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Google’s Message To The Ad Industry: We Won’t Build Our Own Third-Party Cookie Alternatives (And We Don’t Want You To Either) Roku Acquires Video Ad Tech From Nielsen – And Nielsen Gets Insights On Roku Users AdColony Is Being Acquired For $400 Million By Digital Turbine CCPA On The East Coast? Meet CDPA, Virginia’s Consumer Data Protection Act Amazon DSP Makes Two Key Hires As It Prepares To Accelerate Viant CEO Explains Why Stock Popped 90% In Debut The Crawl, Walk, Run Guide To Contextual Targeting The Six Pillars Of A Successful In-House Model Snapchat And Pinterest Benefited From The Facebook Boycott – But Can They Keep It Going?

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Broadcaster-Backed Blockgraph Partners With TransUnion To Build Addressable Ad Solutions

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 2:00 pm.

TransUnion is partnering with Blockgraph, builder of pipes for addressable television, so that advertisers can use its identity data to target, reach and measure TV households across channels.

Through the partnership, announced on Thursday, advertisers and media companies can access data through Tru Optik, the data marketplace and DMP TransUnion acquired in October; use the data modeling services on offer from TransUnion to build custom audiences; onboard first-party data; and activate audiences across the Blockgraph network, which includes Comcast, Charter and ViacomCBS.

The duo will also work together to develop identity-focused products that help TV marketers resolve first-party data against households or individuals.

Blockgraph was first launched in 2017 and incubated as part of Comcast’s FreeWheel. Charter and ViacomCBS signed on as joint venture partners in Blockgraph the following year.

It’s a work in progress, but the purpose of the venture is to help brands and broadcasters apply identity within the convergent TV ecosystem.

As Google Dismisses Email-Based ID Solutions, Here’s How Consumer Journeys Must Be Remapped

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 1:15 pm.

“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 Seraj Bharwani, Chief Strategy Officer at AcuityAds

The behavior-tracking infrastructure that fueled the ad tech industry over the past two decades is undergoing a major overhaul. And the remodeled tracking pathways must be in place before the consumer traffic goes “dark” in the next 12 months. Google’s recent decree that email-based ID solutions aren’t viable over the long-term threatens to cut off some of these potential pathways.

While imperfect, traditional third-party cookies have been a scalable, efficient, and proven infrastructure to track and develop behavior-based audience models, advertise across channels, and measure effectiveness of campaigns on the Open Web. In their absence, online publishers, advertisers, and the ad tech ecosystem at large needs to find alternative ways to reach consumers and measure effectiveness of media investments with potentially less precise and, thus far, unproven data infrastructures.

The leading solutions, which are at various stages of development, fall into three major classifications that I refer to as the 3Cs for cookie replacement: Context, Cohorts, and Coop. None is a perfect replacement for all use cases supported by third-party cookies—yet., But collectively they offer the promise of a more sustainable solution for both publishers and advertisers.

Cookie Fail? BuzzFeed Calls It A Win For Its Data Studio ‘Lighthouse’

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 12:00 pm.

The majority of BuzzFeed’s ad deals – 65% – now use its first-party data to target ads. And the publisher also provides data matching, insights and optimization powered by data from its 104 million monthly users.

To make these data capabilities easier for advertisers to access, BuzzFeed is collecting them into one product, dubbed Lighthouse. The offering will span both BuzzFeed and recently acquired HuffPost content.

When advertisers work with BuzzFeed, sellers give them an option to choose from a selection of data capabilities from Lighthouse that will best meet the marketer’s needs.

“Nothing we do will be one-size-fits-all,” said Ken Blom, SVP of ad strategy and partnerships.

For example, some of BuzzFeed’s largest clients have been doing two-way data transfers with the publisher, in the “clean room” style popularized by walled gardens. If a marketer matches its customer base with BuzzFeed’s, they can find out what kind of content its audience gravitates toward. So far, it’s mostly huge clients that take this approach.

Content-driven insights can also help a marketer home in on its target audience. A streaming service working with BuzzFeed first cast a wide net. BuzzFeed found two-thirds of those engaging with the streaming service’s brand were female, 70% were cord cutters and 60% read articles about comedy shows and memes, all meaningful insights that help with ad targeting, optimization and creative messaging.

