Measurement

AdExchanger Talks is a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. This episode of AdExchanger Talks is supported by Tealium. ComScore CEO Bryan Wiener will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC I/O New York conference taking place Oct. 15-16. One month into the job, comScore’s new CEO, Bryan Wiener, hopes to renew the company’s sense of purpose. It’s a […]

Travel publishers often miss the boat on attribution. Although their content is an integral part of the trip-planning process at the top of the funnel, there’s no easy way to credit its role in an eventual hotel booking. Fathom, a site that publishes curated destination guides and first-person travel accounts, knew it was leaving money […]

Spotify and TGI Fridays are hooking up with Foursquare as a preferred measurement partner. Solid measurement is what seals the deal with marketers, said Brian Berner, head of US sales at Spotify. “Many of our [brand] partners have a brick-and-mortar presence, so we’ve seen increased demand for measurement that showcases how our ad platform connects […]

Vista Equity Partners’ plan to buy a majority stake in Integral Ad Science – valuing the company at $820 million, according to AdExchanger sources, or up to $850 million, according to Axios – underscores the ongoing importance of ad verification and the pressure these vendors face to grow their product offering to remain competitive. “There’s […]

Ads.txt is headed to the app ecosystem. What form will it take? That’s still shaking out. The IAB Tech Lab released guidance on Wednesday with several proposals for how to implement Ads.txt within an app environment. Ads.txt is the Tech Lab’s initiative to reduce inventory spoofing and help advertisers distinguish legit supply sources from the […]

Publishers like to pretend that consumers can’t live without content – but if 95% of media brands disappeared tomorrow, no one would care, said Rafat Ali, CEO and founder of travel publisher Skift, at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit in New York City on Tuesday. Despite the value media people ascribe to the importance of what they […]

There was a time when the yogurt company Chobani had to track its digital marketing activity vendor by vendor. But last October, it put out an RFP to consolidate its activity with a marketing cloud. “One of the benefits with a marketing cloud is it gives us a holistic picture of all of our digital […]

Apple just made a move under the radar that could cause third-party attribution providers to become obsolete. In late March, Apple quietly released SKAdNetwork, an API for iOS 11.3 that allows ad networks or advertisers to directly attribute installs from the App Store without relying on an attribution vendor. Apple’s well-documented stance on consumer privacy […]

Google’s decision to stop providing DoubleClick (DCM) advertising IDs in its ad server log files beginning May 25 will throw a wrench into multitouch attribution, because it will block marketers’ ability to compare Google campaigns with other ad platforms. Whether this policy change is an existential threat to independent attribution or not, the loss 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 Martin Kihn, research vice president at Gartner. In a muted squib released last week, Google signaled it would no longer include user IDs with log files from its industry-leading ad server. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Free Ride Spotify updated its free, ad-supported app on Tuesday with personalized playlists and other features. The changes elevate the user experience to within spitting distance of its paid tier. So why would anyone buy a subscription? “The better our free experience is, the […]

As the governing body for professional surfers globally, the World Surf League (WSL) promotes the sport to both casual fans and diehards. But just a few years ago, the WSL – at the time called the Association for Surfing Professionals – lacked a cohesive marketing strategy, and campaigns for different surf events were heavily siloed. […]

ComScore said Monday that it has appointed Bryan Wiener as CEO, who previously served as executive chairman of Dentsu digital media agency 360i. He will start May 30. Wiener has served on comScore’s board of directors since co-founder Gian Fulgoni exited last November. The embattled measurement company has its work cut out. ComScore was delisted by the […]

With Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation taking effect May 25, Facebook must alter some of its business practices regardless of any fallout due to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. The Cambridge Analytica revelations merely behoove Facebook to move faster and fix things in light of macro privacy changes hitting the EU. The most recent example is […]

Video supply-side platform Beachfront Media is expanding its partnership with White Ops, the digital verification vendor that specializes in bot detection, to include over-the-top (OTT) inventory. All inventory passing through Beachfront’s marketplace is now vetted and verified by White Ops, according to Frank Sinton, Beachfront’s founder and chief product officer. But is OTT fraud a […]

