Platforms

“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 […]

Pandora has been vocal about its need to increase its ad tech capabilities since CEO Roger Lynch took the helm in November. With Wednesday’s acquisition of programmatic audio platform AdsWizz for $145 million, Pandora has gone from a programmatic newcomer to one that could control the market. “We’ve invested in proprietary ad tech for a […]

The Cambridge Analytica debacle demonstrated that Facebook has no systematic way of knowing what happens to data once it leaves the platform. What happened wasn’t a data breach – but that isn’t what matters. “Partners are bound by agreements that say they’re not supposed to share the data out, but there’s no way to regulate it, […]

Moen’s social marketing stack used to include everything but the kitchen sink. “We used seven-plus tools to facilitate our social media program and I always say ‘use’ is a very strong word because we certainly weren’t leveraging all those tools,” said Brittany Neish, senior social strategist for kitchen and bathroom fixture manufacturer Moen. And because […]

The almighty duopoly is losing share – but just a little bit. Google and Facebook will take a 56.8% share of US digital ad spend this year, down from 58.5% in 2017, according to a report published by eMarketer on Monday. The report also predicted the duopoly’s share of new digital ad dollars entering the […]

Facebook is running out of eyes to blacken in the wake of revelations over the weekend that Trump-affiliated data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested information from 50 million Facebook accounts without permission. But as long as ads continue to perform on Facebook, the scandals won’t lead advertisers to pull back their spend. “We may see individuals […]

Reddit is banking on native mobile ads to generate advertiser karma. Starting March 19, advertisers will be able to buy native promoted posts in Reddit’s official iOS app, with Android inventory to follow within the next few weeks, the company said Wednesday. The only visual difference between in-feed native posts and organic posts created by […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Susan Panico, senior vice president of strategic solutions at Pandora. Unilever CMO Keith Weed made headlines at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting when he threatened to pull advertising investment from online platforms that create […]

Penske Media, the publisher of WWD, Variety and new majority owner in Wenner Media, acquired multiplatform women’s lifestyle publisher and events company SheKnows Media, the company revealed Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SheKnows, which claims to reach 79 million uniques per month across its flagship property, StyleCaster, HelloFlo and BlogHer sites, also […]

Publishers are rethinking their Facebook strategies in the wake of LittleThings’ sudden shutdown on Tuesday. While LittleThings is the first pub to fall victim to Facebook’s news feed algorithm change, it is likely not the last. Many pubs play Whac-A-Mole with the news feed, optimizing article and video content to fit the whims of a fickle Facebook […]