Technology

The platforms taketh away – but sometimes regulators can giveth back. Google is seriously flirting with the idea of reopening YouTube inventory to appease European regulators and Criteo just won its 2019 case against Meta over being booted from the Facebook Marketing Partner program.

The Trade Desk’s OpenPath gives advertisers a direct link with premium publishers, collapsing the supply chain from the DSP directly to the publisher’s inventory. While a win under the guise of supply path optimization, it also spells danger for SSPs, the traditional guardians of publisher inventory who now risk being squeezed out entirely, writes Joseph Lospalluto, US Country Manager of ShowHeroes Group.

Google may open up YouTube to outside programmatic demand as a bargaining chip to EU regulators. And a looming recession won’t deflate digital advertising – although don’t expect pandemic-level growth.

The IAB, in collaboration with the IAB Tech Lab and the Media Rating Council (MRC), released its first update to in-game ad measurement standards since 2009. The new standards reexamine the metrics for counting a valid in-game ad impression and add criteria for measuring ad placements in 3D and virtual environments. They also define in-game measurement terms in alignment with cross-channel measurement efforts.

Two years of sweeping disruptions – supply-chain shortages, staffing challenges, fluctuating COVID regulations and looming inflation – were tough on consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers and retailers. But consumers are eager to shop in stores again. As data across touch points converge, marketers have the power to elevate customer experience and increase conversions, writes Gila Wilensky, president of Xaxis US.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Google’s $18 Billion Offer Almost exactly one year ago, the EU began an antitrust inquiry into whether Google restricts access to the cross-site web and app data it uses to benefit its own products. Specifically, the European Commission examined how Google forces advertisers […]

The market is not being kind to digital media companies. The nearly 40% drop in BuzzFeed’s stock price on Monday and the decline of its valuation from $1.5 billion when it went public in December to roughly $300 million now is no doubt causing other digital-native publishers to rethink their IPO plans. But any doom and gloom about the long-term viability of digital publishers in public markets is likely overblown.

After Apple’s WWDC, the company’s next step will be to clamp down on fingerprinting … the question is, when? Plus, industry orgs struggle to build a path forward with new signals.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. All Systems Ro’ Roku insiders are abuzz about a potential acquisition by Netflix, Insider reports.  There’s no firm reporting of a deal, or even of negotiations. But two employees say Roku abruptly closed the trading window to sell vested stock. That kind of trading […]

As clients look for alternatives to third-party cookies, ad agency Dentsu can steer them to its in-house Contextual Intelligence tool, which launched today. Although contextual targeting is often considered inferior to demographic or behavioral targeting, it can drive performance. Jewelry retailer Pandora piloted the tool during the 2022 Valentine’s Day season. Ads placed using the solution represented 2% of campaign spend, but drove 36% of revenue, a 24x return on investment.

Three web standards organizations tasked with the online ad industry overhaul, the W3C, the IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org, called out for help this week during a series of presentations and a joint panel at the AdMonsters Ops conference in New York City.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Brick By Brick-And-Mortar The march of the retail media networks cannot be stopped.  Dollar General on Tuesday announced a rebrand of its advertising business, now DGMN (for Dollar General Media Network), to extend its data to ad-buying across the web. According to the […]

Retail media networks are coming out of the woodwork. And it may feel like everyone’s got one. But it’s time to stop using RMN as an umbrella term. The details matter, says Patrick Miller, co-president of commerce at Ascential, on this week’s episode.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Whoop Deduped Open Bidding, Google’s alternative to header bidding that maintains its high take rate, has been in the hot seat since last year, after a state-led antitrust suit revealed the lengths to which Google went to stymie header-bidding adoption.  The Trade Desk cranked […]

Richard Russell, VP of omnichannel marketing at Deckers Brands, parent company of Ugg and Teva, has been on a mission to “wean people off of using return on ad spend as the end-all be-all metric” and to reorient the company’s marketing strategy to focus on getting the most out of first-party data.

Personalization – paired with effective measurement – has enabled marketers to see and understand results, ultimately driving them to spend more. Madan Sundararaju, vice president of the M&E sector at Capgemini Americas, writes on how traditional media platforms can adapt to these trends and increase their share of ad revenue.

We read between the lines of Google’s progress report to the UK’s antitrust regulator on its plan to remove third-party cookies from Chrome. Could Google miss its own self-imposed 2023 deadline? “Signs point to yes.”

Go to any SSP or DSP website and you’re likely to see a mention of programmatic “premium.” But programmatic premium shouldn’t stop at inventory – ad tech companies should also be supplying premium service to make sure advertisers can actually optimize their buys by maximizing the value of that premium inventory, writes Steve Pelletier, SVP of strategic partnerships & corp development at FatTail.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. So Sue Me One of the myriad sticking points standing in the way of a US federal privacy law is the question of whether people will be able to sue tech companies in open court. Terms of service often stipulate that signatories give […]

You’ve probably heard (dozens of times) by now that first-party data will be the key to post-third-party-cookie ad targeting. But what exactly is first-party data? How does it differ from second-party, third-party and zero-party data? And what makes first-party data more suited to a privacy-centric ad experience?

The IAB Tech Lab announced its Global Privacy Platform (GPP), a framework to standardize the sharing of consent signals so companies can more easily comply with global privacy regulations. “It’s a protocol for streamlining and managing cross-jurisdictional privacy compliance,” said IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur – which is why the platform will be ready to incorporate new consent strings within the framework as they emerge.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. WWD-See It To Believe It Ad tech is on tenterhooks waiting for privacy-related news from Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference next week. Sandwiched between glitzy announcements about shiny new products and hardware, many expect a momentous mention as to whether Apple will start […]

Vibenomics announced a $12.3 million Series B round on Tuesday, led by Panoramic Ventures, bringing its total funding to just over $30 million. Vibenomics expects to grow its roster of 6,000 retail locations (just over half of which are grocery stores like Hy-Vee, QuikTrip, Kroger and GetGo) to more than 20,000 locations by the end of 2023.

The programmatic market continues to boom as marketers shift more of their budgets to digital channels. But despite the incredible scale of this ecosystem, the market is still maturing – and true price discovery and price setting at a level of granularity that reflects true marketplace dynamics can help fill some of those gaps, writes Andrew Casale, president and CEO of Index Exchange.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Since You Asked … When the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) asked what tech companies thought of Apple, Meta happily chimed in.  Meta, which has lost billions of dollars due to Apple’s new tracking prompt, says its ability to innovate has been […]

At Programmatic I/O in Las Vegas, CafeMedia’s Paul Bannister, Tinuiti’s Nirish Parsad and Insider’s Jana Meron weighed in on the ad industry’s worsening signal-loss problem due to the deprecation of device identifiers and third-party cookies.

The word “cookieless” crops up in virtually every conversation about the future of online identity. But what exactly do people mean when they say “cookieless”? Although the definition seems simple enough – the absence of cookies – it lacks the nuance to encompass the true complexity of signal loss. It’s also a misnomer.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Oh, Snap Snap warned investors this week that it will miss its one-month-old revenue target, tumbling shares by more than 40% in what may be a harbinger for the industry, CNBC reports.  “Since we issued guidance on April 21, 2022, the macroeconomic environment has […]

Taking the “room” metaphor literally, the current clean room system is akin to a collection of stand-alone rooms existing outside the form and function of a house. That’s why the next level must look beyond clean rooms. It’s time to build a clean house using a method called distributed analytics, writes Marc Rossen, SVP investment and activation analytics at Omnicom Media Group.