Technology

Lost in the Sturm und Drang of Q4 (Q for quarantine) 2020, Google introduced a beta program called Performance Max, its first ad product spanning all Google-owned media. Fast-forward to today, and Performance Max has quietly become the fastest growing and potentially most controversial product in the Google portfolio.

Brand marketers are still hesitant to lean into a mobile-first approach, particularly in programmatic. But with the mobile app economy predicted to grow to $156 billion by 2023, why the uncertainty? Today, the digital advertising industry has the opportunity to transform the mobile app channel by acknowledging, understanding and tackling marketers’ concerns, writes Steve Roach, head of mobile app sales at Index Exchange.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. A New Day, A New Apple Apple engineers are preparing to support third-party app stores on iPhones and iPads, Bloomberg reports.  But this is not a change of heart on Apple’s part. Apple is simply following the law. A new rule in the […]

How well do you know your audience?

I’m not just talking about their age, location, gender or purchase history. I’m talking about the subtle details that really tell you who they are as people. Details that provide a clear understanding of how to communicate with them beyond superficial insights.

The most commonly cited rationale for publisher staffing cuts has been marketers’ hesitance to spend on advertising amid persistent economic uncertainty. But publishers’ latest pivot to video and increased competition among digital channels is also likely to blame.

Television has long been one of the most transparent advertising channels. Likewise, programmatic advertising has always offered buyers incredible detail about the audience and context of their ads. Now, advertisers are rightfully frustrated that they have so little transparency into where their ads run when buying television programmatically.

Google Ad Manager (GAM) was out of commission for about three hours Thursday evening across web, app and video inventory. Any ad placement served through GAM, even ads monetized by a non-Google SSP, went dark, leading to lost revenue for publishers of all sizes at a time when they can least afford to lose out on revenue.

The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act, the American Data Privacy and Protection Act and efforts to change Google’s and Apple’s mobile advertising practices would force companies to adopt new practices and technologies to understand and act on consumer identity. Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO at ID5, dives into each initiative and its implications.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Can You Talk The Tok? With TikTok, it’s like the clone wars. (We’re looking at you, Reels and Shorts.) But TikTok has a special power, which is its seemingly limitless feed of quick, infinitely swipeable, likable, shareable videos. Reproducing TikTok’s success is no […]

DOOH has been thought of as pure branding, according to Elliott Hasiuk, principal for digital media at Part and Sum. That makes sense, considering out-of-home media might just be a big picture of, say, a Big Mac and the McDonald’s arches plastered 40 feet in the air. “Now we’re able to tie that branding to bottom-of-the-funnel metrics that matter more to the business.”

Fingerprinting, an alternative to third-party cookies, uses a constellation of browser signals to identify a person. The browsers don’t like it, but can they actually stamp it out? Plus: Advertising will grow, albeit slowly, in 2023, according to recent ad agency forecasts.

The quality of marketing data – or, rather, the lack thereof – is arguably as big of an issue as signal loss, but doesn’t get nearly as much ink. On Wednesday, data validation provider Truthset opened the doors of its data collective to help data providers independently test the accuracy of their consumer records.

The IAB Tech Lab has updated its OpenRTB standard to include objects specifically designed for DOOH. It also published new DOOH-specific guidelines and technical resources for real time bidding in collaboration with the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) and Outsmart, the Out of Home Advertising Association for the UK.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. BuzzCuts BuzzFeed is laying off 12% of its workforce, Variety reports, based on an SEC filing. The reduction will apparently help BuzzFeed “weather an economic downturn that I believe will extend well into 2023,” writes CEO Jonah Peretti in a memo.  BuzzFeed’s revenue […]

Last week, the IAB’s multistate privacy agreement (MSPA) was made available for advertisers, publishers and ad tech partners to sign and begin using to track their data flows. But what is the MSPA?

