Identity

Lots of first-time advertisers are heading to the Super Bowl this year: electric vehicle makers, crypto brands … and Criteo? It’s hard to imagine a bigger stage for a company that usually operates behind the scenes.

With cookies (finally) cooling off, contextual targeting tech is starting to heat up. On Tuesday, ShowHeroes Group, a video and contextual targeting tech provider based in Europe, announced its acquisition of cross-screen ad platform smartclip LATAM (as in Latin America). The rationale behind the deal is to help ShowHeroes Group bring its solution to the […]

Google’s Topics API was, well, a very hot topic last week. Ad tech companies and publishers jumped all over the proposal after it was announced, many with critical takes on the kinks that need to be worked out.

Google tells its side of the story in a motion to dismiss the antitrust case it’s facing – but where does the truth lie? Also: Google unveils its cookie-free Topics API, a rundown on California’s follow-up privacy law (CPRA) and a quick explainer on the latest privacy bill to hit the Hill: the ominously named Banning Surveillance Advertising Act.

The Privacy Sandbox is bursting with news this week. On Thursday, Google shared a slightly more concrete testing timeline for its FLEDGE and Core Attribution reporting API. Two days before, on Tuesday, Google announced the Topics API, a new proposal for post-cookie interest-based advertising that now replaces FLoC. Google, which teased earlier this week that […]

On Tuesday, just a few days after filing a motion to dismiss the state AG-led antitrust lawsuit against its advertising business, Google announced Topics, a new proposal for the Privacy Sandbox that replaces the FLoC API, which is being sent to bird heaven.

With the looming threat of privacy crackdowns across the globe – and big platform changes coming – contextual advertising is starting to look pretty good again. And not just on the open web – on TV, too. On Wednesday, Precise TV, a kid-safe contextual advertising platform for YouTube, announced a partnership with video data platform […]

It’s time to stop talking and start doing. That’s the raison d’être, in a nutshell, behind a new community group – the Private Advertising Technology Community Group – housed within the World Wide Web Consortium.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Neeva Have I Eeva Paid To Search  The search engine startup Neeva launched its $5 per-month tier on Wednesday, Fast Company reports.  It’s small news – Neeva has some hundreds of thousands of users – but it’s an important marker because at least someone’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Relay Interference  Mobile carriers hate Apple iCloud Private Relay, an iOS 15 feature that encrypts location data, IP addresses and Safari traffic so that no companies, including Apple, can track web usage. In Europe, four carriers – ​​T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone and Telefónica – are […]

Usually, when people talk to their TV screen, they don’t expect to get an answer back. Voice assistant and smart TV startup Disruptel is aiming to change that with a contextual awareness product for smart TVs called Smart Screen. The company has been beta testing the software, which answers a viewer’s questions about their programming […]

Change is coming to online identity, writes Anthony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab. Resist the urge to plan based on hope or cynicism. Instead, focus on a defensible approach, whether you’re creating audiences as a publisher or connecting audiences between an advertiser and a publisher.

Marketing on the web is undergoing a monumental shift as third-party cookies are phased out. But the real problem is that our industry has gotten so used to them that we’ve missed an important fact: Cookies were never intended to do the heavy lifting we’ve come to rely on, writes Erica Schmidt, Global CEO of Matterkind.

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

A picture – or a comic in this case – is worth a thousand words. But each of our most popular comics of 2021 illustrated a key development in the world of advertising and media this year, from the end of last-click attribution and the growth of CTV to mega media mergers and the birds in Google’s Privacy Sandbox. These are the stories behind our top comics of the past year.

The ripple effects of Google’s decisions dominated AdExchanger’s top story list in 2021.

That’s A Wrapped If you were on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok last week, you probably saw the Spotify Wrapped feature, an annual breakdown of each user’s most listened to songs and programs for the year. That roundup is then shared on social media, with captions like, “Spotify thinks I need therapy.”  Every year, Spotify […]

Criteo is buying IPONWEB, the engineering company that built most of the underlying infrastructure for the ad tech ecosystem. The deal represents a huge chess move on the part of Criteo. So, what does Criteo get from acquiring the company responsible for building the foundation of programmatic advertising as it exists today?

Amazon The Impervious Google and Facebook are reeling from data privacy changes. Tim Cook warned investors that Apple underestimated part shortages and would not meet demand until next year. Macy’s slimmed its store inventory. Disney’s production schedules are delayed by months and even years. And Amazon is – doing great. The ongoing supply-chain drama, COVID-19 fallout […]

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the tentpoles that kick off that final stretch of Q4 spanning Thanksgiving and Christmas. But this Black Friday/Cyber Monday combo was not as record-setting as in years past, according to Adobe and others who track sales data. There are many reasons behind this change. Not only has the pandemic […]

Roast turkey wasn’t the only thing to gorge on this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s top antitrust regulator, published a 125-page document outlining the next phase of its ongoing antitrust investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox. (You can read the whole shebang here.) The document contains an updated set […]

Although privacy and online advertising are often framed as mortal enemies – or at least mutually exclusive – it doesn’t have to be the case, says Lindsey Shepard, CMO of Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser. “The advertising ecosystem online is fundamentally broken right now – I believe that,” says Shepard (although, you can call her “Shep”). […]

The Location Equation Location data companies have seen an uptick in inquiries from government officials and public health groups, The Washington Post reports. It’s no surprise – health officials and local governments had to track the effects of quarantine measures as well as next-order impacts on public services, such as transportation. Though the applications are […]

The direct-to-consumer cookware company Made In noticed its social media dashboards went a bit screwy after Apple tightened its privacy controls this year. Luckily, Made In uses all of its own dashboards – which didn’t go haywire – and tracks identity changes closely, CEO Chip Malt shares as special guest on this week’s The Big […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Big Game Amazon CEO Andy Jessy (Jeff who?) issued a bold statement at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle this week. “In the case of games, we have a belief that that could end up being the largest category in entertainment over a long period […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Creative Galaxy Snap is fending off competitors with new money-making tools for creators, Variety reports. Next month, Snapchat will launch Spotlight Challenges, cash bonuses ranging from $1,000 to $25,000 for accounts with top views in categories like “Best Trick Shot.” The tool is a […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Andrew Frank, VP distinguished analyst at Gartner. As yesterday’s cross-domain tracking methods fade into history, the entire digital ad community is casting around for a suitable replacement – and marketers trying to navigate through the […]

With your permission, please endure yet one more Privacy Sandbox-related bird reference: Chrome’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposal will not fly in its current form. “We’ve got a long road to hoe before it’s possible to prove this can be a working model for advertising,” said Todd Parsons, chief product officer at Criteo. The […]

What is privacy? Turns out, there’s no easy answer, even for David Temkin, Google’s senior director of product management for ads privacy and user trust. “Privacy is not itself quantifiable. It’s a subjective sense; it’s relative to people’s expectations,” Temkin says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “[Privacy is] relative to what they understand […]

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