Measurement

As advertising spend ramps up during Q4, bad actors respond in kind. Attracted by increased ad budget, fraudsters hide their chicanery within the burst of year-end marketing activity. And shorter campaign flights during the holidays mean advertisers don’t have time to check for weird patterns or increased bot activity. “If you’re running a campaign over […]

Is enabling age targeting for online recruitment ads a form of discrimination? Facebook, called out by ProPublica and The New York Times on Wednesday for the practice, says no. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason,” Rob Goldman, Facebook’s VP of ads, responded in a blog […]

Edible Arrangements is best known for its fresh fruit and chocolate arrangements, many of which are gifted at the last minute for holidays or anniversaries. Although 65% of Edible Arrangement’s business comes from ecommerce, the brand wants to drive visits – particularly from repeat customers – into its 1,200 local store franchises. “No one’s going […]

In the words of Jon Stimmel, the chief investment officer for UM Worldwide, planning an over-the-top (OOT) ad campaign is “a Frankenstein of different methodologies mixed together.” He added, while speaking last week at the Videonuze Shift summit in New York, that buyers need more automation in the OTT planning process: “We are recreating the […]

New York Life is in the insurance business – but the brand also has to protect itself. Marketers today have several metrics to juggle in their digital buys: Fraud, viewability and context top the list. But it’s not enough to monitor these metrics; brands need to take action. Natan Cohen, New York Life’s corporate VP of […]

Will Dmexco become a no-go? Late last week, the organizers of the Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference (Dmexco) in Germany abruptly severed ties with the show’s two co-founders, Christian Muche and Frank Schneider, sparking concerns over Dmexco’s future. Reports alleged that Dmexco’s organizer and the event’s trademark holders had parted ways with Muche and Schneider’s consulting […]

The ad server SpotX and ad verification company DoubleVerify have flagged a new type of fraud they’re calling “verification stripping.” DoubleVerify says the new method may be responsible for up to 10% of ad fraud spikes it identifies. Verification stripping happens when fraudsters hinder the transmission of network calls between the ad server and measurement […]

When Snap acquired location-based data company Placed over the summer, agencies got excited about the prospect of intermingling the data sets – but that won’t be happening anytime soon. Placed will not share any advertiser or partner data with Snap, Placed CEO and founder David Shim told AdExchanger. “Keeping the data set separate is important if […]

Like any good media planner, fraudsters are attuned to time of year, seasonality, demographics, ad formats and trends in consumer behavior. With football season and the MLB playoffs in full swing, they seem to have turned their attention to pro sports sites. “We see a lot of sophisticated invalid traffic targeting premium sites,” said Amit […]

Although Netflix’s audience is large (and growing), it’s notoriously hard to measure. Nielsen hopes to remove some of the difficulty gauging audience viewership in ad-free environments like Netflix with its launch Wednesday of a syndicated measurement service called Nielsen Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) Content Ratings. Eight networks and studios, including A&E, Disney-ABC, Lionsgate, NBCUniversal […]

Although the industry is settling on a few practical uses for beacons, primarily as a helpmate for attribution, they’re just one marketing data point among many – a tactic. “Beacons are only one piece of the equation, a component of a larger effort,” said Chris Cunningham, CRO of proximity and location data aggregator Unacast. “There are […]

About a year and a half ago, global beauty manufacturer Coty realized it needed to get a grip on its own data. The company was about to complete a merger with several P&G specialty beauty brands and become a $9 billion global business. And since Coty was expanding its portfolio, pressure was mounting because each […]

For Gabrielle Rossetti, leading innovation and strategy for Havas sometimes means acting as a scout on behalf of brand clients. Even if a tool doesn’t fit into a client’s tactical tool kit, Rossetti’s team can help them build a blueprint for the future. “It’s about helping them understand where they can innovate and the technologies […]

Paid search influences offline conversions, but there’s been no good way to measure that impact. That’s because paid search, a market expected to top $36 billion this year, according to eMarketer, has been primarily used as a direct response channel, said David Shim, CEO and founder of Placed. The Snap-owned location data company released an […]

Nielsen entered into a definitive agreement on Wednesday to acquire indie attribution company Visual IQ. Terms of the deal, expected to close in October, were not disclosed. The 10-year-old Visual IQ should enhance Nielsen’s measurement offering with deeper multitouch attribution. The goal is to give “advertisers, publishers and agencies a holistic platform that offers the […]

