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The Big Story: The Pile On Publishers’ Plates

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Publishers are facing challenges on three fronts.

First, they must prepare for cookieless identity, which means sifting through several dozen distinct identity providers. Second, they need to comply with new state-by-state data privacy laws. And third, they are working within an industry facing broad economic headwinds, including layoffs. At a time when they need to do more, they have fewer resources.

Recording from the AdMonsters Publisher Forum in Miami, Fla., Associate Editor Anthony Vargas relayed what hundreds of overwhelmed publishers are thinking about: In particular, three acronyms are getting a lot of play: FLEDGE, SDAs and the MSPA.

FLEDGE, of course, is the remarketing tech within the Privacy Sandbox. SDAs are the IAB Tech Lab’s Seller-Defined Audiences, another post-cookie targeting tool. And the MSPA, or multistate privacy agreement, is an IAB-created standard for the industry, including publishers, to comply with privacy laws. Anthony shares how publishers across the industry are adopting these tools.

He also gives a rundown on last week’s IAB PlayFronts. In-game advertising is often dismissed for its audience (which is more diverse in terms of age and gender than people think), its lack of scale, brand safety or cost. But some of these concerns are outdated or surmountable. Anthony explains why.

The Rundown on ACR

Then we go deep into ACR, or automatic content recognition, a technology that’s becoming more important as smart TV manufacturers enter the advertising business (or vice versa) and the industry moves away from panel-based measurement.

ACR tech, available via opted-in smart TVs, takes screenshots of what you’re watching, matches it to programming and shares that information with ad tech and advertisers to improve measurement and targeting.

But there are two big problems with ACR data, Associate Editor Alyssa Boyle reports.

First, the data is highly fragmented, with each TV manufacturer protecting the data gleaned from its TV sets. Second, this type of tracking can feel creepy to consumers who do opt in but might not fully understand what they agreed to.

Depending on the way the wind blows with future data privacy legislation, ACR tech could find itself facing more challenges ahead.

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