Identity

Location data is buzzing at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “Where you go is who you are,” said Daniel Rosen, global director of advertising at Telefónica, speaking at an MWC Mobile Media Summit (MMS) satellite event. “[It’s] hugely powerful.” That’s coming from a carrier with its own mobile exchange, Axonix, an audience buying platform fueled […]

Best practices and policies to deal with fraud and botnets are emerging, but ad tech companies aren’t sharing them with each other – partially because they don’t want their secrets to slip out to fraudsters, and partially because ad fraud detection is a competitive differentiator. As a result, companies are developing their own policies and […]

Brands are experimenting with proximity marketing, but consumers aren’t always willing to give up their location data. As Pew noted in a recent study on privacy and information sharing: “Location data seems especially precious in the age of the smartphone.” Spam, the risk of data breaches, overdone customer profiling and data being collected for one […]

Some people might describe Foursquare’s shift from location-based social network to a purveyor of location data as a pivot. But Steven Rosenblatt, newly appointed president of Foursquare, prefers the term “evolution.” “We’ve been building the world’s largest location intelligence data company for some time,” said Rosenblatt, who came to Foursquare in 2012 after several years […]

AskMen is firmly in the pro-platform camp among publishers. The men’s website, born during the dot-com boom, now looks to platforms, not SEO, as a way to gain audience and increase recognition. The king of those platforms is Facebook, where video posts earn the publisher millions of views. AskMen, which is owned by Ziff Davis, […]

Accuracy is a spectrum when it comes to location data. And because there’s no systematic way to discern between different types of location data, including how granular it is or when it was derived, the buy side is confused and reluctant to spend. “When we ask clients what the stumbling block is for location, they […]

GameSpot readers know what they like – and they know what they don’t like. Owned and operated by CBS Interactive, the video game news and reviews site caters to the mainstream console gamer aged 18 to 40. And they’re an opinionated, assorted bunch. “On the surface level, that might seem like a homogenous audience – simply […]

These days, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee is focused on multichannel personalized communications. About three years ago, it had yet to implement email. “We really wanted to optimize our outreach, to optimize the customer experience and help customers understand exactly what we’re offering,” said Sherri Zink, VP of medical informatics at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST), […]

There are myriad reasons why location data can be defective – and fraud is just one small piece of that growing problem. Growing because the lack of industry standards around the collection and use of location data leads to a fair amount of misunderstanding, unintentional discrepancies and widespread inaccuracy. “Location fraud is the easy part,” said […]

As the ad industry girds for the mushrooming debate around privacy, consumer choice and ad blocking, it’s clear that existing opt-out mechanisms aren’t exactly cutting it, especially when it comes to cross-device. But although mobile adds another layer of complexity to the situation, online advertising is still reliant on a little .txt file called the […]

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), which is uniting industry players to root out criminal activity in digital advertising, has unveiled a pilot program to block fraudulent traffic coming from data centers. Google proposed the data center project and is leading the pilot program, which will see member companies sharing intelligence about fraudulent data centers. The companies […]

Two months into a quality control effort designed to curb fraud, domain masking and other sketchy practices in its marketplace, AppNexus has offered some details on those cleanup efforts – and even given them a name. The company’s supply hygiene initiative, dubbed IQ, consists of three measures aimed at boosting transparency and accountability of media sold […]

The year of mobile, the decade of mobile, the year of data – none of the monikers matter if the right measurement isn’t in place. “Clients are still looking for ROI and to connect the dots,” said Jeff Hinz, managing partner and US digital director at Mediacom, speaking at the Mobile Media Summit on Monday during […]

Wayne Gattinella, CEO of DoubleVerify, will appear at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event addressing inventory quality and supply chain issues in the digital advertising ecosystem. Because of the high demand for mobile location-based data, it’s a big opportunity for fraudsters looking to game geo-coordinates. “With more money flowing to place-based advertising, […]

ZenithOptimedia Chief Investment Officer John Nitti will be a speaker at AdExchanger’s CleanAds I/O conference on June 3, an event examining issues and solutions around fraudulent inventory in the online advertising ecosystem. Clients hold their agencies accountable when they run campaigns heavy on fraudulent traffic or misrepresented inventory. While ZenithOptimedia, part of Publicis, understands that […]