Facebook updated its targeting policies on Wednesday in the wake of the racist and anti-Semitic ad targeting scandal, first reported by ProPublica. COO Sheryl Sandberg clarified Facebook’s position in a post and laid out its three-pronged approach to running a tighter ship. Following the exposé and attendant public backlash, Facebook disabled the self-reported targeting fields […]

Slideshows have been hurt by growing demand for viewable inventory, as readers rarely scroll down and often click to the next slide before ads load. Topix, which buys traffic to slideshows that rack up tons of page views, was affected by this shift. Four months ago, the site’s viewability hovered around 40%, so programmatic buyers […]

More than half of bookings at Motel 6 happen on the same day as arrival. That means most of the budget hotel chain’s customers are on the road when they make their decision to stay the night, so the booking experience has to be as frictionless as possible, said Jeff Thomas, director of ecommerce and […]

In its short, two-year lifespan, FuboTV, a streaming video service specializing in live sports content, has mostly monetized through paid subscriptions. But after raising a $55 million Series C round in June – and pushing to grow subscribers for its new skinny bundle, Fubo Premier – it’s turned its attention to its tech stack. FuboTV […]

Google’s latest anti-fraud measure aims to stamp out ad fraud by clawing back money from the exchanges where its DSP purchased fraudulent inventory. In Q4, DoubleClick Bid Manager will give advertisers the option to buy only from exchanges that will refund media spend for fraudulent inventory. Over the past month, Google’s DSP has issued advertisers […]

Although the Video Player Ad-Serving Interface (VPAID) was meant to create better measurement in online video, it’s not that compatible with mobile video or OTT. “Everyone wants to measure [viewability] and they’re giving us VPAID tags, but VPAID doesn’t work in all environments,” said Soo Jin Oh, VP of client strategy for Cox Media’s digital […]

WPP’s media-buying unit GroupM on Thursday unveiled its own global viewability standard for display and video ads on social media feeds. Display ads must be 100% in view for one second before a user scrolls past to count as viewable. Video ads still have to be 100% in view, but can be initiated as autoplay […]

In the two years since the Trustworthy Accountability Group got off the ground, the industrywide fraud-fighting coalition has received more than 350 applications from companies within and outside the United States for TAG registration to get verified as a trusted partner. As of this time last year, the registration count was only about 100 mostly […]

Ever click on an ad by mistake? You and the rest of internet-connected humanity. On Tuesday, Facebook said it’s going to stop counting those errant clicks in its reporting for ads served through Audience Network and start barring publishers from including clickable white space in the background of their native ads. Beginning next week, if […]

Mobile app install ads are still a multibillion-dollar business for Facebook. But is Facebook taking too much credit? It’s hard to say, because Facebook is what’s known as a self-attributing network, i.e., a walled garden. A self-attributing network is just what it sounds like: a platform that, usually because of its scale, has the power […]

Because 30-50% of direct campaigns on Business Insider transact on a viewable CPM, getting those campaigns to deliver the contracted amount without wasting inventory helps the publisher’s bottom line. Making sure campaigns deliver within those stringent requirements – including 100% viewability – is one of the jobs of Marc Boswell, SVP of revenue operations and […]

Nielsen’s specialty is media measurement, not mar tech. But a slew of new Nielsen Marketing Cloud wins may help change that perception. Despite the presence of data management platforms from Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle, Nielsen Marketing Cloud just had its largest-ever quarter for new DMP client wins since it acquired eXelate in 2015. CPG marketers […]

Charter, the US cable conglomerate second only to Comcast in subscriber count, has made a strategic investment in 605 Group, the TV analytics startup founded by former Cablevision ad execs. Although financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Charter has struck a strategic data partnership with 605 to provide access to TV viewing data in […]

While mobile app advertising is in dire need of standards, that prospect is easier said than done. Confusion and wrongheadedness in the industry is rife, even among user acquisition specialists. “Ask a room full of UA managers to explain how mobile tracking works and I think most won’t be able to explain the whole process,” […]

DoubleVerify is looking for a home. AdExchanger has learned that the independent verification company recently hired a banker from tech-focused investment firm Pacific Crest Securities. Final bids were due Tuesday, and sources tell AdExchanger the deal price could be somewhere in the $350 million range – a lofty bid, though considerably less than the reported […]