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How Safari’s ITP 2.3 Update Is Cracking Down On Link Decoration ‘Abuses’ 3 Things Xandr Needs To Do As Pressure Mounts To Deliver Tapad CEO On Cross-Device Graphs And Where Its Data Comes From (Hint: Not Telenor) NCC Media Rebrands To Ampersand, Launches Targeting Tech And Teams With OpenAP Why Hulu Is Betting On New Ad Formats Google's Ad Business Undergoes Massive Reorganization Zeta Global Signs A Deal With IgnitionOne For Its DSP Business Antitrust Crib Sheet: A Rundown On All Of The Big Tech Probes Zenith Forecasts $45B In Video Ads This Year, But TV Is Still King

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Black Holes In Our Data Models Are Quietly Getting Bigger

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, September 26th, 2019 at 2:49 pm.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Nathan Woodman, an independent consultant and former chief data officer at Havas Media Group.

We don’t talk about it much, but there is a growing bias in the data that feeds our digital marketing algos and measurement.

This emerging instability in the data assets that power our industry are amplified by browser tracking changes, government regulation, user consent frameworks and clean room ID redaction. This challenge presents an opportunity for the industry to fix pervasive but previously unaddressed measurement and optimization issues.

Many of us have been focused on viewability, fraud, unfair auctions and supply-path optimization. These issues took priority, but now that they appear to be settling, and new friction is emerging, I feel the time is right to address some fundamental issues in measurement that make marketers uneasy about their digital investments and create a shroud over the industry that keeps ad dollars away.

Shining light on the problem is the first step in correcting the behavior.

The Big Story: Oracle And Google Roll With The Punches

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, September 26th, 2019 at 11:52 am.

Owning a business that relies on consumer data is riskier than ever – in terms of both public sentiment and potential regulation.

And this risk has caused Google and Oracle to make structural changes. This week on The Big Story, we look and what happened and why.

Earlier this week, Oracle laid off 10% to 15% of staffers in its Oracle Data Cloud (ODC) unit. Most of those staffers worked on ODC’s third-party data products. Once the lifeblood of ODC, the use of third-party data to target customers had fallen out of favor within the company as growth has slowed, thanks in part to upstart competition.

But ODC, which contributed only a small percentage to Oracle’s overall revenue, exposed the entire corporation to risk. Recall that the penalty for violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation could be 4% of a company’s annual global turnover, and that’s a pill Oracle’s legal team doesn’t even want to think about.

And Oracle’s reorg of ODC mirrors a restructuring with Google’s ad products, where search and display are coming together. Much of the old DoubleClick team have moved on – either to consultative roles within Google (Brad Bender) or to new opportunities outside of ad tech (Jason Bigler).

As Sarah Sluis points out in this week’s podcast, Google’s search revenues have consistently grown by double digits each quarter, while display’s growth has only been in the single digits – while costing more to acquire traffic. Plus, the industry is seeing the rapid dissolution of the cookie, a key component for targeting display ads, thanks to web browsers taking an active role in blocking them.

There’s An Upside To Sharing Our Data

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, September 26th, 2019 at 12:05 am.

"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Jane Clarke, managing director and CEO at the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM).

Smart marketers today are trying to understand the impact of their advertising across a fragmented ecosystem of platforms. In particular, we want to understand deduplicated reach and ROI of advertising by gaining access to cross-platform video viewership data and other forms of media data.

The premise is simple, in theory, yet, it's much more complicated in practice because so many different sources own and house data. Publishers have app data, MVPDs have app data, marketers have their own site and app data, and on it goes. Current solutions from third-party measurement providers require complicated implementation of tags and SDKs.

Marketers want to stitch together a narrative about their brand’s performance using impression data from owned, earned and paid media. We desire access to common metrics across all data platforms. We want access to data – which resides within platforms and walled gardens, publishers and media companies and advertiser-owned digital properties – because this information will help reduce media waste and lead to better-informed business decisions.

There’s no existing arena for brands, agencies and publishers to contribute to, in aggregate, in return for access to a pool of shared data with common metrics for competitive intelligence and cross-publisher and cross-media ROI analyses. There should be.