What Google Is – And Isn’t Saying – When It Says It Won’t Build Alternative IDs After The Death Of Third-Party Cookies

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 11:56 am.

On Wednesday, Google dropped either a bombshell or a nothingburger (depends who you ask) with its announcement via blog post that it will stop selling ads based on cross-site browsing and third-party cookies.

The bigger news, arguably, is that Google will explicitly not support and perhaps even take steps to hinder industry identity initiatives, such as Unified ID 2.0, initiated by The Trade Desk.

But on the cookie front, people in the advertising industry were a little surprised by the intense reaction to Google’s news, considering that it’s already been more than a year since Google pledged to kill third-party cookie tracking in Chrome by 2022. And because the bell had been tolling for third-party cookies long before then.

“The idea that cookies need to be deprecated is quite an old idea, like a decade old,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. “We were talking about this when I was on the board of Aggregate Knowledge, and cookies going away was one of the reasons we sold to Neustar when we did – which was nine years ago.”

So, why the furor over Google’s blog post?

Pinterest Intros New Shopping-Focused Ad Products With Video Taking Center Stage

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 12:35 am.

Pinterest has three main priorities for 2021 and beyond: video, making its trend data actionable and shopping.

On Wednesday, at Pinterest’s first-ever partner and advertiser summit event, hosted virtually, of course, it made announcements related to all three.

“We had a big year in 2020, and we want our advertisers to know more about the progress we’ve made, what’s driving our growth and how that’s laddering up to the big bets we’re making,” Jon Kaplan, Pinterest’s global head of sales, told AdExchanger.

Pinterest added more than 100 million monthly active users globally in 2020 to hit 459 million, a 37% year-over-year increase. Revenue in the fourth quarter was up 76% YoY to $706 million, and 2020 revenue grew 48% to nearly $1.7 billion.

Although Kaplan declined to share specific numbers, he said that video, including video advertising, is starting to become a “meaningful” percentage of Pinterest’s revenue. Video views in Q4 were up more than 100% over the year, and video uploads increased more than 6x.

With that growth momentum in mind, Pinterest is launching a new video marketing tool called Pinterest Premiere that allows advertisers to own an exclusive video placement in the home feed targeting a specific demographic, interest and/or category during a designated time period.

Publishers Need To Fix Their Approach To Performance Testing

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 12:30 am.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Priti Patel Powell, senior director of business development and strategy at PubMatic.

Mention an A/B test and many advertisers immediately think about creative assets. Pitting one design or bit of content against another is a fast and effective way to learn and improve before or even in the midst of a campaign. But too often, technical and optimization teams fail to leverage this reliable and accurate approach for performance testing.

Bad A/B testing is the same as flipping a coin. In programmatic advertising in particular, bad testing that yields meaningless results is rampant, giving publishers incorrect information when assessing identity solutions, server-side versus client-side placement, what bidders to use, and auction timeouts.

Proper A/B testing, with more data-informed decision-making, can provide publishers with real guideposts for how to evolve their programmatic strategies and increase their revenue potential.

The case for isolated, split A/B testing

There are a variety of common, but incorrect ways that publishers test their ad technology. Too often, technical and optimization teams hurry through testing, fail to use a control, or overreach with complex multivariate testing.

Disney Online Channels Are Nipping At Broadcast Heels; Does GDPR Need A Makeover?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Disney’s Streaming Win

In yet another sign that streaming is where it’s at, advertising at Disney’s online channels are on pace to overtake the company’s ABC broadcast network as marketers shift spending to more targeted audiences. Per Ad Age, ad sales at Disney’s direct-to-consumer businesses rose 47% to $882 million last quarter, closing in on the $984 million at ABC, which registered a 5% gain. At that pace, online outlets such as Hulu, ESPN+ and ABC.com will soon pass the network. In particular, Hulu’s secret weapon is its “rapid growing, robust advertising business,” according to CEO Bob Chapek. As streaming TV viewership continues to surge, Disney has been consolidating its ad-sales teams over the past few years to create one-stop shopping for marketers across its various networks and platforms which has given a lift to traditional and online outlets. “Advertisers want to follow audiences,” said Rita Ferro, president of advertising sales at Disney. [Related in AdExchanger: Inside Disney’s Plan To Automate Half Its Ad Business Within Five Years]

GDPR Upgrade?