Back in 2018, Tim Cook said, “The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer—if our customer was our product.” Fast-forward to 2022, and, to deliver the most relevant Apple Search Ads, the company uses “information a customer includes in their Apple ID account” for ad targeting purposes. If that isn’t monetizing your customers, what is, writes Uriah Av-Ron, partner and founder at Oasis Public Relations.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. That’s A Wrapped This week once again saw social timelines taken over by Spotify Wrapped, the audio service’s year-end user roundup of the most-played music and podcasts. In addition to highlighting Spotify’s first-party data, Wrapped has become the company’s most effective marketing tool, […]

Thanks to signal loss, recession fears and the “ad tech tax,” publishers of all sizes are seeing their ad revenue suffer. But the problem is more pronounced among local news publishers, many of which were barely getting by before platform privacy changes roiled the digital advertising industry. The Local Media Consortium (LMC) shares how it’s helping its members mitigate these headwinds.

The Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday online shopping bonanza was in full effect this year. But it’s hard to make judgements about whether this season is helping buoy retailers and brands as in years past

SKAdNetwork (SKAN) 4.0 was released last month and there’s a lot to be optimistic about. But there’s also complexity to unpack. While Apple has focused on bringing more measurement into their framework, it could further fragment the advertising ecosystem, too. Katie Madding, chief product officer at Adjust, offers five key changes to be aware of.

SSPs had traditionally been among the first in the ad tech ecosystem to build profitable businesses. But their future in the programmatic tech stack is uncertain because they’ve evolved from publisher-centric technologies to demand aggregation businesses, often competing with their biggest customers: buy-side platforms or DSPs.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Yahoo? Yahoo has taken a 25% stake in Taboola as part of a 30-year exclusive ad deal (uhh … pardon?) that makes Taboola the primary native inventory seller for Yahoo’s media properties, The New York Times reports. The announcement leaves questions hanging. A […]

Brands are starting to look at video games as an inventory source, but there’s no scaled programmatic infrastructure to help aggregate supply in video games. And so that’s where in-game ad platform Bidstack is focusing its road map.  “We’re moving toward being a gaming SSP, a pure tech play,” Bidstack Founder and CEO James Draper told AdExchanger.

How should advertisers approach a wild-child platform like Twitter? David Cohen, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau – who recently spoke with Elon Musk himself on that very topic – weighs in. Also in this episode: grappling with the term “commercial surveillance,” retail media real talk and marketing in the metaverse.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. AdExchanger’s daily news round-up will return on Monday. Enjoy your holiday, and may all your online orders arrive on time. A Little Bit Lauder Now Estée Lauder wasn’t a first mover on TikTok – but it was a very fast follower.  The Estée Lauder […]

As part of a plan to consolidate its SSP partners, Horizon Media struck a deal with PubMatic Monday. Horizon’s clients who purchase open-auction inventory through its HX trade desk will be able to use PubMatic’s SPO products to automatically optimize their bidding depending on which KPIs they want to boost, whether the deal is open auction, programmatic guaranteed or a private marketplace.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Hasbros And The Have-Nots Companies like Netflix, Roku, Apple, Amazon and Paramount are thirsting for recognizable brands they can build a content universe around.  Media franchises provide a solution. Because, apparently, people will settle for only franchises and nothing new, ever again.  […]

Android has a Privacy Sandbox, too, and it’s going into open beta next year. Learn why this initiative isn’t generating the same ruckus as its close Chrome cousin, which is being hashed out at the W3C. Plus: a rundown on transparency (or the lack thereof) and the related data land grab in CTV.

After a five-year run as GM of Comcast-owned video ad tech platform FreeWheel, Dave Clark made the jump to programmatic ad platform TripleLift, which hired him as CEO in October. Clark spoke to AdExchanger about TripleLift’s IPO plans, how close its ambitious CTV ad formats are to market and more.

Between Amazon blocking beer ads during NFL Thursday Night Football and Meta’s newly introduced restrictions on pharmaceutical advertising, marketers are running into all sorts of unexpected (and perhaps anti-competitive) obstacles. Dan Meehan, Founder and CEO at PadSquad, offers suggestions for marketing around these restrictions.