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Apple’s Attribution Fix For Safari Explained Comcast’s FreeWheel Hires Utpal Kalita As Blockgraph CTO In Blockchain Data Push CTV Data Is Massively Fragmented: Here Are Three Ways The Industry Is Stitching It Back Together Irish Regulators Begin Investigating Google For GDPR Infringement Google Aligns With Consultants On Cloud As Marketing Converges With The Enterprise Quantcast Is Starting To Make Money Off Its CMP Footprint The Walled Gardens Are Eating Open Programmatic – Here’s How They Do It Learning Google’s Dizzying Policies: 20 Minutes With Prabhakar Raghavan On His New Job Leading Ads And Commerce Ad Sales Prez Rita Ferro Talks Disney’s Digital Evolutions – And Ambitions

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Apple’s Attribution Fix For Safari Explained

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, May 24th, 2019 at 9:40 am.

When it comes to ad tracking in Safari, Apple usually taketh away. But sometimes Apple giveth advertisers a little something. Meet privacy-preserving ad click attribution for the web.

Think of it as Apple throwing a bone to advertisers who need a way to measure the effectiveness of their ads in Safari, which is where tracking cookies go to die.

The ad click attribution API, released as an experimental feature in early May, enables a limited form of click-to-conversion tracking that is built directly into the browser itself. It doesn’t rely on cookies and severely restricts the amount and type of data that can pass between buyers, sellers and third-party intermediaries.

For now, the feature has to be manually enabled and is only available within a preview version of Safari, where users and developers can experiment with new tech and extensions. But the plan is to set it as the default in Safari later this year.

Apple is also proposing the approach as a standard to the World Wide Web Consortium in the hope that other browsers adopt it, too.

The Bonds Run Deep For Audiences And Media Companies That Follow Them Across Channels

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, May 24th, 2019 at 12:05 am.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Courtney Glaze, vice president of revenue operations at Vox Media.

It’s not always lasting love at first sight. The media dating pool is big, and consumers have unlimited options. Companies need to use every mode of communication to build solid relationships, otherwise audiences will swipe left and find someone else who can.

Consumers’ attention has become multidimensional, and in order for media companies to maintain the loyal, engaged relationships they worked so hard to build with their audiences, they need to carry them across different platforms. Media companies have spent the last few years diversifying their businesses to keep up with this attention segmentation, shifting from what was once a single platform relationship to what is now a multimedia suite of mobile, audio, TV/OTT and in real life.

It’s now realistic to deliver strategic content to the same consumer when they are at work, watching TV, on a commute or on a treadmill. These are moments when blind scale doesn’t translate to impact. Marrying creative and audience with context is a muscle that successful media companies have strengthened – and one that can only be achieved by companies that reach consumers through diverse channels. Their relationship with consumers is deeper than a media company that is committed to one or limited platforms, and deeper than even a single platform with scale.

Comic: Who Watches The Watcher?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, May 24th, 2019 at 12:04 am.

Facebook Thought Out Killing Politics Ads; Condé Will Guarantee Some Advertiser Outcomes

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, May 24th, 2019 at 12:03 am.

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

Electing Out

Political ads used to be seen as a huge opportunity for Facebook, but now they’re just a landmine. After finding itself at the center of Russian interference in the 2016 US election and facing similar issues abroad, Facebook debated internally whether to pull the plug on political ads, The Wall Street Journal reports. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the final call to continue selling political ads, but the company will change its process. Facebook will stop offering commissions for political ad sales, and the platform has already moved most political ad buying to a self-serve system that its sales people support at a high level. That’s a sharp pivot from the in-depth assistance Facebook offered candidates in 2016, when Facebook employees closely advised campaigns and reportedly wrote Trump campaign ads. “It doesn’t matter if you’re running for president or running for city council,” says Katie Harbath, Facebook’s global elections public policy director. “You have access to the same tools and level of support.” More.

Performing Miracles

Condé Nast launched a new performance advertising product on Thursday geared toward retail and ecommerce brands, with affiliate links and product videos created by the publisher that drive traffic back to a product sales page. The new offering, called Prime Web, is built into Spire, Condé’s data and ad-targeting business, which requires a $20,000 minimum campaign commitment. But the publisher is also guaranteeing certain performance levels, and will give advertisers free impressions as a make-good if it doesn’t meet those goals. Think store visits or sales lift numbers, says Evan Adlman, SVP of enterprise sales. Condé has worked with Nielsen Catalina Solutions for a year and a half to attribute sales lift, but can also integrate with other retail measurement services, such as Placed or IRI. More.

Comcast’s FreeWheel Hires Utpal Kalita As Blockgraph CTO In Blockchain Data Push

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 at 3:31 pm.

Comcast’s advertising business is gearing up to run campaigns with Blockgraph, a data-sharing product that uses blockchain technology to allow advertisers to target TV audiences using first-party data.

Comcast first mentioned its blockchain advertising ambitions in 2017 at Cannes, and since then the initiative has been incubated by Comcast’s FreeWheel ad tech subsidiary.

On Thursday, FreeWheel said it had hired Utpal Kalita as CTO of the Blockgraph business.

After bringing on industry partners and setting terms for the service, Blockgraph needs a tech chief and more product execs to handle its first product update cycle. The company plans to start running its first live campaigns next month.

Kalita said it will be the first time a marketer uses CRM data or other first-party audience data to match against a TV distributor’s targetable data, like household IP addresses or Wi-Fi networks, without a third-party on-boarder and with the transactions tracked by Blockgraph’s blockchain ledger system.

The three broadcasters pledging to support the platform so far are Viacom, Charter and NBCUniversal, a Comcast sibling.