The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a group created by the IAB, ANA and 4As late last year, have announced the creation of a Fraud Threat List through which members will share URLs they consider fraudulent to create a master blacklist. “We are developing a registration program to create a safe zone for the digital advertising […]

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

Personalization was a problem for Malltip. The app, which aggregates publicly available information on coupons, sales, maps and directories from more than 1,800 malls and national retailers across the US, quickly realized that “a lot of our users were dropping off because the content we were delivering just wasn’t particularly relevant to them,” said Wai […]

As the cookie weakens, brands and agencies are looking for an alternative. Cross-device seems to be the answer – but questions remain. AdExchanger examines the state-of-play around cross-device IDs. Consumers are media multitaskers – and cookies are not. As users migrate to mobile at record speeds – according to comScore, apps already account for more than 50% […]

Six months after it came to light that AppNexus has a problem with invalid inventory, the New York-based company is imposing more transparency on ad networks and websites that use its platform to sell media. AppNexus confirmed to AdExchanger that it has started inserting a new snippet of JavaScript into its ad tag in order to […]

Many publishers don’t know – or don’t want to know – what kind of fraud occurs on their sites. But it’s a reaction not dissimilar to how brands approached fraud before shocking numbers – like the 17% of programmatic ads and 23% of video ads determined fraudulent in the ANA/White Ops study last year – […]

Publicis Groupe media shop ZenithOptimedia revealed Monday it’s hooking up with mobile data platform NinthDecimal to try and get a handle on offline attribution. Connecting online spend, mobile in particular, to offline purchases, is what keeps agencies up at night. It’s also what keeps advertisers from spending as much as they should on mobile, said […]

All of La Quinta Inns & Suites’ 2015 insertion orders specify that it will pay for human traffic only. “As a brand that strives to do the most with our resources, and as a challenger brand in the space, it matters when our media dollars aren’t going to real people,” La Quinta director of media […]

  Location data platform AdNear is going off-road with its data collection. The Singapore-based company is in the midst of completing a series of tests using drones to collect wireless data, a key ingredient in AdNear’s audience profiles. AdNear has been conducting its drone experiments in several key markets, including Los Angeles, since January. The […]

On Monday, more than 90,000 tech vendors, manufacturers, marketers, agency reps, carriers, analysts, reporters and sundry members of the C-suite from more than 200 countries descend on Barcelona for Mobile World Congress with a single acronym on their lips: IoT — The Internet of Things. But connected cars, smart washers, chatty fridges, intelligent garage doors and the […]

Women who wear Louboutin stilettos are more likely to watch boxing, have at least four credit cards and compost regularly. Snowboarders overindex for gambling, eating at Applebee’s and always being first in line to buy the newest tech gadget. Diet Coke drinkers likely drive a Mercedes-Benz, shop at Ann Taylor Loft and listen to the radio […]

It’s a mobile world and Rocket Fuel wants a piece of it. The ad network, known historically as a desktop display player, announced Tuesday the launch of Local Lift, a tool that purports to drive in-store foot traffic and measure the results by connecting mobile clicks to store visits. Although this isn’t Rocket Fuel’s first […]

  The rise of automation has made the ad-buying and selling process more informed and efficient, but it’s also provided an outlet for fraudsters to profit. After all, if machines conduct more transactions that used to take place between two humans over the phone, there’s less human oversight. Additionally, ad ops teams, excited by the […]

Drawbridge sees itself as the democratizer of cross-device identity. “We’re the folks that provide cross-device connectivity for inventory that isn’t on Facebook and we do it without PII,” said Nimeshh Patel, Drawbridge’s VP of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Headquartered in San Mateo, Calif., Drawbridge – whose technology analyzes various non-personally identifiable data points, […]

Advertisers need to be inventive to adhere to health marketing regulations, particularly since 2011, when the IAB banned health marketers from using cookies to target patients. PageScience’s approach is to bring contextual, cookie-less targeting to its clients through page scoring. On Wednesday, the company made public its Health Insights dashboard, which lets brands and agencies […]