Measurement

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Hold, Please The former Trump administration’s plan to force the sale of TikTok’s US operations to Oracle and Walmart has been put on ice – again. President Biden is reevaluating his predecessor’s efforts to address potential security risks from Chinese tech companies, The Wall […]

LiveRamp has locked in a deal to acquire Silicon Valley-based tech startup DataFleets for $68 million. DataFleets has a cloud-based technology that allows businesses to securely merge and analyze data in a privacy-safe way. The acquisition is part of LiveRamp’s growing focus on data protection capabilities. As part of the deal, which includes some assumed equity […]

AppLovin’s recent acquisition of mobile attribution provider Adjust for $1 billion is evidence that M&A doesn’t necessarily decline in times of uncertainty. The mobile advertising ecosystem may be in a holding pattern waiting for Apple to release its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, which should finally happen by March or early April. But the fact that Apple’s […]

Uncertainty related to iOS 14 caused Snap’s stock to slip in after hours-trading despite beating expectations for user growth and revenue in Q4 2020. Snap added 156 million daily active users in the quarter for a total of 265 million, a 22% increase year over year. Full-year 2020 revenue was $2.5 billion, up 46% YoY, […]

Apple appears to be providing its homegrown ad network with more granular measurement functionality that what everyone else will get through SKAdNetwork. Specifically, the Apple Ads Attribution API payload field will include two parameters that are important for optimization – creativeSet ID and keywordID – but totally absent from SKAdNetwork postbacks. Without creativeSetID, advertisers won’t know which […]

AppLovin has struck again. Bloomberg scooped late Wednesday afternoon that AppLovin is on the cusp of acquiring mobile app attribution startup Adjust for $1 billion. The news was confirmed by AppLovin in a press release. [Read the release]. AppLovin is an app marketing platform that helps advertisers automate their user acquisition and re-engagment campaigns. Adjust, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Cookie Drama In the wake of multiple antitrust lawsuits and a US congressional probe, Google’s attempt to get rid of the third-party cookie is attracting regulatory attention, Digiday reports. On Jan. 8, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation into whether Chrome’s […]

Facebook began testing a new in-app screen Monday that will appear before the opt-in prompt required in iOS 14 apps by Apple’s upcoming AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) policy. The test will roll out globally across both Instagram and the core Facebook app. The additional prompt is meant to provide more information about Facebook’s privacy controls and how […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brand Safe? With brands and agencies calling on social media platforms to ensure ads aren’t adjacent to harmful content, Facebook announced that it’s building a tool for advertisers to keep their ad placements away from certain topics in its News Feed. Per CNBC, the […]

Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts. Our guest this week, Manu Mathew, got in on the ground floor of multi-touch attribution (MTA) when he founded Visual IQ. The MTA company rose with the programmatic tide before being acquired by Nielsen in 2017. The category […]

SKAdNetwork is entering its final form, though details are scant. Apple recently updated its page dedicated to user privacy and data use to reflect its plan to add support for view-through attribution for video, audio and interactive ads in apps by “early spring” 2021. Apple will tie these attribution capabilities to creative measurement, so developers […]

Google announced this week that its federated learning of cohorts sandbox proposal (FLoC) is nearly as effective as cookie-based advertising. And the rest of the ad industry collectively said, “Whaaaaaat?” Needless to say, there’s a lot to unpack behind all the hype. This week on The Big Story, the team welcomes Flashtalking CEO John Nardone […]

Developers, mark your calendars for, eh, “early spring.” That’s when Apple will start requiring apps and advertisers to get permission before they can use the IDFA for tracking and ad targeting. After leaving developers on tenterhooks for months, Apple finally shared its broad timeline for AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) implementation in a blog post on Thursday, which […]

Apparently IDFA can move stock prices. Although Facebook had a damned good Q4, with ad revenue up more than 30% year-over-year to $28.1 billion – its fastest growth rate in more than two years – the stock fell nearly 4% in after-hours trading. Why? Because the ad targeting-related headwinds that Facebook CFO Dave Wehner has been referring […]

