transparency

This year, programmatic companies faced tough decisions about privacy, awkward acquisitions and the cookie die-off that never quite happened.

In today’s digital advertising landscape, speed, scale and sophistication have become both a promise and a problem. Innovation has accelerated – but so too has fragmentation. Marketers are expected to drive performance across an ever-expanding universe of platforms, formats and data streams – often without the clarity or confidence they need to succeed.

When an ad shows up next to illegal content, there is often not a single point of failure. Adalytics Krzysztof Franaszek walks us through why he found ads showing up next to the worst kind of criminal content — and the simple and complex solutions to this problem.

Meta and Mozilla’s new browser-based attribution system for web ads appears to solve an interesting math problem. But if applied to real-world advertising, it will increase privacy risks for users, writes Raptive’s Don Marti.

What captured our readers’ attention this year was both a continuation of and a departure from years past. Our top 10 stories in the past year coalesce around two themes: kookies and kwality. Ahem, cookies and quality.

Open social platforms need established content policy that is underpinned by transparency, advanced technology and feedback loops for constant improvement, writes Zefr’s Cameron Cramer.

Marketers are wasting 25% of their ad spend on made-for-advertising websites and inefficiencies. And the ANA thinks consolidation and education are the solutions. Plus: 2024 ad spend will grow, but at a slower rate. And streamers will grapple with CTV’s rising ad spend and linear TV’s accelerating decline.

“What frustrates me most about this situation is how easily it can be remedied in a way that will benefit all parties,” writes Lou Paskalis about the Google Search Partner network brand safety debacle.

Google search ads appear on a host of unsavory and offensive sites, according to recent Adalytics research. And without any transparent reporting from Google, marketers can’t do anything about it.

Armed with Ads.txt and Sellers.json files, Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads Institute, spends her days exposing how money flows through the twisted pipes of the programmatic supply chain. Her goal? To defund disinformation, toxic content and hate online.