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The Big Story: A Lackluster Black Friday

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the tentpoles that kick off that final stretch of Q4 spanning Thanksgiving and Christmas.

But this Black Friday/Cyber Monday combo was not as record-setting as in years past, according to Adobe and others who track sales data.

There are many reasons behind this change. Not only has the pandemic created some strange year-over-year comparisons, but the discounting of big-ticket items like TVs doesn’t feel as impactful to many consumers. Plus, some brands didn’t even offer deals, while others ran them so often in the lead-up to Thanksgiving that they weren’t timed to either big sales day.

But shopping, or the lack thereof, wasn’t the only event that went down on Black Friday. While Americans were recovering from Thanksgiving gluttony, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority released a 125-page document about its planned oversight of Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

We distill what ad tech and publishers should take away from this document on this week’s episode. From the key gripes by ad tech companies and publishers about the Privacy Sandbox to how the CMA’s involvement could slow down Google’s move away from third-party cookies, we break down the investigation’s rippling impact.

 

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