The Big Story

Signal loss combined with privacy concerns is helping bring old-school panel measurement back in style. Google just started recruiting for a panel this week. Plus: the future of attention metrics.

Google has tried – and so far mostly failed – to get its customers on board with major new migrations for its online advertising platform. But Google means business this time, with the migration to the new GA4 analytics solution. You’ve got one year. Also: Tech layoffs are on the rise.

The NewFronts are old news. Now it’s all about the upfronts, which are old. But don’t forget about the podcast upfronts, which are newer than the NewFronts but named after the TV oldfronts … or upfronts. Okay. Now that we’ve cleared that up, tune in for frontline reporting from the upfronts (TV and podcast varieties).

It’s NewFronts season. A week of programmatic pageantry where the data-driven video and streaming media ecosystem plays dress up in an attempt to recreate the glitz and glamour of the age-old TV upfronts. But across the Atlantic, the industry is hard at work dealing with the harsh realities of the online era as advertising becomes a means of “psychological warfare.”

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 […]

Attribution on Facebook ain’t what it used to be. The Facebook that enabled hundreds of creative versions, targeting variations and near-instantaneous optimization – all fed by data – is changing. Apple took a big bite out of Facebook’s attribution capabilities when its AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) required apps to collect a user opt-in to track their account […]

Getting online shoppers to click and add a product to their cart – and then have that product ship cost-effectively to a customer – is the latest challenge for CPG companies. During earnings calls over the past week, leaders of CPG companies had to answer to investors about their ecommerce strategies, which have accelerated thanks […]

Connected TV has arrived – a bit earlier than programmers may have expected. The pandemic-related boom in streaming, along with record TV upfronts, means there’s going to be a “wild Q4” ahead as programmatic buyers scramble for access to streaming inventory. One key issue is that CTV measurement capabilities aren’t developed enough yet, noted Kelly […]

Will Xandr find a home with InMobi? As InMobi prepares for an IPO, we talk about the Axios report that the company is in talks to acquire Xandr. AT&T has been shopping the company formerly known as AppNexus around for months – so when will a buyer materialize? Ad tech’s stratospheric public market valuations should […]

The Trade Desk made waves this week with the release of Solimar, its new beach resort brand. Psych! Solimar is real, but it’s the company’s new DSP dashboard. In addition to the updated UI, The Trade Desk also launched a venture capital arm called TD7 – named for the $7 million seed investment that got […]

 The teacher just gave the class an extension on a hard, confusing assignment. Third-party cookies won’t go away in Google Chrome until the end of 2023, a delay of nearly two years. Google said the decision would allow its Privacy Sandbox proposals to move further along. Currently, only three of more than 30 are in […]

We’re entering the end-game for third-party cookies, but an unlikely group could intervene to keep them alive: regulators. Last Friday, Google agreed to let UK watchdog group Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) approve its decision to remove third-party cookies. The move is unusual, reports senior editor Allison Schiff, because it’s an example of regulators guiding […]

IP address is a tell for several things, namely a user’s location – and it can be used to triangulate identity via fingerprinting. But soon that will no longer be the case, at least not in Apple’s ecosystem. Apple raised the privacy bar at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, and IP address was in […]

Epic has accused Apple of running a monopoly, and this week the trial concluded. Why should we care over in advertising land? While there have been antitrust cases in Europe for some time, now they’re happening on big tech’s home turf. The District of Colombia filed a case against Amazon this week, and of course […]

The upfronts kicked off this week with news of a megamerger between WarnerMedia and Discovery Communications. But Xandr isn’t coming along for the ride. AT&T’s ad tech acquisition remains with the telco. We can only speculate why, but one reason might be that AT&T is planning a second spinoff in light of the currently frothy […]

The sun hasn’t been shining on Wall Street this week as tech stocks dipped precipitously – The Trade Desk among them. Despite turning in decent earnings, TTD’s stock dove by more than 25%, making it one of the most affected of the ad tech bunch. It was a surprising development after more than a year […]

This week, The Big Story records live at AdExchanger’s digital conference: Innovation Labs. While our April 20 one-day event will focus on Ecommerce, and our May 18 event will focus on CTV, our event on March 16 was all about Identity. And the big story around identity, no pun intended, is that it’s still a […]

This week, the Big Story is … well, it’s probably the double-barrel shotgun lawsuit staring down Facebook, but we recorded this podcast before that news broke. So this is a story about Big Things To Come as Nielsen revealed it will completely overhaul the currency used to transact TV advertising. The new currency, which is […]

This week on The Big Story, we talk about measurement. Wait, don’t go. We’re going to dive into the topic of measurement by focusing on two exciting new areas: podcasting and addressable TV. On Tuesday, Spotify bought podcast ad tech company Megaphone (once known as Panoply) for a reported $235 million. The ability to measure […]

Oh God, will this election never end? This week on The Big Story, we get into That, and how the results whatever they might be at the time of writing, might potentially impact paid media. Will a Biden win make politics boring again, causing news publications to lose audience? Of course, a peaceful transfer of […]

We’ve been talking so much these days about Google and identity that we’ve neglected getting into the other big Google story: antitrust. Congress dragged Google back to Washington again this week (virtually, at least) to examine about how its business impacts the competition. And this time, reports AdExchanger senior editor Allison Schiff, the senators were […]