Platforms

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. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Other Giant Google deserves some of the flack that Facebook is almost exclusively catching in the wake of its Cambridge Analytica scandal, writes Christopher Mims for The Wall Street Journal. Mims argues that Google has lax standards for merging data between its various […]

Airfare and hotel prediction app Hopper is different from other travel booking services. When you download Hopper, the app tells you not to buy anything. And that’s because Hopper acquires users at the top of the funnel. “We’re looking for people who are just browsing on social, people who aren’t necessarily looking for a flight […]

Most consumers are only just learning about the inner workings of the ad-supported internet – and they don’t like what they see. David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of business and marketing partnerships, understands their frustration. “A lot of the discomfort people have is when they feel like they don’t actually know what’s going on with the ad […]

Vevo uses YouTube for a large chunk of its distribution and viewership. A joint venture between Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, Vevo creates and distributes more than 330,000 music videos across YouTube and its owned-and-operated channels. Vevo gets access to YouTube’s massive audience, and YouTube gets a cut of the […]

“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 Matt McGowan, president at Adestra. Facebook’s move to shut down its Partner Categories program helps it look good in the court of public opinion, shores up some loose ends with […]

“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 Eric Picard, vice president of product management at Pandora. Last week, the IAB Tech Lab released the Open Measurement (OM) Software Development Kit (SDK), a universal SDK to support standardized, […]

TBS and TNT try to be “brands that live outside of television,” said Karina Kogan, SVP of digital media and products for the two networks. Beyond its owned-and-operated networks, sites and apps, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat are the networks’ workhorses for driving engagement with viewers – and acquiring new ones. “We start with who’s watching […]

As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced a second congressional grilling on Wednesday in Washington, DC, the company’s VP of ads and business product, Mark Rabkin, addressed a more ad-savvy audience at Programmatic I/O in San Francisco. The takeaway in SF: Facebook will continue to make policy changes to the way data is handled on its […]

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.” A contrite yet confident Mark Zuckerberg, wearing a suit rather than his usual gray T-shirt and jeans, testified Tuesday before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees in Washington, […]

In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared statement for Congress, he describes how his company hopes to prevent illicit data sharing and enhance transparency around political advertising. The testimony, which will be delivered Wednesday, partially reiterates changes that Facebook publicized last week. Last Wednesday, Facebook detailed API data restrictions. And last Friday, it described the tools […]

YouTube will no longer support third-party ad serving on reserved buys in Europe beginning May 21, and it will assess whether to extend that policy globally, according to a memo obtained by AdExchanger. Google advised advertisers who aren’t currently using its ad server DoubleClick Campaign Manager (DCM) to host video on YouTube to “retraffic their […]

Facebook on Friday implemented new transparency and verification processes for political advertisers. Last October, the company said it would begin allowing only authorized advertisers to run electoral ads, which explicitly advocate for or against an active political candidate. But those limits will now apply to any advertisers who want to run “issue ads” that more […]

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here. True or false: While Facebook was looking the other way, Cambridge Analytica exploited easy loopholes in its data policies to steal user data and swing a US presidential election. In this week’s podcast, Gartner Research VP Martin Kihn picks apart the assumptions underlying the latest […]

Behind the Cambridge Analytica headlines, Facebook on Thursday completed the first phase of its ongoing three-part MRC audit. Phase one was an inspection of served display impressions in the news feed on Facebook and Instagram across desktop, mobile web and in-app. Before the Cambridge Analytica data-sharing scandal broke, Facebook was being pushed to be more open […]

NBCUniversal is about to do something TV companies have talked about for years: transact TV in a similar way as digital – on impressions. NBCU revealed Thursday that it would begin to measure live, on-demand and time-shifted TV ad buys using a common impression-based metric called CFlight. CFlight will be part of NBCU’s upfront pitch and […]

A blog post by Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer on Wednesday detailed restrictions on data access for a number of its APIs, including events, groups and pages. Read it. (The blog also revealed in that post that Cambridge Analytica had harvested 87 million profiles, rather than 50 million, as was originally widely reported.) Developer […]

Facebook might be reconsidering the policy it initiated last Wednesday about third-party data providers, Acxiom CEO Scott Howe said Tuesday in a letter to advertisers. Read it. “We’ve seen some signs that Facebook is reconsidering the initial policy they issued last week on data imports in light of advertiser concerns that will have an economic […]

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 […]

This is the third in a series of deep dives from AdExchanger on mobile fraud and mobile data quality, including guides to fraud tactics and threat vectors and practical solutions from advertisers in the growth and user acquisition trenches. Read the first story (“2018 Will Be A Year Of Reckoning For Mobile App-Install Fraud“) and […]

YouTube on Monday released a CPM-based pricing model for its skippable video format called TrueView for reach. Read the blog post. This pricing model optimizes not for viewability but for on-target reach – similar to YouTube’s six-second bumper ad format. Previously, TrueView ads were transacted on cost per view, with YouTube charging advertisers once consumers […]

Facebook’s announcement Wednesday that it would ban third-party data partners from directly targeting on its platform hit ad buyers hard. Previously, buyers could directly apply third-party data segments to their targeting on Facebook through suppliers like Acxiom, Oracle and Experian to enrich Facebook’s data with offline segments. Now, marketers using segments from third-party data brokers […]

AppLovin is one of the most well-funded indie ad platforms out there – and it’s growing like a weed. The mobile ad network last year received $841 million in debt financing from Chinese private equity firm Orient Hontai Capital. In 2014, AppLovin raised just $4 million in seed funding. Originally, Orient Hontai had intended to acquire a majority […]

LinkedIn made Video for Sponsored Content, video ads which appear as sponsored posts in the feed, generally available on Thursday. It also rolled out video-compatible Company Pages for brands and publishers. Since LinkedIn’s beta launch of sponsored video last October, more than 700 advertisers, including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, GE and Philips, have signed on. […]

Facebook is going to stop allowing third-party data providers from offering targeting directly on its platform. The move is a direct reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In the past, advertisers could use a feature called partner categories to supplement the targeting they do on Facebook with data from brokers, such as recent purchases or […]

NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke said Facebook faces big repercussions because it breached users’ trust. “The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Facebook’s business model is based on data people don’t [always know] they’re sharing and then selling that data … to a buyer Facebook [doesn’t even] know,” Burke said Tuesday in response to Facebook’s […]

“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 Mike Romoff, head of global agency and channel sales at LinkedIn. Ad agencies face an existential crisis, years in the making, and it feels particularly urgent at this moment. There […]

The lack of a standard measurement protocol has been an issue for the podcast industry for years. When podcasts are streamed, only the owner of a podcast player app knows how long a person listened to an episode, where they skipped and stopped in that episode or whether they heard an ad. That makes it […]

“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 Joshua Lowcock, executive vice president and chief digital and innovation officer at UM Worldwide. The advertising industry often talks about trust – trust between advertisers and their agencies, trust between […]

#WheresZuck? Posting a mea culpa on Facebook after nearly five days of conspicuous silence. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke over the weekend, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to explain what happened and to outline fixes. He promised Facebook would investigate all apps that had “access to large amounts […]