ViacomCBS CEO Bakish Has A Plan; Alexa Supports Billions Of Dollars Of Transaction

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, September 26th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

ViacomCBS Vs. The World

ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish believes the key to winning the streaming wars is to unite ad supported products like Pluto with subscription video products. “The cool thing about streaming in the context of ViacomCBS is it unites two strategies that were developed independent and are both driving growth,” Bakish said in an interview with Cheddar. “On the Viacom side, we have the ad-supported free strategy in Pluto … In parallel to that, you have CBS’ strategy, an SVOD strategy.” Pluto, whose active users have grown from 12 million to 18 million in the first half of 2019, will use its super low price of free to attract new customers, and will also provide a forum for ViacomCBS to move people to its subscription products. Bakish also emphasized ViacomCBS’ massive content library, which includes 140,000 television episodes and 3,600 movies. That’s all well and good, but ViacomCBS’ strategy sure is similar to its competitors’. More.

Shopping Queen

Is voice commerce on its way here? Today, most people engage with voice activated devices to do basic tasks like set alarms and play music. But Amazon revealed Alexa is supporting “billions of dollars” of transactions every year, excluding the revenue Amazon makes from selling its own products, Bloomberg reports. Voice has been slow to take off as a shopping mechanism for consumers, but RBC Capital Markets predicts Amazon will add $10 billion in incremental revenue from voice shopping alone by 2020. Alexa is also growing up: It now supports 100,000 skills and integrates with 85,000 devices, said Dave Limp, head of Amazon’s devices and services business at a press event in Seattle on Wednesday. More.

Scale, Please: Vox Media Shares Post-Merger Plans For New York Media

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Wednesday, September 25th, 2019 at 3:26 pm.

Vox Media and New York Media are merging to create a portfolio of brands so they can better compete against platforms and build diversified businesses at scale, the companies announced Tuesday.

“The conversations we have with marketers every day are about the engagement around our brands, scale and performance,” Vox Media Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Pauley told AdExchanger. “This [merger] objectively increases our value in each of those areas.”

New York Media will receive stock in Vox Media and become part of a portfolio that spans sports, tech, news, fashion, food, shopping, gaming and entertainment. Vox Media’s unique monthly visitors, which range from 85 million to 90 million, will grow to 125 million.

The increased scale and breadth of content will expand the set of brands that could work with Vox Media.

“There isn’t a brand in the world we can’t...have a conversation with,” Pauley said.

Both companies have diversified content brands, and each has taken steps to expand their revenue streams. New York Media is further along in commerce and digital subscriptions, while Vox Media is more advanced in programmatic, podcasts and TV content production, Pauley said.

Programmatic opportunity

New York Media made its first programmatic hire just a year ago, when it brought on Jeremy Fass. In comparison, Vox Media has spent five years building its programmatic business. It also operates Concert, an ad network that runs across premium content sites with high-impact ad units.

In Q4, Vox Media will identify clients whose campaign objectives suggest they’d benefit from the increased scale of adding New York Media inventory, Pauley said.

Ad Buyers Beware, This Article Includes At Least 4 Words That Might Be On Your Keyword Blacklist

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Wednesday, September 25th, 2019 at 1:35 pm.

People are consuming more news content than ever, but some advertisers avoid it like the plague. In fact, the word “plague” is probably on a bunch of keyword blacklists.

“We battle the narrative that news is an unsafe place for marketers,” said Christine Cook, SVP and CRO of CNN’s digital portfolio, during a panel Tuesday hosted by TrustX at Advertising Week. “There’s a growing list of brands who wholesale say they won’t advertise in hard news environments.”

Although third-party ad verification tools are getting more sophisticated, the keyword blacklist is still the first line of defense for brand safety, and it’s a fairly blunt instrument, especially when it’s not regularly refreshed and/or doesn’t take context into consideration.

If you block the word “dead,” for instance, you’re potentially missing content related to “The Walking Dead.” Blacklist the word “breast” and “chicken breast recipes” from food sites could be on the chopping block.

But news content is often hit hardest when keywords meander mindlessly onto a block list after a newsy event.

Agency Data Platforms Fall Short On Creative, Confuse Clients

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Wednesday, September 25th, 2019 at 12:05 am.

Agency holding companies have spent $12 billion on data assets over the past five years but have yet to successfully deploy those assets at their creative agencies, according to a Forrester report released Monday.

“It’s still very much a media proposition,” said Jay Pattisall, Forrester analyst and author of the report. “[Creative] seems to be an obstacle.”

The report evaluates data platforms at each of the big six holding companies, including Omnicom’s Omni, IPG’s AMP, Publicis’ PeopleCloud, Dentsu’s M1, Havas’ Converged and MDC Partners’ Alchemy.

Forrester found that each platform can effectively reconcile multiple data sets to develop and activate better audience targeting for clients. But that capability falls short with creative execution. Omni is the only tool that has a specific use case for “creative inspiration,” which pulls in culture and trend data to help form creative ideas.

