The Big Story this week (this month, rather) remains the impact of the Coronavirus on media, marketing and global economies.
The team examines how the pandemic and ‘social distancing’ affects the advertising industry, which is notoriously built around personal relationships and networking. As Allison Schiff notes, many ad deals come about extemporaneously, whether it’s sitting next to someone at a conference or a handshake intro made by mutual acquaintances.
With no conferences and no handshakes, will ad tech deal-making pipelines run dry?
But don’t worry, we’re also getting into the weeds on some of the thorniest issues facing publishers and ad tech. News companies including BuzzFeed, Insider Inc. and News Corp. are seeing an uptick in vendor outreach, as ad tech and data companies try to sink their teeth into publishers’ first-party cookies. Publishers are far more wary now than a decade ago, when vendors would tag pages willy-nilly with the promise of a slightly better CPM.
One such ad tech vendor is LiveRamp, which is pushing its Authenticated Traffic Solution as a way to wean publishers (and its own identity graph) from cookies to more stable identifiers like an email address. Can LiveRamp survive the cookie apocalypse? And if LiveRamp can’t – who can?
