The Big Story

Twitter’s ad prospects just got even more dicey with news that Elon Musk will buy the platform. Plus, quantifying ad tech’s carbon footprint.

As data-driven advertising undergoes an unwanted rebrand by privacy advocates to “surveillance advertising,” we take the pulse of privacy professionals and talk about how they talked about ad tech at a recent privacy conference in Washington, DC. Plus: The rise of in-game advertising and what it needs to do in order to level up.

The Privacy Sandbox proposals are moving forward in an organization whose governance is in the air and whose leadership is disengaged. We unpack what’s going on at the W3C with working group member and IAB Tech Lab advisor Alex Cone. He also weighs in on what went wrong with FLoC.

Retail media is reaching the C-suite, with advertising (and first-party data projects) coming up in retailer earnings. Then, we talk about the $16 billion deal to buy Nielsen. 

Google Analytics is removing the IP address from its global product. We get into the data privacy whys, as well as what Google Analytics is building in its place, in this week’s episode. Also: The EARN IT act and how American Express overhauled its attribution model in anticipation of loss of signal.

This week, there’s only one big story: the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine. The worlds of media, marketing and technology are reckoning with their role in a time of war. Difficult theoretical questions of content moderation and information access are all of a sudden not-so-theoretical and advertisers, too, must consider their role.

Activision-Blizzard, ZeniMax Media, Bungie, Zynga, MoPub, Adjust, Glu Mobile: Each multi-billion acquisition happened in the past year, as creative game developers and the ad tech businesses that monetize their apps come together. Plus: What’s new in the SSP market? Google’s iron grip on the category is strong as ever, but there’s room for growth.

Audio advertising is maturing (or going through puberty?): Spotify is the latest platform to weather a content controversy (over Joe Rogan’s misinformation). Meanwhile, competitor SiriusXM is building first-party identifiers. Plus: the quiet Olympics, and why B2B advertisers love the Super Bowl.

One of the most compelling soap operas of 2021 was the TV measurement debate. As the year ends, here’s one of our best reruns: the moment Nielsen lost its MRC accreditation.

Mobile advertising companies are being snapped up at eye-popping valuations. But wait … isn’t Apple torpedoing the ability to target and measure app advertising with its AppTrackingTransparency framework, SKAdNetwork and other privacy-focused policies? We untangle that contradiction on this week’s episode of The Big Story, where the editorial team is joined by special guest John […]