to data from performance marketing agency Merkle. But not everyone is alarmed. The change is likely just another stepping stone in […]

Agencies want to take advantage of location data, but roadblocks still stand in the way. For Mobext, the mobile arm of Havas Media Group, fragmentation and quality-control issues top the list. “A lot of companies have hopped on the bandwagon in the location space, and that’s created a lot of clutter in the offerings available […]

When it comes to location-based based data, targeting is the low-hanging fruit. The ripe opportunities center on using location to enhance behavioral profiles and connect online ad exposure with real-world activities. Easier said than done, however. Advertisers and agencies are interested, but the technology is still developing and there’s a fair amount of BS flying […]

When a retargeted ad follows you around the internet even after you bought the advertised item, who failed? For publishers, it doesn’t matter. “Who failed? Honestly, I don’t care – I can probably get a $20 CPM for that retargeting campaign,” said Nicholas Hermansader, VP of ad operations at The Meet Group, a public company that […]

Spotify revealed Monday it had acquired content recommendation engine MightyTV to further personalize its ad delivery capabilities. Read the release. MightyTV founder and CEO Brian Adams will join Spotify as VP of technology. His eight employees will also join, and MightyTV will cease to exist as its own brand. Spotify declined to share the terms […]

Foursquare debuted a foot-traffic measurement tool called Foursquare Analytics on Monday. Foursquare Analytics, which uses opted-in users to measure in-store traffic, began in private beta last year with brands like TGI Fridays, Equinox and Taco Bell. Brands that pay a monthly subscription fee to use the SaaS product. TGI Fridays matches customers from its CRM […]

Frontier Airlines is on a quest to facilitate direct customer relationships. To do that, it’s turned to Qubit to build a personalization engine from scratch. While site personalization and cross-channel communications used to be more of a “nice to have” for brands, it’s now table stakes for airlines like Frontier. “For a lot of customers, […]