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Can Contextual Targeting Replace Third-Party Cookies? EMarketer: Google is Losing Share To Amazon In Search If You’re Using A Blacklist, It’s ‘Dead’ Certain You Blocked This Article Facebook And Ad Platforms Reckon With Lying In Political Ads California AG Drops Highly Anticipated First Draft Of CCPA Implementation Regs Kibo Buys Monetate In Its Vista-Backed Bid To Be The Next Ecom Cloud Publicis Reports Q3 Early Because Results Are That Bad – And Lowers Guidance Through 2020 Dataxu’s Mike Baker: Scaling A DSP In A New World Dominated By TV Hulu Moves To First-Price Auctions For Its OTT Inventory

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Can Contextual Targeting Replace Third-Party Cookies?

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 at 6:15 am.

Contextual targeting is all the rage – and no, it’s not 1998.

It’s 2019, and the industry is anxiously casting around for an alternative to third-party cookies as the browsers clamp down on cross-site tracking and regulatory pressure ratchets up in the United States and around the world.

A shift away from audience-based buying is inevitable, said Max Jaffe, managing partner and programmatic practice lead at GroupM.

“You could argue that over the years, the pendulum swung too much toward audience-based buying and third-party data – and now it’s starting to swing back,” he said.

Reactionary or for real?

The California Consumer Privacy Act, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020, has a lot to do with the growing interest in contextual stateside, said Jay Friedman, president of programmatic agency Goodway Group.

If cookies are no longer viable, keywords are a quick fix.

EMarketer: Google is Losing Share To Amazon In Search

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 at 6:00 am.

Google is still by far the dominant player in search advertising, but Amazon is quickly stealing share as it grows in the number two spot.

Amazon’s search business will grow 30% in 2019 to $7 billion, making up 13% of the total US search market, according to a forecast released Tuesday by eMarketer.

That’s peanuts compared to Google, whose 2019 search revenue is $40 billion and 73% of the US search market.

But jump to 2021, and Amazon’s search share will grow from 13% this year to 16% at $11.7 billion, while Google’s will shrink to 70.5%.

“We are seeing Google losing share as Amazon gains share,” said Nicole Perrin, principal analyst at eMarketer and author of the report.

Amazon’s search business is mostly growing thanks to product searches. While product listing ads on Google are still doing well, most product searches now begin on Amazon, according to eMarketer polling.

Amazon is the only search engine whose share of ad budgets will grow through 2021, since it’s the only scaled offering besides Google and Microsoft Bing. But other retailers – Walmart, Pinterest, eBay and Target – have search engines that while aren’t as scaled, consumers are nonetheless using to find products at Google’s and Bing’s expense (but not Amazon’s).

If You’re Using A Blacklist, It’s ‘Dead’ Certain You Blocked This Article

by AdExchanger Content Studio // Posted on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 at 12:07 am.

This article is sponsored by Oracle Data Cloud.

The digital world can be a scary place, so it’s no wonder that brands and agencies are clamoring to find solutions that protect brand equity without sacrificing the scale advertisers need to stay top of mind for consumers.

In doing so, many are relying on stringent keyword blacklists to protect them from a brand safety disaster and insulate them from content associations that are not suited to their brand image or message. Yet the effectiveness of that tactic is limited by the clumsy and overbroad limitations from blocking based on exact matched words or terms.

The advertiser conundrum

Keyword blacklists consist of words or terms that are unacceptable to the advertiser or media buyer. There is a traditional list of content categories that most brands want to avoid, though the amount of tolerable risk varies from brand to brand. That list includes the standard Interactive Advertising Bureau brand safety categories: arms or weapons, illegal drugs, tobacco, adult or obscene content, hate speech, death or injury, and terrorism.

But the problem with blacklisting based on exact matching keywords alone is that the approach is missing an important ingredient—context—which is paramount when defining suitable inventory versus aiding in the isolation of innocuous content.

The Problems With Identity

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 at 12:05 am.