Google shared a glimpse of its AppTrackingTransparency plan on Wednesday, but offered few details about exactly how it’s readying itself for Apple’s IDFA changes. Google did acknowledge that publishers “may see” (ahem, will likely see) a palpable impact on their Google ad revenue on iOS once Apple’s policies take effect due to reduced visibility into […]

So few publishers and advertisers are ready for Apple’s forthcoming IDFA changes that mobile DSP Jampp had to develop its own app just to run live tests of SKAdNetwork. SKAdNetwork is Apple’s privacy preserving attribution API for iOS 14. Once Apple implements its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, which will require advertisers and publishers to get an […]

Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts. AdExchanger readers may recall the story of AdFin, which set out to build a Bloomberg terminal-style dashboard for advertising that pipes in log-level data to offer clients a holistic view of their supply chain. AdFin tried to serve […]

Here’s something for an investor to bring up on Facebook’s next earnings call on Wednesday: Apple’s upcoming IDFA changes could have a significant impact on Facebook’s revenue – as much as 7% of total revenue in Q2. That’s according to Eric Seufert, a mobile consultant and investor and editor of Mobile Dev Memo. Doing a little back-of-the-napkin […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Time To Reassess Marketers were hawkeyed in the lead-up to Inauguration Day on Wednesday, ready to pause, tweak or block ads from appearing against problematic content should things have gone sideways, Digiday reports. While some marketers said they planned to stick to blunt tactics, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. U & Me And UID 2.0 Welcome to the Unified ID 2.0 cocktail party, SpotX. The video SSP, which is owned by RTL, is the latest company to sign up in support of UID 2.0, the open source industry initiative originally spearheaded by The […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Canceling The Don The bans and account suspensions just keep on coming for President Trump. On Tuesday, YouTube said that it has suspended his channel for at least a week, The New York Times reports. YouTube, which has typically been fairly slow to crack […]

Comscore released a solution for audience targeting and activation on Monday that relies on contextual signals rather than cookies. You’d be forgiven for asking the question, “Wait, Comscore has tools for targeting?” It does. Although far more well well-known for its media measurement capabilities, Comscore has had its own suite of audience and contextual targeting […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Built On Sand? The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching an investigation into Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome, CNBC reports. The CMA says it’s received several complaints about how Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals will impact competition. One of […]

“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 Alan Chapell, president at Chapell & Associates. Like most of you, I’ve been following Google’s announcement of the Privacy Sandbox, the eventual depreciation of third-parties cookies in Chrome and the […]

Although it’s too early to predict how the antitrust lawsuits filed against Google and Facebook late last year will play out, one immediate outcome is more awareness of how digital advertising functions. “Many of the topics we’ve been so obsessed with in the ad tech industry are no longer just being talked about within the […]

Unity Technologies raised more than $1.3 billion during its IPO in September at a $13.6 billion valuation, proof positive that the gaming industry isn’t playing around. Roughly 750,000 creators, mainly game developers, use the Unity platform to build their apps, and Unity’s game engine powers game titles played on billions of devices around the world, […]

2020 brought an identity crisis to the online advertising industry. The year started with Google answering the until-then theoretical question of what might happen to third-party cookies at some unknown point in the distant future. In July, Apple made a similar move with the announcement that its proprietary mobile device ID, the IDFA, would soon […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Jedi Mind Trick? More details are coming out about Google and Facebook’s alleged sweetheart deal to rig Google’s ad auction. The tech giants agreed to “cooperate and assist one another” if they ever faced an investigation into their pact, according to an unredacted version […]

The brand client has become the agency CEO. In mid-December, former Electronic Arts marketer Belinda Smith was appointed as CEO of the Americas at media agency m/SIX, a joint venture backed by The&Partnership and GroupM, and also one of EA’s external agency partners. That’s how Smith met the crew at m/Six, where she’ll now oversee […]

For a company generating tens of billions of dollars in advertising revenue, Facebook’s attribution offerings are highly reliant on cookies and pixels. This can lead to inaccurate reports that sometimes underreport conversions. Thinkster, for example, an AI-based math tutoring app, typically spends between 90% and 95% of its ad budget on Facebook. But Facebook’s attribution […]