EU

Havas makes a play for WPP; The European Commission is getting simplified; and retail chains are monetizing their Muzak.

Sillicon valley bigwigs are getting into SuperPACS; turns out, shaming AI companies sorta works; and UK publishers are going “consent or pay.”

It’s been tough going for enterprise SaaS companies since 2021. Plus, the EU’s top antitrust watchdog is pulling back from the regulatory beat.

Meta continues to tinker with its business model as it deals with the new European regulatory environment. Plus, Government officials liberally used location-tracking software Locate X in criminal investigations dating back to 2018.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Commerce Copycats The Wild Man Drinking Company (which makes a novelty item called the Krak’in used for shotgunning beers) filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Temu last week (H/t @Sean Frank, CEO of the wallet brand Ridge). Why’s that interesting?   Temu frames itself as […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Europe? More Like ‘You’re Out’ In 2018, a handful of American ad tech startups abandoned the EU when their services became (more likely than not) verboten. Drawbridge, for instance, left Europe when it became clear that regulators had cross-device graphs in their crosshairs. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Fine Whine Google began arguments in the appeal of its $5 billion antitrust fine from 2018, when European Commission regulator Margrethe Vestager successfully argued the company unfairly leveraged its market position to force its search app onto Android devices. Although, if Google loses the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Shunned IAB Europe just elected its new board of directors and guess who didn’t make the cut? Google. For the first time in years, Google will not have a representative on IAB Europe’s board. [You can check out the newly elected crop here.] It’s […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Court Date Dun, dun! Cue the “Law & Order” sound effect because the IAB Tech Lab is being taken to court in Germany by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) over what the advocacy group considers an ongoing breach of personal privacy by […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Seriously Looking Although MediaMath has been avidly pursuing strategic options for a year, including a potential sale, it hasn’t worked out. But now the company has hired a team of bankers to get the ball rolling again while ad tech M&A and IPOs are […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Bouncing Back The virtual Upfronts have concluded; the celebrities have bounced; the guest DJs are spinning on Brooklyn rooftops. And the time has come for advertisers to commit. The broadcast industry wants to know whether flashy presentations by Disney, NBCUniversal, ViacomCBS, WarnerMedia and others […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Dark Underbelly You know when the opt-in button is, like, way bigger than the opt-out button, or a checkbox is ticked by default? Those are dark patterns, and regulators are starting to take notice. The Federal Trade Commission held an all-day workshop last week […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Please, Mr. President Google is asking President Biden to take action as European regulators pursue more robust regulation of the industry. (Where did we leave our tiny violin?) According to CNBC, Karan Bhatia, Google’s VP of government affairs and policy, said in a blog […]

Google will not make FLoC-based cohorts available for testing in countries where GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive are in effect. In other words, no FLoCs in Europe. At least for now. During a meeting of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group (IWABG) at the World Wide Web Consortium on Tuesday, Michael Kleber, a Google engineer, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Vive La Privacy Will the IDFA have its day in court? As developers scramble to prepare for Apple’s iOS 14 privacy changes, which could roll out any day now, a French lobbying group is taking a different tack. France Digitale, which represents startups in […]

“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. Fixing your own strategy and business model when the industry is a whirlwind of moving parts takes time, courage, vision and above all the ability to […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Refriended Unilever will resume advertising on Facebook and Instagram in the United States after withdrawing last summer amid a wide scale brand protest over misinformation, The Wall Street Journal reports. The owner of Dove soap, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and other CPG brands said Thursday that […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Breaking Big Tech? A set of strict new EU privacy laws now under discussion could be the basis for breaking up the big tech platforms, Business Insider reports. The first drafts of the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) were unveiled […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The People Vs. Google’s Ad Stack The AGs of 10 states have filed a suit against Google, accusing it of monopolistic behavior in its ad business, The New York Times reports. In a Twitter video announcing the legal action, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Apple Strikes Back “Dramatic,” “outlandish” and “false” – that’s how Apple SVP Craig Federighi described claims being made by the ad tech industry about Apple’s forthcoming IDFA changes in iOS 14. During a recorded speech at the European Data Protection & Privacy Conference on Tuesday, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Falling Short? Facebook updated its misinformation policy to include vaccine-related content, as the company continues fighting against claims that it isn’t doing enough to protect its billions of users. The Wall Street Journal reports that the social networking giant will over the coming weeks […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Antitrust Shade Add to cart: antitrust lawsuit. EU regulators filed antitrust charges on Tuesday against Amazon, accusing the ecommerce giant of using its access to data to gain an unfair advantage over the merchants on its platform, the AP reports. The news comes just […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Privacy Trade War The EU struck down the US-EU Privacy Shield, the transatlantic data-sharing framework. More than 5,300 companies, most of them small or medium enterprises, rely on the Privacy Shield, and will now need additional contractual agreements directly with users to continue using […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Rose-Tinted Glasses CMOs may be overly optimistic about the pandemic’s long-term impact. Seventy-three percent expect the negative effects to be short-lived and hold a positive outlook for performance in the next two years, according to a survey of 430 CMOs by Gartner. With this […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Facebook Unfriend How at-risk is Facebook, really, from the flurry of brands suspending ad campaigns? Facebook has weathered worse. Its market cap plummeted $43 billion in one day in 2018, after reports of the Cambridge Analytica data violations, but bounced back within two […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. April Showers, May Flowers Retail sales surged in May, recovering 63% of their losses from March and April. While this is a sign of recovery, Reuters reports, the United States economy isn’t out of the hole, especially since many states have rising COVID-19 infections. […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Do Not Merge A group of antitrust economists filed comments on the new DOJ/FTC draft guidelines for vertical mergers, calling the new draft “excessively permissive” for large companies. Historically, antitrust cases focus on horizontal acquisitions, when a company buys a direct competitor. But old […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Ecom Advantage The EU’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager, opened an investigation into whether Amazon unfairly collects or uses data to promote its own products at the expense of other retailers or manufacturers. “Ecommerce has boosted retail competition and brought more choice […]

When the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May, Nestlé Germany was ready. Germany’s data collection laws have been notoriously austere for decades, much to the chagrin of some digital players. National laws – such as the Federal Data Protection Act, the Criminal Code, the Civil Code, the Telecommunications Act and Telemedia Act […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Time Will Telco There’s plenty of pressure on Brian Lesser to build advertising into a pillar of AT&T’s business and marry the wireless company’s customer data to the new WarnerMedia content assets. “But probably more than anything, I feel this sense of responsibility to […]