Identity

Clean rooms are riding a wave of momentum as the ad industry looks for ways to use aggregated, anonymized data sets to predict audience identity. Yet, despite a catchy name, clean rooms aren’t necessarily as “clean” as they promise to be, writes Drew Stein, CEO of Audigent.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Defining Moments The IAB Tech Lab introduced Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA) in February as a post-cookie, post-ATT option for publishers to create targetable impressions without sending retargetable cookies or device IDs to DSPs. But standardizing contextual data taxonomies can be difficult, and the buy […]

Personalization platform Dynamic Yield has the distinction of having been acquired by not one but two large brands. McDonald’s bought the company in 2019 and then sold it to Mastercard late last year. “I guess this is just our destiny,” said Ori Bauer, Dynamic Yield’s CEO.

Ad tech must quit its addiction to user IDs and instead start focusing on how we can innovate in other areas: audience targeting, managing frequency and improving measurement (especially conversion attribution). Meanwhile, contextual and geo-based targeting are a great way to reach an audience and get better than expected ROI on campaigns, writes Ian Trider, VP of RTB platform operations at Basis Technologies.

The FTC sued Kochava on Monday for allegedly selling visitation data tied to abortion clinics, mental health facilities, places of worship, domestic abuse shelters and other sensitive locations.

While Chrome dallies on the third-party cookie question, Firefox keeps releasing new anti-tracking features. Marshall Erwin, Mozilla’s chief security officer, dishes on everything from cracking down on fingerprinting to its unlikely collaboration with Meta on privacy-preserving attribution technology.

Many brands, startups and well-known CPGs are missing the more effective retailer data sets at their disposal: loyalty programs, writes Lauren Littlejohn, director of data science and research at 84.51°.

Waze, which was acquired by Google in 2013, now has 140 million monthly active users across the globe. Waze does serve ads based on real-time location, but the company refers to this as contextual because the ads are based on wherever a given device is in the moment, rather than any meaningful connections or patterns about a particular user.

Marketers today have many data sources available to them, giving them the option to tailor data sets based on their specific needs. Whether it’s for audience segmentation or business operations, it can be tempting to buy the biggest data set available. However, it’s important that marketers think twice before diving in, especially when it comes to location data, writes Jeff White, CEO of Gravy Analytics.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Games Or Gains? Gaming on Netflix isn’t taking off. That’s hardly surprising – you may very well not even have known Netflix has gaming. And that’s a problem for Netflix, which is looking to increase its subscriber base (or at least keep existing subscribers […]

What does a bloody third-person shooter game about robbing banks at gunpoint have in common with a hyper-casual game that involves flipping a strip of cartoon bacon from a skillet to try and make it land on random objects? The answer: Not much, but both are classified as “action” games, according to Apple and Google in their respective app stores.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem… Well, the votes are in for AdExchanger’s 2022 comic caption contest – and we’ve got a winner. Congratulations to Paul Gubbins for making us chuckle, and thanks to everyone for submitting and voting. And Paul, we love dad jokes around here, so, well done. […]

We hosted a comic caption contest this past week – and AdExchanger readers, you really delivered. Thanks to everyone who submitted a caption. Now it’s time to crown the winner. But although you’ve got until 2024 before Google phases out third-party cookies in Chrome, we need you to vote on your favorite caption by 4 […]

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the most mature and comprehensive health data protection law in the US. (It passed in 1996.) But does this patient data protection law apply to data-driven advertising and online data collection? The answer is yes and no.

Google’s decision to kick the can on cookie deprecation even further down the road to 2024 did not come as a shock to many in the digital advertising industry. The longer runway will give advertisers and publishers more time to test post-third-party-cookie solutions. But despite the temptation to procrastinate, publishers and tech vendors told AdExchanger they don’t anticipate straying too far from the road maps they’d already established to meet the previous 2023 deadline.

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

The expiration date for third-party cookies has been extended for another year. We talk through what the delay will mean for ad tech. Plus, an entire corner of the LUMAscape now exists within the Tremor-Amobee deal, the ultimate example in ad tech consolidation.

Procrastinators are being given a gift (of sorts): Google is postponing its deadline for the phaseout of third-party cookies in Chrome by a year, until the second half of 2024.

Advertisers love a captive audience, and there are few audiences more captive than mass-transit riders. So it was perhaps inevitable that Intel-owned urban mobility app Moovit would launch an ad platform. Moovit’s advertising service is live for advertisers in Latin America, Italy and Israel, and the company plans to roll it out everywhere its app is used.

🏆 We’re hosting our next comic caption contest. 🏆 Submit your caption idea by 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, July 25, for the chance to win a free ticket to Programmatic I/O New York in October.

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

Ad agencies are understaffed and their clients – small businesses in particular – often don’t have the time or the technical background to sift through reams of campaign data. And so, increasingly, they’re turning to automation to cut down on the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of account management. Tag, an independent agency based in Iowa, uses a suite of automated reporting tools, including from Basis Technologies, to communicate cross-platform campaign metrics to its clients.

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

As clients look for alternatives to third-party cookies, ad agency Dentsu can steer them to its in-house Contextual Intelligence tool, which launched today. Although contextual targeting is often considered inferior to demographic or behavioral targeting, it can drive performance. Jewelry retailer Pandora piloted the tool during the 2022 Valentine’s Day season. Ads placed using the solution represented 2% of campaign spend, but drove 36% of revenue, a 24x return on investment.

Personalization – paired with effective measurement – has enabled marketers to see and understand results, ultimately driving them to spend more. Madan Sundararaju, vice president of the M&E sector at Capgemini Americas, writes on how traditional media platforms can adapt to these trends and increase their share of ad revenue.

We read between the lines of Google’s progress report to the UK’s antitrust regulator on its plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome. Could Google miss its own self-imposed 2023 deadline? “Signs point to yes.”

You’ve probably heard (dozens of times) by now that first-party data will be the key to post-third-party-cookie ad targeting. But what exactly is first-party data? How does it differ from second-party, third-party and zero-party data? And what makes first-party data more suited to a privacy-centric ad experience?

The word “cookieless” crops up in virtually every conversation about the future of online identity. But what exactly do people mean when they say “cookieless”? Although the definition seems simple enough – the absence of cookies – it lacks the nuance to encompass the true complexity of signal loss. It’s also a misnomer.

Even if third-party cookies weren’t on Chrome’s chopping block, brands would need a strategy to navigate signal loss, says Spiceology CEO Chip Overstreet. Spiceology is working with digital identity management company Parrable and MediaMath to retarget users in environments where third-party cookies aren’t available.

You get what you pay for. This adage is considered way too infrequently in the world of digital advertising, especially programmatic. There is so much pressure placed on gaining efficiency, both in execution and cost, that marketers have begun to prioritize “added value” impressions over meaningful business results, writes Elise Stieferman, director of marketing and business strategy at Coegi.