“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 Eric Berry, co-founder and CEO at TripleLift.

There are several intersecting issues relating to identity in ad tech today. The challenge is that the solutions often fail to align directly with the most significant problems.

The single biggest problem is that browsers are blocking third-party cookies. Safari has gone the furthest by making it difficult to do any form of cross-domain tracking. Firefox is not far behind. On the other hand, Chrome, which is roughly the size of all other browsers combined, may never block third-party cookies.

Today’s identity discussions often focus on the challenge of syncing cookies across ad tech providers. Many ID consortia, for example, create a single cookie that ad tech partners can use without the need for each partner to sync with each other. While this is helpful, the IDs often reside in a third-party domain, so they don't survive Safari and Firefox blocking.

Alternatively, other consortia IDs live on the publisher's first-party domain, meaning that they may provide session-level frequency caps on a particular publisher and can be used for short-duration click-through attribution. They provide a small subset of the functionality available to cross-domain cookies, such as attribution and broader session or lifetime frequency caps.

Agencies Reportedly Settle Over Rebates; Omnicom, Publicis To Split Disney Media Account

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Rebate Redux

Media agencies are paying settlements to clients as a result of contract audits sparked by the ANA’s 2016 transparency report, AdAge reports. Nearly 100 audits have taken place, but it’s not clear which clients or agencies are involved or if any money has changed hands yet. Most clients are forgoing cash payouts to avoid public disclosures and accepting free media instead. But they’re doing so on the precondition that they can’t audit the media, meaning they don’t know the quality of the inventory or how much the agency paid for it. Often, agencies will leverage the collective buying power of their clients to get a cheaper rate. But CMOs have no incentive to change these dealings, because free media helps them meet their performance goals. “I get how that looks good,’” said Stephen Broderick, CEO of FirmDecisions, a marketer consultancy that does agency audits. “But the reality is you’re just buying more of the same nonsense you got involved [with] in the first place.” More.

House Of Mouse

Publicis and Omnicom have emerged as winners in the multibillion-dollar review of Disney’s media business. Publicis won the business for Disney’s parks, wresting the account from Dentsu’s Carat, and for the new streaming service Disney+, which will mean a deluge of ad spend. Omnicom has retained the majority of Disney’s ad spend, winning its TV networks, including ABC, FOX and Nat Geo, as well as entertainment studios Marvel and Pixar. People with knowledge of the deal say Disney was impressed by Publicis’ Epsilon business, the data company it acquired for $4 billion earlier this year, Campaign reports. Meanwhile Omnicom followed another trend by creating a bespoke agency for Disney, OMG23 (a reference to 1923, when Disney was founded). More.

Tubi Kids Hits The Scene Just Before Disney+

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Monday, October 14th, 2019 at 4:40 pm.

Tubi is creating a dedicated kids section, Tubi Kids, on Oct. 21 – just weeks before Disney+ launches on Nov. 12.

The ad-supported kids content will be COPPA-compliant, meaning that buyers won’t be able to do any kind of behavioral targeting for the ads. Programmatic bid requests will be stripped of any kind of behavioral targeting signals that don’t comply with COPPA, said Tubi CEO Farhad Massoudi – meaning it’s unlikely much of the inventory will be sold programmatically.

Buyers will primarily purchase the inventory direct or via programmatic guaranteed because of the COPPA data restrictions, said Chief Revenue Officer Mark Rotblat.

“We’re talking about tens and hundreds of [kid-focused] advertisers. The brands and their agencies love the idea of contextually reaching children in the environments they watch,” Rotblat said, especially as viewership declines on places such as Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.

In order to strip out the IP address, Tubi will site serve the ads and won’t allow any third-party tags at launch, though it plans to add in COPPA-compliant tags later. COPPA allows for some forms of ad measurement, including frequency capping, and Tubi will cap ads for partners.

The Tubi Kids section is to some extent a reorganization of existing content, and will include 1,200 titles at launch, for a total of 5,000 hours of programming. Its ad load will average four to six minutes per hour, the same as its adult programming, but much lower than the 14 minutes to 18 minutes per hour in broadcast and TV programming.

