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Claritas Buys AcquireWeb With Aspirations To Be The Next Consumer Identity Graph France Slaps Google With 50 Million Euro Fine – Largest Yet Under GDPR How Verizon Made Its Super Bowl Play This Year From Google To Jigsaw: The Jonathan Bellack Exit Interview Civis Launches Creative Focus As Brands Bring Data To Pre-Campaign Strategy The Big Story: This Episode Brought To You By The Letters CES And PMP Basic Private Auctions Are ‘Going The Way Of The Dinosaur’ As Programmatic Cleans Up Verizon Isn’t Cutting Off The Subscriber Data Spigot To Its Media Unit – At Least Not Yet Martin Sorrell At CES: Clients Will Demand Speed And Flexibility In 2019

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Claritas Buys AcquireWeb With Aspirations To Be The Next Consumer Identity Graph

by James Hercher // Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 at 1:26 pm.

Claritas acquired the CRM and identity company AcquireWeb on Tuesday, the third in a yearlong buying spree as Claritas revamps its traditional audience segment business for real-time, data-driven media.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Claritas will gain 20-30 AcquireWeb employees.

In the past year Claritas has also added Geoscape, a multicultural audience targeting company, and Barometric, a media measurement startup. With the addition of AcquireWeb, Claritas is ready to ramp up the online media business, said CEO Mike Nazzaro.

“Between Barometric and AcquireWeb, we now have the audience creation, optimization and measurement pieces for us to build one of the industry’s larger identity graphs,” Nazzaro said.

The co-founders of Nielsen Catalina Solutions, including the CEO, COO and CRO, spun Claritas out of Nielsen three years ago, with backing from the private equity firm Carlyle Group. NCS had just orchestrated an ad tech turnaround, transitioning its in-store sales data – Catalina is the top manufacturer of the machines that print receipts – to the programmatic ecosystem for use in targeting and attribution.

The former NCS team wants to run a similar playbook with Claritas, previously a Nielsen business that segments households into certain consumer categories, such as empty nesters or young, well-educated people living in satellite cities.

MillerCoors Taps Into Self-Serve Location Data From Foursquare

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 at 10:00 am.

MillerCoors doesn’t have the opportunity to collect much first-party data: Most of its sales come through independently-owned convenience and liquor stores or bars and restaurants.

“It’s very difficult to identify or measure audiences because of the nature of how these businesses are run,” said Brad Feinberg, VP of media and consumer engagement at MillerCoors. “They’re not aggregators from a data standpoint in a way that could give us any visibility into who our customers are.”

Foursquare hopes to brighten that blind spot with curated audience segments built upon anonymized location data from Pinpoint, its managed programmatic media buying platform.

On Tuesday, 450 of those segments will be available self-serve style via The Trade Desk. Think “fast food lovers” (people who frequent McDs and Burger King, for example) or “roadtrippers” (people whose movements classify them as interested in lifestyle activities).

Other DSPs will roll out the segments throughout 2019. Foursquare will refresh the segments every two weeks.

MillerCoors is the first alcohol brand to sign up, with plans to kick off a two-week beta test this week.

Former Oath Execs Launch Startup To Fight Malware Before It Strikes

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 at 7:00 am.

Does the world need yet another tech company to combat malvertising on the internet?

“Well, do you still constantly see malvertising when you browse the internet?” said Seth Demsey, co-founder of Clean Creative, an anti-malware company started by a handful of security experts and Oath vets who exited before the name change.

Touché.

Based in Baltimore, Clean Creative came out of stealth on Tuesday with former Oath SVP of publisher platforms Matt Gillis as CEO, a roster of 30 publisher clients and 19 employees with plans to hire more throughout 2019. The team has been working on the technology for over a year.

Malware continues to plague the advertising ecosystem because common tactics like blacklists and creative scans aren’t up to the task, said Demsey, whose previous day job was chief technology officer of AOL/Verizon’s ads business.

Blocking known threats leads to a false sense of security. You’ve got to catch the unknown threats, and you’ve got to do it at scale, Demsey said.

Beeswax Nets $15M In Series B, As It Gears Up For Connected TV And Going Marketer Direct

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 at 6:30 am.

Beeswax raised $15 million in Series B funding which it will use to support connected TV and win marketer clients. As it expands to achieve these initiatives, Beeswax will double its current headcount of 65 by the end of this year.

The software-as-a-service DSP last raised funds in 2016. The new round brings total funding to $28 million.

RRE, Foundry, and Amasia led the round, and You & Mr Jones participated.

Despite a 150% revenue increase this year and an investor-friendly SaaS business model, it wasn’t easy for Beeswax to secure funding. “There is enormous skepticism about ad tech,” said CEO Ari Paparo.

In contrast to its competitors, Beeswax charges an annual software-as-a-service fee while most other DSPs charge percentage of media.

The high CPMs commanded for connected TV inventory – as high as $30 to $40 – will make a flat monthly fee more appealing to clients, who want to save money.

