Identity

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, […]

XAd only wants advertisers to get paid if someone actually walks in the door. On Thursday, the location-based mobile ad network said it would allow brands to transact on a cost-per-visit (CPV) basis. Advertisers will be able to make media buys based on foot traffic-related KPIs and only pay for performance. It’s an appealing proposition […]

Are some marketers approaching cross-device backward? Tom Laband, CEO and co-founder of mobile data marketplace adsquare, thinks so. “We see many advertisers start with cookie-derived data and bridge that to mobile IDs using cross-device vendors – and to me, that doesn’t make sense,” Laband said Thursday at a company event in New York City. Device IDs, […]

Most marketers know they need data management platforms and a growing number have either already implemented one or plan to do so soon. Yet marketers in some industries, such as manufacturing and education, are seriously lagging in DMP adoption, according to a survey released Tuesday by market research firm The Relevancy Group. Forty-one percent of […]

This is the latest installment in “PII,” a series featuring the talent that makes the wheels turn in our data-driven advertising world. Read previous interviews with talent from Mindshare, Mediavest | Spark, Razorfish, Essence, INNOCEAN and Clear Channel Outdoor. Former Brightroll and Amazon exec Craig Whitmer recently joined location data company Placed as VP of programmatic. Placed “measures what people do […]

Turn is settling with the Federal Trade Commission for its part in the Verizon zombie cookie debacle. It’s been nearly two years since it was first revealed that the demand-side platform was using Verizon’s unique identifier header (UIDH) for tracking purposes even if a user had opted out of being tracked. On Tuesday, the FTC […]

While the online advertising trade groups have created anti-fraud programs and exchanges have instituted inventory standards, fraud is still on the rise. AdExchanger reached out to some of the people in the trenches about where the digital ad tech and media ecosystem stands now and how progress can be made. Click below for their responses. […]

Despite skyrocketing mobile traffic and climbing mobile conversion rates, British airline Monarch was struggling to determine precisely what was or wasn’t working for mobile media buys. “We persistently got all the data in and still faced the question: What about mobile?” said Robert Foulkes, senior marketing manager for the low-cost airline. Monarch was among the […]

Convenience store chain QuickChek is placing location at the center of its digital strategy. It wants to prove that digital spend leads to foot traffic, said Eric Rush, digital marketing manager at QuickChek, which operates 140 retail locations across New Jersey and New York state. QuickChek only started to seriously invest in digital channels roughly […]

People-based marketing is the natural evolution of data onboarding, according to LiveRamp, the data onboarder owned by Acxiom. On Wednesday, LiveRamp launched IdentityLink, which aims to resolve a single identity across different online and offline touch points. It’s an extension of what LiveRamp already does, said CEO Travis May. LiveRamp’s bread and butter has always been […]

Investors are bullish on location. “We think there is a lot of promise in location,” said Anders Richardson, managing director of Palisades Growth and an xAd board member, speaking at an xAd event in New York City on Thursday. “It’s amazing to me what it allows marketers to do.” In other words, providing a conduit […]

MasterCard is partnering with location data company PlaceIQ to help retailers and merchants connect what people buy to where people go. The relationship, unveiled Wednesday, “paints a much richer picture than location or transaction insights can provide by themselves,” said Shubhra Srivastava, VP of media solutions at MasterCard. “Location data complements transaction-based insights and provides […]

WPP’s GroupM upended the industry’s mutual viewability standard back in 2014, when it promised to buy only 100% in-view ads for clients. Now it’s created an executive position to enforce that standard in all of its markets as well as to shield clients from a slew of other brand safety issues presented by digital advertising. […]

Early Wednesday morning, a week after the initial US launch of Pokémon Go, a small milling crowd formed outside Barney Greengrass, an iconic Upper West Side Jewish deli and a “PokéStop” – a real-world location anchored in the augmented reality game interface. It’s not unusual for queues to form for bagels and smoked fish, but […]

Augmented reality seems to have hit its mainstream stride with the runaway popularity of Pokémon Go, and users are having a blast – but location-based marketers are also getting pretty stoked. “This is like the best high-profile marketing campaign for location intelligence that anyone could ask for,” said Foursquare president Steven Rosenblatt. For those living under […]

As fraudsters get smarter, anti-fraud players must evolve to put up a worthy fight. To scale its fraud detection capabilities, viewability and verification measurement vendor Integral Ad Science (IAS) has acquired bot detection company Swarm. Terms of the deal, which was announced Friday, were not disclosed. “Fraud is not going away, it’s getting more sophisticated,” […]

Facebook, which recently took the wraps off a tool that lets advertisers link location-aware ads to store visits, may have more than 1.5 billion users, but scale isn’t the only prerequisite for cracking offline attribution. “My question for Facebook would be: Do they know the spatial outlines of every McDonald’s in America?” said Duncan McCall, […]

Advertisers don’t have a strong enough grip on the technological ecosystem to make informed buying decisions, agreed leaders of several leading ad organizations at AdExchanger’s Clean Ads IO conference. Panelists from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) got on stage in New […]

Cardlytics, which helps advertisers like Starbucks activate audience data from bank partners like Bank of America, Citibank and PNC, is working with Drawbridge to assess how cross-device exposures affect online and in-store purchases. Drawbridge is the first cross-device platform to access Cardlytics Measurement, a tool that gauges metrics like average basket size and the view […]

Blood in the water brings sharks, and high CPMs bring bots. And political spenders, who often outbid brands on targeted inventory, are uniquely vulnerable to digital fraud and bots. “All the ingredients that typically happen for fraud are a part of the political marketplace,” said Mark Schlosser, senior sales director at the ad fraud security […]

Dutch cross-device data vendor Screen6 has been flying under the radar and avoided the Nielsen verification route like its well-known competition. Last year, Tapad (recently acquired by Norwegian telco Telenor) and Drawbridge had the accuracy of their device graphs evaluated by Nielsen, coming in at 91.2% and 97.3%, respectively. Screen6 CEO and co-founder David de […]