When the International Business Times and its parent Newsweek Media Group were accused in February of buying bots to help win a major ad buy from the Consumer Financial Protection Board, they had a helping hand from PopAds. PopAds, which specializes in pop-unders and didn’t respond to requests for comment, also resells traffic, performs unauthorized […]

Placed, the Snap-owned location data company, is giving away its analytics tool for free. Starting Thursday, brands and media planners can use a public version of its insights service to view foot traffic trends for around 2,000 businesses in the US. Placed pulls the aggregated data from its audience of around 300 million monthly active […]

With additional reporting by Alison Weissbrot. Sizable brands and top-tier publishers can use their clout to pressure media platforms into sharing more measurement data – but what are advertisers actually getting? Just enough to keep them spending, said Chris Kane, founder of programmatic consultancy Jounce Media. “Walled gardens will do the minimum acceptable thing so […]

Facebook is doing some early spring cleaning in Ads Manager, the tool advertisers use to create, manage and track campaigns. Starting Thursday, it will begin labeling whether metrics are estimated and start marking metrics that are still being tested. The goal is to give advertisers more insight into how metrics are calculated. Knowing when metrics […]

TripAdvisor said on its quarterly earnings call Thursday that it is part way through a significant reduction of its online marketing and has stabilized its advertiser auction platform after some buyer exits in the second half of last year cratered prices. TripAdvisor is overhauling its advertising investments due to improved data and attribution, CEO Steve […]

Deep-link startup Branch earned its Facebook mobile marketing partner (MMP) stripes on Wednesday and launched an attribution tool for paid media called Universal Ads. Branch is the first MMP added to Facebook’s marketing partner program since around 2013. When the company launched in 2014, it focused on deep-linking across owned-and-operated content – for example, tracking clicks […]

Publishers, prepare yourselves for another Facebook organic reach reality check. Starting Monday, Facebook will finally begin measuring organic page reach the same way it measures paid ad reach: based on viewable impressions. This is only a reporting change and unrelated to how organic distribution works on Facebook. Facebook started alerting publishers in early February, but […]

Paris-based ecommerce analytics platform ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series B round from a series of investors including US VC firm Canaan and Highland Europe. ContentSquare previously had raised $20 million, bringing it to a total of $62 million after this round. The company will use the financing to support research and development of […]

The paid ads folks at mattress brand Purple and online watch retailer MVMT spend their days obsessing about measurement – and stressing over data silos. Budgets are lean, and they’re under pressure to tie spend to success. A six-person team at Purple manages paid advertising across more than 15 channels. But combining, analyzing, comparing and activating […]

Advertisers for the first time can tap Roku’s first-party data via a managed service measurement system called Ad Insights, released on Wednesday. The Ad Insights platform builds on Roku’s support of third-party measurement partners like existing partner Nielsen, Kantar Millward Brown, Oracle, Placed and Experian. “This launch was really the result of us stepping back […]

The independent measurement space was once Nielsen’s to lose – and now it’s taking pains to make sure that doesn’t happen. Nielsen is in a delicate position. Although its long-established panel-based business is primarily what pays the bills, TV ratings aren’t the future. The company’s success depends on moving away from classic TV ratings, while […]

Nielsen’s TV Brand Effect (TVBE) business now belongs to Phoenix Marketing International, a performance measurement and metrics company. Phoenix on Monday acquired the syndicated service, which is used by brands to measure recall of television ads based on Nielsen data. The companies declined to share the price of the deal. Nielsen will continue to operate […]

With the explosion of cross-screen TV, publishers and advertisers are clamoring for better discovery, personalization and cataloging of video content, and metadata is answering that call. Metadata, put simply, adds more context to data. Metadata in video can range from the contents of that video (e.g., colors, products, characters) to the way it’s classified (e.g., […]

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 […]