Programmatic Ad Quality Baggage; Martech Big Brother

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Lessons Of History

Ad/Fin CEO Andrew Altersohn writes for MediaPost that programmatic must deal with its ad quality (i.e., fraud, viewability and brand safety) baggage once and for all. He quotes Tim Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters, who says, “Over Reuters’ history, we helped many markets make the transition from small, thinly traded, opaque venues to large, efficient and transparent exchanges. It feels to me that programmatic advertising, after a very promising start that has borrowed trading technology from the financial markets, is ready to make this important transition.” More.

Circa 1984

Fusion examined Dstillery’s mobile tracking of Iowa caucus-goers, and it found an ad tech ecosystem “doing far more information collection…than the NSA, but they don’t explicitly link it to their names.” Also noted: Samsung’s new SmartTV came with a warning regarding personal conversations in front of the set, since “that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.” Martech’s Big Brother-ish reputation lives on, but the industry doesn’t seem to care.

Paid Emoji

Under withering fire from investors regarding its ad monetization efforts, Twitter, perhaps unsurprisingly, is now pitching marketers on paid stickers and emojis. The emerging revenue plank has been embraced by newer messaging apps such as Kik, Line, Snapchat and Twitch. But Orli LeWinter, 360i’s head of social, tells Digiday, “I don’t know if that will be the renaissance that Twitter needs.” More.

Instant Gratification

Facebook’s Instant Articles, which fought an uphill battle for adoption, has hit an important publisher milestone following recent feedback-induced updates, writes Jack Marshall at The WSJ. “The biggest stumbling block with Instant Articles was that we were making less there than with visits to our own site. We are now seeing parity with our mobile web version,” said LittleThings.com co-founder Joe Speiser. “It’s every bit as good as on our own site,” echoed Business Insider’s president, Julie Hansen. “It’s pretty much 1 to 1 across those platforms,” said Mic chief strategy officer Cory Haik. Read on.

Say Cheese

Benedict Evans, VC at Andreessen Horowitz, looks at the content format underlying the biggest social platforms: photos. Doing some back-of-the-napkin math, Evans expects about 2 trillion pictures to be shared on Snapchat, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram combined this year. Which explains recent products from Facebook that autoconnect its news feed to user photo libraries and recently taken pics. “How many (photos) were taken and not shared? Again, there’s no solid data for this (though Apple and Google probably have some).” The paid media of the future will float among a sea of pics. More.

But Wait, There’s More!