Do Advertisers Need To Pay Attention To The T-Mobile/Sprint Merger?

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 at 1:38 pm.

Although the Justice Department could try to block the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint merger (maybe), Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai bestowed his blessing on the deal earlier this week.

If T-Mobile and Sprint manage to merge, they’ll have around 126 million subscribers and become the third largest telco in the United States behind Verizon and AT&T, which have around 150 and 141 million subscribers, respectively.

And we know what happens when telcos achieve scale – they start thinking about data monetization and targeted advertising. Or at least that’s been the case for T-Mobile and Sprint’s main rivals.

“The major telecoms all want to become a Google or a Facebook or even an Amazon and, on paper at least, they should be able to do it,” said Mitchell Reichgut, CEO of Jun Group.

But ambition and scale don’t automatically equal success. Despite the roughly $9 billion it spent to acquire AOL and Yahoo, Verizon Media (formerly Oath) saw its revenue decline more than 7% in the first quarter to $1.8 billion, and the jury is still out on whether AT&T will prosper in the media biz.

Datorama Opens App Developer Marketplace For Ad And Measurement Tools

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 at 10:03 am.

Datorama, the Salesforce marketing analytics platform, launched an app marketplace Thursday where companies can list new automated data products.

AT&T’s Xandr ad unit has one app in the marketplace at launch, which pulls data from the AppNexus demand-side platform (DSP) into Datorama, so it can be analyzed alongside other DSP or ad platform campaign data, said Alex Chatfield, VP of DSP sales.

Many brands use three or more DSPs, and the new Datorama marketplace automatically rationalizes which DSP served the ad that prompted a conversion.

“Brands with strong attribution programs were doing that before but it required implementation work and a lot of manual spreadsheet work in between,” Chatfield said.

Most of the apps available at launch were developed by Datorama and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Those apps include automated tools that plug into the API-based search and social platforms (YouTube, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Bing and LinkedIn) as well as apps that connect directly to Salesforce email and lead generation products.

Moving forward, more apps will be developed by third parties, like the AppNexus app for reconciling the DSP and ad server data, said Jay Wilder, Datorama’s head of product marketing.

The Big Story: Who Dares Wins

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 at 8:50 am.

This week on “The Big Story,” we travel to Washington, DC, tour some walled gardens and fly into the clouds – before coming back to earth to piece together the evolving TV landscape.

First pit stop: AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley spoke at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing called “Understanding the Digital Advertising Ecosystem and the Impact of Data Privacy and Competition Policy,” where he unloaded on the programmatic ad industry that he helped to create.

We’ll recap what he said, his gripes against Google and some interesting discrepancies in his testimony.

Next, if you thought the ad networks were dead, just take a look at Google, Facebook and Amazon. Senior editor Allison Schiff examines how precisely Google, Facebook and Amazon have extended their influence beyond their own walled gardens by buying impressions from publishers and marking them up. But is this a bad thing?

After all, it’s hard to argue that the data contained within the trifecta doesn’t make the advertising perform better.

CTV Data Is Massively Fragmented: Here Are Three Ways The Industry Is Stitching It Back Together

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 at 12:30 am.

The tsunami of data surging into TV introduces a massive amount of complexity and fragmentation into what used to be a simple media buy.

“It’s really complex to buy, and that’s spooking a lot of buyers off,” said Tracey Scheppach, who buys addressable connected TV (CTV) with her agency Matter More Media.

CTV, which is content viewed on a TV and delivered over the internet, is the frontier for this data-driven transformation because it is theoretically (though not often in practice) addressable. Companies are swooping in to use that data to provide new capabilities in targeting, audience marketplaces and measurement.

But only some types of companies within the CTV ecosystem can collect viewing data or identity data about their viewers.

Ironically, those with the least TV inventory (or none at all) have the most data: digital MVPDs, direct-to-consumer apps, smart TVs, ad servers and companies with SDKs installed.

Programmers, who have the bulk of the TV inventory, need to own the distribution channel in order to get consumer data.

Their content frequently lives across combinations of devices and apps, all of which share different amounts of data or require different technical setups. And consumers also watch content across multiple services, making it difficult for one company to understand identity or a viewing footprint.

So although precise data exists, it’s heavily siloed on different platforms, which is why addressability with the scale of linear remains a pipe dream.

The industry is bringing this data together in three ways: through technologies designed to stitch together capabilities like targeting, measurement, frequency management and optimization; through partnerships between distributors and programmers; and through the formation of industry standards.

With A New CRO, Twitch Levels Up Its Advertising Ambitions

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 at 12:04 am.

At any given moment, 1 million people are watching Twitch, tuning in to the half a million people who stream themselves playing video games every day.

The audience can be on par with a national cable network, according to a Nielsen study of concurrent viewers conducted in January.

Twitch checks three coveted boxes for advertisers: video advertising supply, a scaled, engaged user base of 15 million daily unique visitors and access to a young, male audience. Sponsorships and influencer marketing, measurable via an in-house research panel, checks a fourth box.

With a strong groundwork laid through its work with entertainment and gaming brands, Twitch is getting serious about its advertising business, which means making inroads in serving advertisers who want to reach young men – not just active gamers.

In November 2018, Twitch brought in Walker Jacobs to serve as Chief Revenue Officer, replacing a CRO who led the company through its first seven years of sales. Jacobs worked in TV early in his career, at Turner, and most recently was COO at Wikia, which attracts an audience similar to Twitch’s. Twitch is hiring rapidly and setting up offices in new markets, like Atlanta, to complement its New York and Los Angeles home bases.