Publishers

Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.

What does a bloody third-person shooter game about robbing banks at gunpoint have in common with a hyper-casual game that involves flipping a strip of cartoon bacon from a skillet to try and make it land on random objects? The answer: Not much, but both are classified as “action” games, according to Apple and Google in their respective app stores.

Marketers are often mission-driven. But too often, when informing the public through news and information is of utmost urgency, marketers choose to steer clear not just from bad or hot-button issues, but from all news content entirely, choking off potential revenue for news enterprises and doing a disservice to the public good, writes Dev Pragad, CEO of Newsweek.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the value of a publisher’s first-party data, but publishers can’t effectively monetize their data programmatically if they don’t have a standardized way to categorize it. On Monday, ArcSpan released Contextual APP, a data processing tool that enables publishers to structure their first-party contextual data into salable audience segments, including seller-defined audiences, using the IAB Tech Lab’s content and audience taxonomies.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the most mature and comprehensive health data protection law in the US. (It passed in 1996.) But does this patient data protection law apply to data-driven advertising and online data collection? The answer is yes and no.

Roku’s total Q2 revenue was $764 million, up 18% year-over-year, but was relatively flat compared with last quarter, when revenue clocked in at $734 million. CFO Steve Louden was probably referring to that plateau when he warned of a TV ad spend hiatus. US advertisers are pulling back in reaction to inflation and supply chain shortages.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Googling Through The Headlines Google flooded the zone with news and interviews this week.  On the transparency front, one announcement that will impact ad tech is Google Ad Manager’s new “Revenue Verification Report.” GAM, the Google SSP, will look into buy-side gross revenue […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Pronounced She-In, As In “Ooh … She In Trouble Now” The fast-fashion company Shein, a gigantic but secretive Chinese manufacturer of fast fashion, is getting a lot of attention. Which Shein both does and does not want.  On the plus side, Shein has […]

Netflix shocked the ad tech world with its selection of Microsoft to run its AVOD business. But the deal actually makes sense, and it’s helped calm nerves on Wall Street to boot. Plus: Why the IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audiences is slow to take off.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Game-Changer The NFL has a history of media and marketing innovation. If we’re keeping score, it was the first sports league to reach every TV in America, the first to invest in studio-style production and the first to mic players on the field. […]

The IAB Tech Lab’s seller-defined audience (SDA) spec is touted as a key contextual targeting alternative for the post-third-party-cookie digital ad ecosystem – one predicated on privacy-friendly addressability and publisher first-party data monetization. Some publishers are enthusiastic about testing SDA campaigns in the run-up to Google’s 2023 deadline for the phaseout of third-party cookies in Chrome. There is growing concern, however, about a marked lack of advertiser interest in doing the same.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. No Compromise For Google Google’s reported offer to US regulators as a bid to avoid an antitrust suit was to spin off part of its ad business. But that news apparently landed with a thud.  The Department of Justice is poised to move […]

Google may have a solution to the antitrust regulatory pressure it’s facing from governments around the world: a proactive spinoff. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is exploring splitting Google’s digital ad business into a separate entity under the Alphabet umbrella. The question is whether Google’s proposed solution will pass muster with regulators, and if it does, who stands to win – and who stands to lose?

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Get The Net Netflix isn’t just vetting third-party vendors for its pre-launch ad business (though it is vetting vendors, to be clear).  The streaming leader is on the hunt for an executive to lead its incubating advertising business, The Wall Street Journal reports.  […]

The impending Google customer force-shift from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) represents a major change to how advertising ROI will be measured via Google’s services going forward. But publishers that spoke to AdExchanger about their migration plans aren’t feeling the same pressure as with, say, preparation for third-party cookie deprecation, Google’s other major upheaval scheduled for next year.

The overturn of Roe v. Wade, the ongoing war in Ukraine, a stock market collapse – it’s all the news that’s fit to print, but how are publishers going to monetize it if brands are skittish about serious topics? Plus: The dangers of data collection in a post-Roe world.

Brands and tech vendors can do a lot more to make good on their public promises to support diverse and Black-owned media, says Rhonesha Byng, the CEO and founder of Her Agenda, a digital media platform for millennial women, and co-creator of the Black Owned Media Equity and Sustainability Institute.

Google recently began testing Topics API, the latest part of its Chrome Privacy Sandbox. It’s a significant improvement over FLoC, but it leaks audience information from trustworthy sites and enriches large platforms at the expense of niche or independent sites – especially sites that invest time and skill to cover categories in detail, writes Don Marti, VP of ecosystem innovation at CafeMedia.

What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam? Freecycle turned to header bidding to reduce its reliance on Google AdSense, but the company’s one-person engineering team had trouble managing the header-bidding system and the constant stream of Prebid updates on top of web development duties. So, after a 70% drop in ad revenue, Freecycle handed its digital ad business over to PubWise’s managed service.

Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying. It’s time to kick blocklists to the curb and start curating keywords by campaign, says contextual pioneer John Snyder, who sold his company, Grapeshot, to Oracle in 2018.

Why wouldn’t DSPs want to secure the best possible access to OTT inventory through programmatic while accessing the impression commitments and set pricing provided by direct deals? If DSPs want to compete with more traditional advertising platforms, they will need to do just that, writes Doug Huntington, CEO of FatTail.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Paid Upfront NBCUniversal says this year’s upfronts was its highest-grossing since Comcast acquired the programmer in 2013.  Unsurprisingly, streaming media helped break the record. Of NBCU’s $7 billion in ad commitments, per a release, $1 billion is earmarked for its AVOD service Peacock […]

Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Personalization Delusion The ability to dynamically scale creative and A/B test dozens – even hundreds – of ad campaign permutations, all potentially targeting specific audience types, has led marketers away from making a single piece of creative that stands alone and appeals to as […]

Ad agencies are understaffed and their clients – small businesses in particular – often don’t have the time or the technical background to sift through reams of campaign data. And so, increasingly, they’re turning to automation to cut down on the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of account management. Tag, an independent agency based in Iowa, uses a suite of automated reporting tools, including from Basis Technologies, to communicate cross-platform campaign metrics to its clients.

Foundry, formerly known as IDG Communications, wants to shed its old identity and build a new reputation not as a digital publisher but as a provider of data and marketing tech, according to Foundry President Kumaran Ramanathan. Ramanathan spoke to AdExchanger about why Foundry walked away from open-web programmatic, how it’s fusing its first-party data with a marketing and data tech stack and its M&A ambitions.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Get Connected The coveted prizes in programmatic right now are exclusive CTV contracts.  In Cannes, the crème de la crème for handshakers and lunch-takers is Netflix. Google is meeting with Netflix there, Ad Age reports, and is an obvious choice as Netflix purportedly […]

Instead of a funnel that slows traffic, we need to create a ubiquitous, always-accessible “sales superhighway” that provides countless on-ramps. This change of perspective will impact both how we define our potential audiences and the speed with which we have meaningful interactions with them, writes Lance Porigow, EVP of growth at The Shipyard.

The IAB, in collaboration with the IAB Tech Lab and the Media Rating Council (MRC), released its first update to in-game ad measurement standards since 2009. The new standards reexamine the metrics for counting a valid in-game ad impression and add criteria for measuring ad placements in 3D and virtual environments. They also define in-game measurement terms in alignment with cross-channel measurement efforts.