Identity

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

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Trade Desk Trade-Offs The investment bank Needham has both the bullish and bearish takes on The Trade Desk after the DSP reported earnings this month. And there is a compelling case in both directions.

Companies are relying on AI to help them treat their current and prospective employees more like their customers. Despite layoffs in some sectors, there is still a labor shortage, and employers continue to feel the aftershocks of the pandemic and the Great Resignation.

Buyers already have access to the same information from the same trusted third-parties that publishers use to define Contextual Categories. So why bother?

Can the digital ad industry’s signal-loss pain be Experian’s gain? Experian has two new identity-focused products that simplify its marketing offerings and aim to give digital marketers a more complete user ID graph.

Although inflation affects everyone, the degree to which it impacts people is “very personal,” says Courtney Hilbert, senior director of analytics at Merkle. Understanding which customers are most negatively impacted by inflation (as opposed to moderately impacted or merely annoyed) should inform a brand’s communication strategy. By the fall of 2021, the question of how […]

AI has many business applications, from automating manual processes and monitoring data in real time to targeting customers more accurately. And industry players are increasingly using AI in their day-to-day work.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Let The Search Begin The long-dormant search category is rousing. Microsoft recently invested $10 billion in OpenAI, maker of machine learning content creation software DALL-E (for images) and ChatGPT (for text responses), with plans to test ChatGPT’s returns for Bing searches. Meanwhile, Amazon […]

When faced with a recession, brands should focus on fundamental changes that save money and drive efficiency while seeking ways to get more out of their data, technology and ad spend, writes Nancy Marzouk, CEO and founder of MediaWallah.

Goodway Group has chosen Jay Friedman as CEO. Friedman assumes the chief executive position after more than 16 years at the company, most recently as president. Former CEO David Wolk moves into the role of executive chairman.

“‘Cookieless’ is just a buzzword,” said Sanup Pillai, DHL’s global head of digital marketing and mar tech tells AdExchanger. “I wouldn’t say we’re getting ready for the ‘cookieless future’ as much as that we’re taking this opportunity to future-proof our technology stack.”

UK-based publisher LADbible Group is testing post-cookie alternatives and building its contextual targeting capabilities. But the social-first publisher has yet to be convinced that any of these alternatives will be a truly viable replacement for the much-maligned – and yet still widely used – third-party cookie.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A New Day, A New Apple Apple engineers are preparing to support third-party app stores on iPhones and iPads, Bloomberg reports.  But this is not a change of heart on Apple’s part. Apple is simply following the law. A new rule in the […]

In 1973, Timberland – then called Abington Shoe Company – debuted its waterproof yellow boots. In 2023, the outdoor apparel and accessories company will observe the boot’s 50th anniversary. And Ezra Martin, Timberland’s newly minted vice president of marketing, Americas, will be rolling out a new marketing strategy for the occasion. Martin shares his insights on personalized customer experiences, localized campaigns and more.

Fingerprinting, an alternative to third-party cookies, uses a constellation of browser signals to identify a person. The browsers don’t like it, but can they actually stamp it out? Plus: Advertising will grow, albeit slowly, in 2023, according to recent ad agency forecasts.

Android has a Privacy Sandbox, too, and it’s going into open beta next year. Learn why this initiative isn’t generating the same ruckus as its close Chrome cousin, which is being hashed out at the W3C. Plus: a rundown on transparency (or the lack thereof) and the related data land grab in CTV.

Political advertising is in full swing for the US midterm elections. We go deep into where candidates are spending their digital ad dollars and how they’re using data, with special guest Grace Briscoe, who oversees some 850 ad campaigns as head of political business for Basis.

Google isn’t bluffing about quitting its third-party cookie habit. That’s because consumer concerns about data privacy and pressure from regulators around the globe have left Google with no choice but to discontinue third-party cookie usage in Chrome, said Dan Taylor, VP of global ads at Google, at AdExchanger Programmatic I/O conference in New York City on Monday.

Google Topics is Google’s proposed replacement, which takes us back in time to broad, interest-based segmented targeting. This means brands are about to return to the “bad old days” of marketing, when many audiences all saw the same message. And this one-message-fits-most approach doesn’t fix what’s fundamentally broken in MADTech: the consumer experience, writes Tara DeZao, director of product marketing, MarTech and AdTech, at Pega.

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.