Privacy Sandbox may have just hit a serious snag.
In a document published last week, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), a prominent working group within the World Wide Web Consortium, referred to the first-party sets (FPS) proposal within the Privacy Sandbox as “harmful to the web in its current form.”
TAG also cast doubt on the viability of the Privacy Sandbox itself:
The “Privacy Sandbox” initiative proposes (among other things) to restrict "third-party cookies", which would align with other browsers and with general industry trends. However, this proposal seeks to redefine what it means to be a third-party cookie. In that context, the efficacy of the "Privacy Sandbox" initiative is thrown into question.
In other words, you can’t profess to be playing by the rules, then turn around and change the rules of the game.
You’re (not) it
TAG’s role is to review proposed changes to the web so as to determine the broader implications. The group helps document and build consensus around principles of web architecture.
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"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 Robin Caller, CEO and founder of Overmore Group.
Fair warning, this essay is a bit of a rant. I mean no harm to any promoter of ad tech, martech, clean rooms or other digital advertising technology.
I’m sure they’re very nice people who love their families and dogs and recycling.
But that doesn’t change the fact that language matters. It is a trap that can lead to mass delusion. The language we use to describe data in our ecosystem demeans the consumer and strips them of their rights. A rant, in this case, is warranted.
First-party data … second-class citizens
GDPR, CCPA, CPRA and nearly every other privacy-related regulation is the product of consumer backlash.
You can almost hear the chorus: “Stop collecting and selling our data so that marketers can deploy it against us in algorithms.”
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Roku said Tuesday it added six new ad tech companies to its Measurement Partner Program to help retail, CPG, pharma, auto and other advertisers better measure ad campaign performance — such as mobile app downloads — as marketers shift their spending to streaming.
Adjust, Affinity Solutions, Branch, IRI, Kochava, and Veeva Crossix have joined Roku’s partner program — launched in 2018 to help the industry measure the impact of ads in streaming TV — a roster that now includes more than 20 partners.
Adding the six new partners lets marketers measure metrics they couldn’t before, including upper-funnel brand metrics and performance outcomes such as mobile app downloads, store visits, and product sales for retail, pharmaceutical, CPG, and auto advertisers.
These measurement partners can be accessed through Roku’s OneView ad buying platform, the dataxu DSP it rebranded in 2020.
“The promise of CTV is of course, that you can measure impressions on a 40- or 55-inch TV screen as you would a digital impression,” Gaurav Shirole, Roku’s director of ad measurement, told AdExchanger. “A lot of the newer partnerships we announced are basically allowing our marketers to go down the funnel to add more behavioral outcomes, whether it's CRM, sales lift or app downloads and installations or location visits or healthcare outcomes.”
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TikTocking Dollars
TikTok wants in on the ecommerce action that has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's introducing new ad formats designed for purchase conversions on the platform. Business Insider reports that the Chinese video app plans to roll out new tools l that allow brands to show their products, retarget interested users, and highlight sales and promotions. TikTok has been testing several new formats including collection ads and dynamic product ads. Collection ads allow brands to combine product catalogs and branded videos to lead consumers to product landing pages. Dynamic product ads automatically retarget people with products according to their online behaviors. The tech giant plans to release these new features in the first half of 2021. Read on.
Big Money
A month after filing an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, DoubleVerify set the terms of its IPO. The New York-based ad verification company could bring home a $4.2 billion valuation. According to MarketWatch, the IPO is expected to price between $24 and $27 a share. The company is offering 8.63 million shares to raise up to $232.9 million, while selling shareholders are offering an additional 4.71 million shares. Twelve banks, led by Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, are underwriting the deal. According to its S-1 filing, DoubleVerify experienced strong, but slowing, revenue growth last year. The company joins a growing list of recent ad tech IPOs that include Pubmatic and Viant. DoubleVerify brought in $244 million gross revenue in 2020, a 34% increase from 2019. Its net income increased dramatically — from $3 million in 2018 to $23.3 million in 2019 – though it dipped to $20.4 million in 2020 due to a jump in expenses. Still, the company is looking to go public at a time of tempered investor demand for IPOs. [Related in AdExchanger: DoubleVerify Reveals Financials As Company Files S-1]
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"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 Shiv Gupta, founder at U of Digital.
Marketers eventually get tired of being fed BS by their partners, and start to BS back.
Time and time again, vendors have been caught with their pants down (figuratively, usually), partaking in nefarious activity that abuses their partnerships with marketers. That has left marketers fearful that ad tech vendors will use their information to benefit competitors, game metrics, and/or gain the upper hand in negotiations, among other concerns.
But they respond to these fears by dishing out BS of their own. We can all agree that this isn’t a great way to do business. Partnerships built on trust and transparency usually ensure that all sides benefit.
Marketers should be more self-aware about cutting down the BS where it’s not needed. But the onus is also on sellers to help them overcome their trust issues. Here are some situations where marketers may BS, and how to navigate them!
Falsifying partner mix, pricing, or business goals
It’s not uncommon for marketers to mislead about the size of their budgets, give artificially aggressive (and unrealistic) performance targets, and/or price points. Sometimes, they conveniently forget to mention to a vendor that they’re also working with its biggest competitors.
Marketers may feel that these misdirection tactics put them in a better negotiating position, but if sellers know exactly what and who they’re up against, they theoretically can better help marketers understand how they will add value.