Tubi sees its AVOD kids section as complementary to streaming services like Netflix, family-focused Vudu or the not-yet-launched subscription service Disney+.

California Gov. Newsom Signs 7 CCPA-Related Bills Into Law

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Monday, October 14th, 2019 at 2:23 pm.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is almost baked.

On Friday, two days before the Oct. 13 deadline for his blessing, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed seven bills into law that augment and bolster the CCPA.

The bills, which were sitting on his desk since the state legislature closed its 2019 session on Sept. 13, represent the last revisions that will be made to the statute before CCPA goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020.

The CCPA-related action has been coming thick and fast recently. On Thursday, the California attorney general’s office published the long-awaited first draft of its implementation regs. The public comment period on the regs closes Dec. 6, after which the AG’s office will digest the information it receives and share revised regs. The AG is required to issue finalized guidelines by July 1, 2020.

Whereas the purpose of the AG’s implementation regs is to provide practical guidance on how businesses can comply, the bills that Newsom just signed tweak the actual text of the law.

Facebook And Ad Platforms Reckon With Lying In Political Ads

by James Hercher // Posted on Monday, October 14th, 2019 at 1:00 pm.

Lying in digital advertisements has become a flashpoint in US politics this year.

A running dispute between Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign and Facebook ratcheted up this weekend, after the Massachusetts senator posted an ad on the social platform featuring a lie that Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Donald Trump for reelection.

“You’re probably shocked, and you might be thinking ‘How could this be true?’” according to the Warren ad copy. “Well, it’s not. (Sorry.) But what Zuckerberg *has* done is given Donald Trump free rein to lie on his platform.”

Warren was responding to a Facebook ad promoted by the Trump campaign lying about Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.

In a tweet this weekend responding to the Warren campaign, Facebook said its standards are similar to broadcast TV, where there are laws about accepting candidates’ ads. The Trump campaign has aired the same claims on TV that it makes on Facebook, without the same blowback.

It’s unclear how this policy gels with Facebook’s claim that it is trying to reduce viral misinformation on its platform. However, Facebook VP of global affairs Nick Clegg said last month at the Atlantic Festival in Washington D.C. that the company doesn’t believe it should “referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny.”

Still, the issue of spreading lies at scale has metastasized to other major video ad platforms as well – namely YouTube, where the Trump campaign promoted an ad falsely claiming the president released a transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president.

Google told Judd Legum, publisher of the political newsletter Popular Information, that the ad doesn’t violate its policies prohibiting “misrepresentation” or intent to deceive viewers.

How E.l.f. Beauty’s Sponsored Hashtag Got 1.6 Billion Views On TikTok – And Counting

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Monday, October 14th, 2019 at 9:22 am.

If TikTok is still proving its value as a marketing platform, despite skyrocketing popularity among Gen Z, it got a huge boost in October when the cosmetics company e.l.f. ran a sponsored hashtag challenge, #eyeslipsface, that amassed 1.6 billion views in just over a week.

Two factors led to e.l.f’s success on TikTok: showing up on a platform where users already loved the e.l.f. brand, and creating content that fit TikTok like a glove with an original song composed for the platform.

E.l.f Beauty added TikTok to its “test and learn” agenda after it saw that the #elfcosmetics tag had 3 million views, a strong signal that people using the app already loved the brand, CMO Kory Marchisotto said.

After a small initial test, it went big, hiring the agency Movers+Shakers to create a 15-second clip around an original song that uses well-timed sound cues (like “mwah” and a twinkling noise) to get viewers to pout and wink to the beat.

“This song has been so popular and so catchy, we will extend the song to a 60-second track and push [it] out to the music community,” Marchisotto said.

TikTok serves as a matchmaker between brands doing a sponsored hashtag challenge and influencers. These influencers create their own #ad remixes to popularize the song. Also, e.l.f.’s video got homepage placement on the app.