Europe's General Data Protection Regulation needs some work, apparently. Axel Voss, one of the architects of the legislation, which has been in effect for less than three years, told the Financial Times that GDPR needed "surgery” in order to keep up with tech advances and a rise in remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Per Business Insider, Voss's comments came ahead of a parliamentary session that will vote on defining the laws as a "gold standard for the world." Voss noted that the tech industry had moved on since 2018, meaning that laws had to change in accordance. "We have to be aware that GDPR is not made for blockchain, facial or voice recognition, text and data mining ... artificial intelligence," he said. "The digital world is about innovation. We cannot stick with principles established in the 80s that do not reflect the new situation we are living in."

Google’s Message To The Ad Industry: We Won’t Build Our Own Third-Party Cookie Alternatives (And We Don’t Want You To Either)

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021 at 1:06 pm.

Google said in a blog post on Wednesday that it won’t use alternative methods to track users online once it ends support for third-party cookies in Chrome – and that it disapproves of using email as an alternative identifier for ad tracking.

In other words, Google is stating for the record that it will not cook up any voodoo tracking magic of its own and that all of its web products will be driven by the privacy-preserving APIs currently in development within the Privacy Sandbox, including FLoC-based cohorts.

The direct implications of Google’s announcement are not immediately clear. Will Google’s pledge not to use or support user-level identifiers for third-party ads in its products only apply to DV360, Google Campaign Manager and Google’s demand partners – or could this also apply to YouTube? The latter is unlikely but, if so, that would be major.

But while the dust settles, Google’s statement does appear to answer one of the biggest open questions that has come up during meetings of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group (IWABG) at the World Wide Web Consortium, which is whether Google plans to, forgive the cliche, eat its own dog food when it comes down to actually applying Privacy Sandbox proposals.

There’s been a great deal of skepticism on that point, especially among ad tech companies that believe Google is aggressively pushing through a series of good-enough-for-thee-but-not-for-me pseudo-solutions that likely won’t deliver as promised.

4 Questions Driving the Future of Identity Without Third-Party Cookies

by AdExchanger Content Studio // Posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021 at 9:28 am.

This article is sponsored by Oracle.

If you spent most of 2020 counting down the days until 2021, then you’re not alone. For marketers, and almost everyone else for that matter, 2021 represents a hopeful restart – a potential shift back to normalcy, where budgets return to their pre-pandemic levels, plans are executed at a normal pace, and brands can begin to act on new ideas to recoup their losses from the last year.

While it’s true that 2021 may indeed bring all these things, it will also bring a new set of uncertainties. At the top of the list, this year will mark the end of an integral part of the online advertising ecosystem: third-party cookies and other similar universal identifiers that have, for a long time, served as the backbone of programmatic advertising.

Third-party cookies, in particular, have been the de facto delivery mechanism for audience data and targeting consumers online since 1995. Their removal from top internet browsers forces massive changes in how brands, advertisers, and publishers drive revenue and run digital ad campaigns. More broadly, the move sparks questions about the future of identity in the online ecosystem.

So, as we embark on a new year filled with immense change and more uncertainty, let’s explore what the future of identity looks like by examining four key questions.

1. First, how did we get here?

There’s a combination of forces driving the current shift away from third-party cookies to a more consumer-centric internet.

The first is heightened regulation around the collection and use of personal data, such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). There also are restrictions on the collection and use of advertising identifiers imposed by the top consumer platforms and internet browsers such as Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox – all of which decided to sunset the third-party cookie in the interest of consumer privacy.

AppLovin Is Going Public, Files S-1 Ahead Of IPO

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2021 at 9:15 am.

App marketing platform AppLovin filed for its IPO on Tuesday after the market closed, and it wins for best ticker symbol ever: APP.

Read the full S-1 filing here.

AppLovin is taking advantage of a public market boom for advertising-related technology companies, but AppLovin was actually quite hot before the froth started frothing.

The company was last valued at $2 billion in 2018, when private equity firm KKR bought a $400 million minority stake. In the intervening three years, AppLovin has invested more than $1 billion across 15 strategic acquisitions and partnerships, according to its S-1.

AppLovin’s most recent acquisition was a nearly $1 billion deal for mobile attribution provider Adjust in February. But its flashiest acquisition was arguably the gaming giant Machine Zone in May of last year.