Two biggie tech platforms caught our eye in the past week: Twitter and Google.
The state of advertising at Twitter is a hot mess. First, Elon Musk writes a glowing endorsement of advertising on Twitter. (The company netted $1.18 billion in revenue in Q2.) Next thing you know, he’s fueling misinformation on Twitter and doing a live brainstorm of monetization features on the platform.
Agencies are skittish, with some advising their clients to temporarily pause campaigns on Twitter, reports Associate Editor Anthony Vargas. And the client-side Twitter execs who advertisers trust are disappearing. This week, former Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette, the face of Twitter advertising, resigned, joining a flock of other executives that headed for the exit – some voluntarily, some not.
Brand safety on Twitter will be a huge concern. Musk has been clear – on this if nothing else – that content moderation is a lower priority. Already, hate speech, like the use of racial slurs, is on the rise, Vargas notes.
What will become of the little bird, propelled in a new direction by Musk’s rocket ship?
The data-privacy-concerned Google
Google also had a busy news week, with two notable product announcements across Google Analytics and Ads Data Hub. First, it pushed back the deadline for the Google Analytics migration, with a frank assessment that marketers just weren’t ready to (or just weren’t going to) move to the new platform. So it built an automated feature to do it for many of them in the background.
Of course, Google is pushing customers onto a new analytics platform in part because the current version of Google Analytics is banned in European countries, and data privacy standards require a new system that doesn’t include IP addresses and doesn’t track individual users.
Heightened data privacy standards spurred the creation of data clean room Ads Data Hub more than five years ago. The change was a byproduct of Google Search data being used for YouTube campaigns, but Google needed a way to do so without allowing advertisers to reverse engineer search audiences. The clean room was born.
But while Ads Data Hub was once a measurement-only tool, now it’s leaning into targeting as well.
The recent Ads Data Hub changes also speak to how the clean room marketplace is evolving, Senior Editor James Hercher explains. As data clean room standards emerge and the open industry insists on access to measurement, Ads Data Hub must evolve again.
