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

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Race To 5G  Sprint and T-Mobile’s $26 billion merger was approved by the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday. The vote came in 3-2 along party lines, with both Democratic commissioners opposing the deal. The companies still face a legal battle from state attorneys […]

Change is in the air. To wit, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, topping the polls of Democratic presidential candidates, has made the breakup of big tech into a pet issue on the campaign trail. At the same time, regulatory and privacy concerns are driving state legislation that could transform the way consumer data is collected and, thus, […]

Neal Richter, has been elected chairman of the IAB Tech Lab, the industry group said Thursday. Richter has been a leader within the Tech Lab for years, helping develop IAB openRTB specs since their first iteration, and helming recent initiatives like Ads.txt and Sellers.json. It’s been a productive year for Richter, since he took on […]

Ad tech company Ad/Fin ceased business operations on Friday after a tumultuous few years of existence. Launched in 2012 as a tool to benchmark pricing data in programmatic media, Ad/Fin made enemies of the agency holding companies when it teamed up with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Ebiquity on a 2016 report uncovering […]

Diageo has an internal mantra: “Responsible media performs.” “When was the last time irresponsibly sourced media was good for anybody?” said Joshua Nafman, head of global media buying and operations at Diageo, on stage at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in New York on Wednesday. Yet, ad buyers hunting for scale have spent years avoiding the […]

There was a time when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was glib when people asked about the competition. He’d point to sleep and video games like Fortnite as the streaming giant’s main rivals for attention. But on Netflix’s third quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Hastings was a lot less flip. “Disney will be a great competitor […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.  Today’s column is written by Erin Essex, product design manager at Shutterstock. Like chess, cooking and skiing, user experience (UX) can be easily understood but hard to master. It’s simple to comprehend, right? An app […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Ronan Higgins, CEO at TVadSync. The MRC recently released final standards for cross-media audience measurement of TV and Video. These standards will require work for all players in the market to get a passing grade, including […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. CMO A Go-Go Dunkin’ CMO Tony Weisman will step down in December after a busy two years at the company. Weisman oversaw a major rebrand (from “Dunkin’ Donuts” to its more general coffee and food focus today), as well as the first overhaul of […]

Privacy’s growing impact on targeted advertising is creating unprecedented challenges for marketers. One underlying reason contributing to the stress: Marketers feel betrayed by big data, said Andrew Frank, VP distinguished analyst for Gartner. “Big data was supposed to give us this scalable customer intimacy, this ability as marketers to know exactly what to sell to […]

Reprise is a specialty agency born in the age of channel planning. What started as a search specialty shop combined in 2018 with IPG mobile agency Ansible and social agency Society as audience-based buying took off. While channel expertise still remained relevant, distinguishing agency services by channels didn’t resonate as much with clients. So when […]

This article is sponsored by Facebook. More than 2.7 billion people now use Facebook and its family of platforms – including Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp – every month.[1] In this age of platform-based interactions, Facebook ad campaigns and customer service features are no longer a “nice-to-have,” they have become a necessary touchpoint to build customer […]

As media properties march to the drumbeat of revenue diversification, many are pursuing affiliate revenue aggressively. Meanwhile, Ziff Media Group has run a thriving affiliate commerce business for years, all the while increasing its level of data-driven sophistication. Ziff Media Group drives $1 billion in last-click attributed revenue a year. In contrast, BuzzFeed’s business totaled […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Welcome To The Jungle Safari introduced a new private browsing mode that disables the now-common tactic among news companies of blocking incognito traffic, which they do because readers use private browsing to avoid paywalls. “This will lead to a hard paywall for all readers […]

This article is sponsored by Oracle Data Cloud. The digital world can be a scary place, so it’s no wonder that brands and agencies are clamoring to find solutions that protect brand equity without sacrificing the scale advertisers need to stay top of mind for consumers. In doing so, many are relying on stringent keyword […]

Contextual targeting is all the rage – and no, it’s not 1998. It’s 2019, and the industry is anxiously casting around for an alternative to third-party cookies as the browsers clamp down on cross-site tracking and regulatory pressure ratchets up in the United States and around the world. A shift away from audience-based buying is […]

Google is still by far the dominant player in search advertising, but Amazon is quickly stealing share as it grows in the number two spot. Amazon’s search business will grow 30% in 2019 to $7 billion, making up 13% of the total US search market, according to a forecast released Tuesday by eMarketer. That’s peanuts […]

Chipotle delivers. Getting customers to switch to online ordering has been a key part of Chipotle’s brand transformation. Digital sales soared 100% YoY for the first half of 2019. That metric, along with an increase in same-store sales, doubled its stock price. Chipotle’s app enables in-store pick-ups or, through a DoorDash partnership, delivery requests. And […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Eric Berry, co-founder and CEO at TripleLift. There are several intersecting issues relating to identity in ad tech today. The challenge is that the solutions often fail to align directly […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Rebate Redux Media agencies are paying settlements to clients as a result of contract audits sparked by the ANA’s 2016 transparency report, AdAge reports. Nearly 100 audits have taken place, but it’s not clear which clients or agencies are involved or if any money […]

Tubi is creating a dedicated kids section, Tubi Kids, on Oct. 21 – just weeks before Disney+ launches on Nov. 12.  The ad-supported kids content will be COPPA-compliant, meaning that buyers won’t be able to do any kind of behavioral targeting for the ads. Programmatic bid requests will be stripped of any kind of behavioral […]

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is almost baked. On Friday, two days before the Oct. 13 deadline for his blessing, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills into law that augment and bolster the CCPA. The bills, which were sitting on his desk since the state legislature closed its 2019 session on Sept. 13, […]

Lying in digital advertisements has become a flashpoint in US politics this year. A running dispute between Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Facebook ratcheted up this weekend, after the Massachusetts senator posted an ad on the social platform featuring a lie that Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Donald Trump for reelection. “You’re probably […]

If TikTok is still proving its value as a marketing platform, despite skyrocketing popularity among Gen Z, it got a huge boost in October when the cosmetics company e.l.f. ran a sponsored hashtag challenge, #eyeslipsface, that amassed 1.6 billion views in just over a week. Two factors led to e.l.f’s success on TikTok: showing up […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. Today’s column is written by Sean Buckley, chief revenue officer at SpotX. The streaming wars have taken a nostalgic turn over the past few months. Subscription services are inking billion-dollar deals for beloved sitcoms such as “Friends,” “Seinfeld” and […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.  Today’s column is written by Mukund Ramachandran, chief marketing officer at Dynamic Yield. Breakneck innovation in ecommerce has flipped the fundamental calculus of retail and punished brands unable to adapt. With once-dominant brands such as Payless […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. McDermott Out Bill McDermott is stepping down as CEO of SAP after nine years leading the company. He will be succeeded by board members and longtime SAP execs Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein, and he will remain as an adviser until the end of […]

Bryson Gordon leads advanced advertising initiatives at Viacom. Catch him at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO New York on Oct 15-16. Ahead of its planned merger with CBS, Viacom is scaling up new, more data-driven models for TV advertising. Its Vantage product offers impression guarantees against narrowly defined audience segments. Vantage was the brainchild of Bryson […]

Hey, CCPA-heads, the moment you’ve been waiting months for has arrived. The California attorney general’s office on Thursday published the first draft of its implementation regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act. [Click here to read the full text.] The purpose of the regulations is to operationalize the law and provide practical guidance. It’s the […]