“Because CPMs are so high, we think a typical DSP charging 15% is just ripping people off,” Paparo said.

Nicolle Pangis’ Journey Through Programmatic, From The Beginning

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 at 12:30 am.

What started with an interest in video production blossomed into a career in programmatic advertising for NCC Media CEO Nicolle Pangis.

To pay off her student loans, Pangis took a job in 1999 at 24/7 Media, a pioneering programmatic ad firm, where she worked in affiliate relations with websites that were part of the ad network.

“I fell in love very quickly,” she said.

After getting an MBA in strategic management in marketing, Pangis went back to 24/7, where she worked in sales, launched a joint technology venture with Dentsu and eventually led global product management.

“I was fortunate that senior people picked me out of places to run things,” she said.

Pangis then moved to GroupM, where she was the CRO and global COO of Xaxis at the height of the agency trading-desk days. She also served as global COO of mPlatform, overseeing data and analytics services at GroupM.

A career in programmatic sparked Pangis’ curiosity about technology and how the guts of it all work – a passion she still explores today as a CEO.

“If something is intriguing but you don’t know how it works, what’s better than figuring it out?” she said. “I’m probably one of the only CEOs that will stand and start writing data infrastructure on a white board.”

She spoke with AdExchanger about her career.

Our Marketing Measurement Journey Is Going Nowhere

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 at 12:15 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 Julie Van Ullen, General Manager, US Growth, at Rakuten Marketing

It’s hard to find something new to say about digital marketing measurement. Today’s headlines about measurement seem no different in tone from those published five plus years ago.

For example, this Forbes article from 2013 notes the disconnect between what marketers think is the right way to measure online marketing and what they actually do (last-click attribution). Several years later, it’s hard to know what has changed.

We’re still having the same conversations. We’ve been envisioning this road trip for years, but the car is still in the garage. We know the destination – and have countless technologies claiming to help get us there.

What is holding us back from just sticking the key in the transmission and pushing the gas?

AT&T Returns To YouTube; Facebook Faces New FTC Fine

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Brand Safe Enough

AT&T is advertising on YouTube again after a two-year hiatus. The telco, one of the world’s largest advertisers, pulled spend from the video platform at the height of its 2017 brand safety scandal with a promise not to return until major improvements were made. Since then, YouTube has raised the number of subscribers and views a video must have to sell ads and added more human and machine review. In AT&T’s latest test, the brand ran against zero pieces of offensive content on YouTube, The New York Times reports. More. “I’m thrilled that AT&T is back,” writes Fiona Carter, AT&T’s chief brand officer, in a LinkedIn post. “But I’m also glad that we packed up our ads and walked away in the first place. As powerful as digital platforms are in today’s advertising ecosystem, they can’t be permitted to disempower the brands that use them to reach their customers.”

Second Decree Burns

The Federal Trade Commission is expected to levy a fine against Facebook following its investigation into whether the platform violated a 2011 consent decree, which it brokered the last time Facebook was investigated for deceiving users. The agreement requires Facebook to notify users when data is sold to third parties. The decision would be the first major US government penalty in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s user data controversies, and is likely to be larger than the $22.5 million the FTC fined Google in 2012, The Washington Post reports. While the regulator’s exact findings are still unknown, the FTC is likely to release a formal recommendation for a fine soon, which will trigger a vote among the agency’s five commissioners. More.

How Verizon Made Its Super Bowl Play This Year

by Rae Paoletta // Posted on Monday, January 21st, 2019 at 6:00 am.

Like the New England Patriots, Verizon will pick up where it left off at last year’s Super Bowl.

Though in Verizon's case, that means honoring first responders.

This year’s campaign is titled “The Team That Wouldn’t Be Here.” Verizon CMO Diego Scotti said the company will start rolling out spots two weeks before the big game.

“One of the things we realized is that there are lots of NFL players that wouldn't be playing today if it wasn't for first responders that saved them,” Scotti told AdExchanger at CES in Las Vegas.

Though Verizon’s Super Bowl story is a continuation of what it started in 2018, it’s revamped its social media strategy for the 2019 campaign. AdExchanger caught up with Scotti to talk about Verizon’s plans for Super Bowl Sunday and beyond.

How To Break Your Addiction To Linear TV

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, January 21st, 2019 at 12:04 am.

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

Today's column is written by Brian Lee, director of programmatic strategy at Cadreon.

I’m a digital guy and I will be the first to admit that TV is very powerful and should be the foundation of the marketing plan for most major brands.

However, in an age where fragmented, cross-screen video consumption is the norm, it is hard to believe that there are major brands that still want to take a linear-only approach to TV.

Disney, Amazon, MVPDs and networks are investing billions into streaming video because the TV market is clearly changing, but us marketers don’t seem to be keeping up with the pace of change of our TV partners.

If the TV networks are taking the initiative to disrupt their own lucrative business model, why aren’t marketers?