Getting creatives to extract insights and incorporate data into their process is a challenge.

“Media agencies are accustomed to this type of information,” Pattisall said. “The skill set to turn audience data into a human-centric truth is yet to develop inside of the agencies.”

SEC Charges Comscore And Former CEO Matta With Fraud; OpenAP To Start Buying Ads

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, September 25th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Settling The Score

The US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Comscore and its former CEO, Serge Matta, with engaging in a fraudulent scheme to inflate its revenue and making false or misleading statements to investors and auditors. Read the SEC release. Between 2014 and 2016, Comscore negotiated the exchange of data sets with no cash consideration (meaning it wasn’t paid), but would claim revenue on the fair value of the deal, even though it hadn’t sold a thing. The practice inflated Comscore’s revenue by about $50 million, according to the SEC. Comscore and Matta settled the case with penalties of $5 million and $700,000, respectively, and reimbursements from Matta of $2.1 million from the sale of stock and incentive-based compensation. Comscore’s stock dropped by more than 4% after the news broke, and at the close of the market was trading at $2.25, down from more than $30 in 2017.

Close A Door, OpenAP A Window

OpenAP, a TV audience consortium backed by Fox, ViacomCBS and NBCUniversal, is charting a new course in the fast-moving TV data market. WarnerMedia was one of the founding members of OpenAP in 2017 (though at the time it was just Turner), but dropped out this year because AT&T is in the process of connecting its own media and advertising businesses. OpenAP added a new CEO, David Levy, in May, and just announced an overhaul of its leadership team. And now OpenAP is planning to spin out as an independent joint venture, as it goes from merely assembling audience segments to actually buying ads, Levy tells Variety. He also touted a new partnership with Ampersand (née NCC Media), a TV sales consortium backed by Comcast, Cox and Charter. “Look, it’s always difficult to work together as competitors,” Levy said. “What you want is a group of companies that are as closely aligned as possible so you can move forward quickly.” More.

Oracle Data Cloud Cuts Staff As It Tries To Move Beyond Third-Party Data

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Tuesday, September 24th, 2019 at 6:45 pm.

Assembled from acquisitions totaling in the multibillions, Oracle Data Cloud (ODC) had become inefficient, too focused on its declining business selling third-party data. Now, the embattled unit is trying to streamline.

ODC cut 10% to 15% of its staff Monday, multiple sources told AdExchanger, after which it will focus on contextual data, brand safety and measurement.

ODC sees those businesses as its strategic future because they present better growth opportunities and stronger margins than its third-party data business, which was once seen as its core.

While third-party data is still the biggest contributor to topline revenue, its growth has slowed and it will be the cash cow that funds ODC’s investments in smaller, faster-growing categories.

"As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our team to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best products to our customers around the world,” an Oracle spokesperson said in a statement provided to AdExchanger.

After ODC GM Eric Roza left in April, the data unit was placed under the oversight of Rob Tarkoff, who oversees Oracle CX Cloud. And ODC is now aligning even closer with CX Cloud. Last week, Oracle integrated ODC assets BlueKai and ID Graph with CX Unity, CX Cloud’s customer data platform.

Tarkoff, along with ODC CRO Mollie Spilman, who joined from Criteo in June, made the layoffs as part of a reorganization to re-focus the data unit, and to reduce the bloat that came from numerous acquisitions operating as stand-alone businesses.

How Safari’s ITP 2.3 Update Is Cracking Down On Link Decoration ‘Abuses’

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, September 24th, 2019 at 1:28 pm.

One more cookie workaround bites the dust, in Safari at least.

The latest iteration of Intelligent Tracking Prevention, ITP 2.3, is cracking down on localStorage and other tracking mechanisms that try and outfox ITP. The change was already in the code base, but hadn’t yet been publicized.

LocalStorage is a form of web storage that allows sites to store data directly in the browser with no expiration date. LocalStorage is sometimes lumped together with edge computing, which is a method for processing data closer to where it's created, in this case the publisher's domain within the browser.

The newer crop of second-generation data-management platforms, including Permutive, use a combination of localStorage and edge computing as an alternative to third-party cookies, and position the practice as privacy compliant, because the data doesn't leave a user's device. For this reason, Permutive claims that it's unaffected by ITP changes.

In a blog post on Monday, WebKit security and privacy engineer John Wilander explained that the primary motivation behind ITP 2.3 is to combat what WebKit considers to be the “continued abuse” of link decoration, aka adding code to a URL in order to create cookie-less identifiers.