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Google’s lack of transparency has long frustrated publishers and independent ad tech companies, and its clandestine program “Project Bernanke” has only confirmed their suspicions that Google uses learnings from its auction to benefit itself.
Ad tech insiders met the allegations that Google secretly fed publisher ad server data into its buying systems to gain market share and keep prices low with resignation. These claims were revealed in a mistakenly unredacted court filing obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
“This shouldn't be surprising – walled gardens have access and full control over vast amounts of ecosystem data,” said Ana Milicevic, co-founder and principal of Sparrow Advisers. “The surprising part would be if they didn't use it in this way to their commercial advantage.”
But publishers still didn’t know the specifics around Google’s advantaged position – for instance, how the tech giant netted $230 million in 2013 thanks to Project Bernanke.
“We have not heard of this practice, but it is the type of news that we typically point to when we talk about lack of auction transparency creating erosion of trust,” said Nicole Lesko, SVP of data, ad platforms and monetization at Meredith.
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This article is sponsored by Xandr.
To an outsider, advertising can often be perceived as glorified and theatrical. While at times true, in reality advertising is the means to an end for a particular business goal.
The goals vary across industries. In healthcare, for example, it might be educating communities about COVID vaccinations, while in sports and entertainment, the objective may be to increase viewership for the big game or sell out concert stadiums.
For the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, the goal has long been to achieve widespread brand awareness and, perhaps most importantly, brand loyalty.
Take brand-name pain relievers. Many consumers buy some sort of over-the-counter painkiller, but there’s a reason why they are willing to pay more for a brand name than they are for the generic drugstore offering. CPG brands have long relied on top-of-the-funnel marketing because that brand awareness and affinity is what drives purchasing decisions and removes price sensitivity, ultimately leading to increased sales, revenue and, of course, bottom-line business goals.
CPG companies have traditionally achieved their brand-focused goals with linear TV, long the most efficient and cost-effective way to reach a mass audience. Demo guarantees have been highly effective for years, but advertiser needs have changed. They are now accustomed to digital’s more precise targeting and ability to directly connect ad spend to conversions ranging from click-throughs on websites, signups to email lists or checkouts from shopping carts.
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Swaarm, a Berlin-based startup that helps advertisers, agencies and ad networks track their performance marketing, hadn’t yet launched in June 2020 when Apple first announced its plans to limit IDFA use.
The timing was fortuitous. Rather than having to pivot like a legacy mobile measurement provider, Swaarm’s co-founders (who had been developing the technology for the past few years) adapted to the changes in time for the company’s October launch.
But Apple’s announcement wasn’t a huge surprise. The bell was already tolling for tracking on iOS – and not even all that faintly – before Apple made its IDFA plans official last year.
“We always had an idea that Apple would deprecate the IDFA – they’ve been saying as much for a long time,” said Yogeeta Chainani, Swaarm’s co-founder and chief product officer. “We’d already been taking steps in that direction with our solution.”
One of those solutions is what Swaarm calls its privacy-enabled attribution (PEA) chain, which came out of beta on Tuesday.
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IPG’s marketing intelligence firm Kinesso has hired Dr. Femi Olu-Lafe as the SVP of culture and inclusion. Olu–Lafe was brought on to push the needle on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across Kinesso and its sister IPG companies, Acxiom and Matterkind.
Olu-Lafe – previously a senior leader and DEI consultant at YSC Consulting and former diversity and inclusion research analyst at Catalyst – holds a doctorate in psychology from Boston University and has worked with Fortune 500 companies designing and implementing DEI initiatives.
The move comes at a time when brands and agencies are rethinking their DEI strategies in the wake of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and recent anti-Asian violence has mobilized the Asian American community to combat marginalization.
Olu-Lafe, an expert in cognitive psychology and applied data analysis, started with Kinesso on Monday. She has been tasked with creating a comprehensive strategy to ensure the data and technology products developed by Acxiom, Kinesso and Matterkind (AKM) are are inclusive and respectful. The recent creation of Olu-Lafe’s role is part of an effort to reduce bias often reflected in data input by people that train algorithms in data-driven marketing, part of an ongoing DEI strategy at IPG.
Olu-Lafe will report to Renu Hooda, chief talent officer at Kinesso. AdExchanger spoke to Olu-Lafe.
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“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant.
The most serious threat to publishers’ business models is coming from within.
I’m talking about email-based universal IDs.
In the last couple of years, media owners have made large investments in the diversification of revenue sources, especially around subscriptions, registrations, logins, e-commerce, and the first-party data coming from those connections. I see a huge focus on controlling their assets and building a direct relationship with their audience.
To turn around and contribute that data in order to reproduce a system which historically strangled publishers and reduced their activity to a fight for survival, makes little sense. It also makes media owners undermine recent progress and strategies.
I struggle to see why the effect on publishers of an email-based universal ID would be different from the past. Plus, imagine the face of regulators being told that a privacy-first solution for substituting the third-party cookie is… email.
To those trying to maintain the status quo, my visions are dismissed as naïve and detached from the financial element (“Whose finances?” I always reply).
But the cost of a strategy to entice the user to register is in itself a huge commitment in terms of budget, human and time resources.
If in the past what caused the commoditization of publishers’ assets was deciding to join the programmatic open marketplace, putting email addresses into a universal system today has a much higher cost and impact.
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