Measurement

Retail media is reaching the C-suite, with advertising (and first-party data projects) coming up in retailer earnings. Then, we talk about the $16 billion deal to buy Nielsen. 

Nielsen announced it’s selling itself to a private equity group for $16 billion. The future might be iffy for Nielsen, but it’s much more certain for the rest of the industry. Industry experts say a buyout of this size is a “boost of momentum” toward a multicurrency future that offers TV marketers the speed and transparency they’re looking for across platforms.

Kelly Abcarian joined NBCU last year to lead a team tasked with disrupting the measurement status quo. “Marketers don’t buy ratings,” Abcarian says on this week’s episode. “They buy results.” NBCU’s roster of alternative measurement and audience verification providers now includes seven partners – and counting.

Although cookies will soon be off the menu and mobile identifiers are under fire, advertisers are taking their sweet time to cook up alternatives. Two-thirds of marketers say they’ve hit pause on actively transitioning from third-party identifiers, according to a new survey from Advertiser Perceptions.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Keep It Clean Clean room?  More like a mud room. It’s where people can leave their “dirty” (read: private first-party) data without ruining the rest of the house.  The marketer point of view often goes something like this: “‘Our data is going to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Dos Va Donya IPONWEB founder and CEO Boris Mouzykantskii published an open letter and update on the company’s actions since the start of the war in Ukraine.  There was theoretical concern the war would be a wrench in the $380 million acquisition of IPONWEB […]

It’s a familiar story – He picked up a new pandemic hobby, while finding pockets of time away from small children. For Neil Hoyne, Google chief measurement strategist, being stuck at home meant writing a book. Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts, was published last month. “The single lesson that pulls through here is that a lot of these changes are easier for companies to realize then what they may suspect.”

CTV is the hot new programmatic media channel, but it suffers from fraud, a lack of clear media-buying signals and a hodgepodge of approaches to measurement. The lack of standards is hampering market growth – but rather than waiting for standards to be handed down, publishers can create positive momentum with media buyers now, writes PubMatic’s Nicole Scaglione.

Google’s communications on the Topics API in the Chrome Privacy Sandbox suggest a broad, coarse-grained approach to targeting. But the limited information shared to date leaves many questions unanswered, writes Eric Schmitt, research director at Gartner.

The biggest reason marketers aren’t shifting their linear TV dollars to CTV is the lack of visibility into where their ads are going, said Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of Integral Ad Science. In attempt to bridge that gap, IAS is tying its contextual tech into its CTV strategy, which started maturing after the company bought the video ad server Publica last summer.

McDonald’s has been criticized for alleged bias against Black-owned media. But McDonald’s recently struck a multiyear advertising deal with Pod Digital Media (PDM) as part of an effort to increase its ad spend with minority content creators and expand its reach with diverse audiences.

This week, Disney is hosting its Platform Tech Showcase, the second such product reveal since launching the Disney Real-Time Ad Exchange (DRAX) last year with a plan to automate as much of its ad sales business as possible.

TV measurement is reaching an inflection point. But with all the saturation, there’s at least one thing most competing measurement providers can agree on: the importance of independent accreditation.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Working Their Retails Off Retail media is in growth-stage limbo. Retailers have flooded the category with no guarantee advertising will pay off.  The latest is the craft store Michaels, which launched a retail media platform on Wednesday in partnership with Criteo. Amazon sets the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Time Is Money The olds may see a TikTok feed and think, “Who can keep up with that?!” But TikTok knows that many of its younger users routinely watch the app at double speed.  TikTok’s internal user surveys and data reveal a tween/teen generation […]

In the past month, there’s been a flurry of Privacy Sandbox-related news. Are we on the brink of adopting universal standards for targeting and measurement? Salesforce’s Martin Kihn says “Not quite.”

The first meeting of the W3C Private Advertising Technology Group (PATCG) took place this week, bringing together the biggest American browser and tech companies. One important new item on the agenda is called Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA), a joint proposal by Mozilla and Meta engineers. If adopted, it would improve cross-device or cross-browser attribution tracking without tripping any of Apple or browser-based privacy policies. That’s a big “if” though. And, even optimistically, could take years to ship.

What happens when the CEOs of Nielsen, Comscore and VideoAmp walk into a bar? … is nearly a joke you could have told on Tuesday. That’s when David Kenny, Nielsen’s CEO; Bill Livek, chief exec at Comscore; and VideoAmp CEO Ross McCray took to the stage at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting to talk measurement […]

Nielsen has always “had a challenge with counting appropriately,” says Andrea Zapata, head of research, data and insights at WarnerMedia Ad Sales. That’s why WarnerMedia is going big on alternatives: VideoAmp, iSpot and Comscore.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Google’s Privacy Shield … And Sword Google businesses have become more and more tightly tied together. The common thread is often privacy, but sometimes Google Cloud is the tie that binds.  You can see the trend surfacing on the bottom line. During earnings this […]

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

Connected TV could learn from linear’s simplicity. As CTV becomes a dominant platform, advertisers should consider the ingredients that have enabled traditional TV to thrive for as long as it has, writes Joe Hirsch, general manager of SpringServe.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. LOL Remember Comscore Rankings? Digital publishing is in a period of self-reflection. Instead of bragging about mass reach, the new norm will be looking at rational numbers to evaluate reach and readership, writes Brian Morrissey, former president and editor-in-chief of Digiday who now writes […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Roku And Nielsen, Rating In A Tree …  … M-E-A-S-U-R-I-N-G. Jokes aside, Roku has launched Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings on OneView, the rebranded dataxu DSP it acquired in 2019.  With the partnership, Roku can promise that advertisers licensing the data only pay for […]

You’ve probably heard the term “surveillance advertising” – used with increasing frequency – in reference to companies with an Orwellian agenda to keep tabs on you at all times. See the recently introduced Banning Surveillance Advertising Act. Minus the hyperbole, surveillance advertising is the practice of serving ads to individuals based on their personal information. But […]

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 […]

During the Summer Olympics, iSpot went for gold – and won. The alternate measurement provider bested more than 50 companies NBCUniversal was trialing as a currency alternative to Nielsen. The testing ground? NBCU’s tentpole global sports event. “NBC didn’t just invite companies to submit RFP responses,” said Sean Muller, founder and CEO of iSpot.tv. “It […]

The era of single-currency television advertising is over. With billions in advertising dollars at stake, marketers must now use multiple premium video currencies to determine the effectiveness and value of their ads, writes Kevin Krim, CEO of EDO.

Media industry influencers wrote books about the impact of reach and the importance of reach over frequency. Even today, as media agencies share strategies to combine live/linear with streaming, the discussion often centers on “incremental reach.” But here’s the thing. Just about any reach calculation you see is an illusion, writes Marilois Snowman, CEO and founder of Mediastruction.

The programmatic advertising landscape has never faced more complexity or challenges than it does today. However, at the same time, the opportunity for growth and refinement has never been greater. Here’s how marketers can take advantage of key trends shaping the space in 2022 and beyond, writes Sameer Sondhi, Co-CEO at Verve Group.