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RhythmOne And Dataxu Tussle Over Unpaid Bills And Hidden Fees The Trade Desk Rolls Out Connected TV Targeting And Attribution Fake Russian Ads Could Have Very Real Implications For Facebook Facebook Disables Employer Targeting, And B2B Marketers Must Adapt Friends And Co-workers Mourn The Passing Of Data Marketing Giant Charles Stryker EHarmony Hopes To Create Long-Term Relationships Across Its Business Units – And With Its Users Is Reliance On LiveRamp Scaring Ad Tech Vendors Out Of The Cross-Device Consortium? CPG Brands Replace Demographic Targeting With Behavioral Targeting Oath’s Revenue Chief Charts A Path For Verizon’s Ad Tech And Publisher Brands

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RhythmOne And Dataxu Tussle Over Unpaid Bills And Hidden Fees

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2017 at 12:28 pm.

Advertisers aren’t the only ones irritated by hidden fees and undisclosed inventory sources. Dataxu is claiming it’s been victimized by shady auction mechanics following a soured partnership with RhythmOne.

The situation came to light after RhythmOne filed a lawsuit in July against dataxu to recover $1,900,000 from three unpaid invoices between January and March.

But dataxu filed a counterclaim in August, saying it hadn’t paid those invoices because RhythmOne violated a 2015 business agreement by using a fake auction to consistently overcharge dataxu for inventory purchased in RhythmOne’s exchange.

Additionally, dataxu alleges that RhythmOne procured that inventory from other exchanges, and then marked it up.

While it’s for the courts to decide who’s right, dataxu’s counterclaim – in which it asks for damages and attorney fees from RhythmOne – provides a detailed look at how second-price auctions can be manipulated by the supply side. And it underscores why the demand side is increasingly dissatisfied with second-price auctions.

Per RhythmOne’s complaint against dataxu, the two agreed in August 2015 that dataxu would pay 1 cent more than the next highest bidder for inventory purchased through RhythmOne’s exchange. Dataxu would be billed in a single monthly statement that includes both media and fees – and it would get a separate bill for fees related to third-party data. RhythmOne’s reporting would determine the bill.

With Video, Publishers Have A Chance To Avoid The Mistakes Made In Display

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2017 at 8:50 am.

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

Today's column is written by James Curran, co-founder and chief product officer at STAQ.

Facebook recently announced a change in its video-sharing metrics that favors the original creator over distributors or “reshare” pages.

Facebook is finally working to help media companies understand their own content better, but its woes with video are hardly over. Facebook's list of metrics, especially for media companies, includes a "retention graph" and detailed breakdowns of autoplay, click-to-play and engagement by time interval. Any publisher that wants to go down a rabbit hole of Facebook video metrics should be able to, even though no other partner, including Google or Snapchat, offers the same metrics.

What’s more, publishers are hamstrung when they try to compare the value of their video distribution partners with the revenue on their own site, let alone get a full picture of their viewers.

Just Give Me The Data

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2017 at 1:00 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 Steve Marosi, director, client advisory, at 84.51°.

Why is it that many analysts – who have so much data, yet so little time – turn up their noses at reporting systems? Why do they lose patience and reach for the export button, doing their most interesting work in Excel, Tableau or other roll-your-own tools? They’re so quick to tell data/insight providers, “I don’t want your dashboards and reports – just give me your data!” Why?

A data analyst recently told me that she exports data from upward of 70 reports to prepare a monthly dashboard for her department. Extreme? Certainly. But not unusual.

This quest for raw data is a message heard repeatedly from consumer goods companies. I imagine it’s not much different in other industries. Yet, what is it behind this self-inflicted pursuit of raw data with all its messiness, hours of toil to clean and harmonize and high risk of introducing errors?

The answer, in one word, is personalization.

Here’s my working definition for personalization in the context of data analysis: the freedom to shape an analysis, with minimal restraints, to address a very specific business problem or question.

DoubleTree: ‘Smart Marketers Know That Data Is Only As Good As How You Use It’

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2017 at 12:30 am.

DoubleTree takes a cookie-first approach to marketing – the kind you can eat.

But when it comes to data collection, the Hilton-owned hotel chain, known for handing out warm chocolate chip cookies to guests as they’re checking in, is interested in deeper data than just demographics and browsing history.

“It doesn't matter to me whether you’re a man or a woman or what your age is or your race – that doesn’t feed me the data I need to make marketing decisions,” said H. Stuart Foster, Hilton’s VP of global marketing. “When we segment users, we think about their mindset, their motivation for traveling.”

DoubleTree, which recently launched its integrated “Your Warm Cookie Awaits” campaign, draws on data from the 40 million members of its loyalty program to inform marketing strategy.

“We know how many people use the restaurant, how much they spend, what types of hotels they stay at outside of DoubleTree in the Hilton portfolio,” Foster said. “The type of activities that people engage in, that is what’s relevant to us.”

DoubleTree’s top goal is developing a direct relationship with its current and future guests, whether that’s through a display ad on a sports site or an interactive billboard.

“There are lots of different metrics we can track and targeting we can do, but it all boils down to driving greater engagement,” Foster said. “Engagement is the best measure of the health of our relationship with our customers.”

AdExchanger caught up with Foster to talk data, programmatic tips, media buying strategy and cookies, both edible and trackable.

Comic: Tinkering

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2017 at 12:04 am.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...

Google Gives Full Refunds For Fraud; Amazon Goes Big In New York

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2017 at 12:03 am.

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

All Systems Go

Google will give advertisers full refunds for any fraud bought through DoubleClick Bid Manager, Ad Age’s George Slefo reports. The news comes weeks after Google began refunding tech fees for fraudulent buys as well as media fees when fraud was bought through its AdX exchange [AdExchanger coverage]. Now Google is putting the onus on supply partners including AppNexus, Index Exchange, OpenX, Teads, Telaria (formerly Tremor Video) and DoubleClick Ad Exchange to refund fraud found in their exchanges, covering roughly 90% of the inventory available through its DSP. Google will also provide more transparency to buyers around where fraud is coming from both before the bid and after an ad is served, and to exchanges on where the fraud originated on their platforms. To combat fraud and domain spoofing, Google said it will only work with publishers who have adopted the IAB’s ads.txt protocol [AdExchanger coverage]. More.

Amazon Goes Gotham

First, Whole Foods. Now, New York. Amazon is making good on its promise to power up on ad reps and engineers [AdExchanger coverage] by hiring an additional 2,000 people in advertising, Amazon Web Services and Amazon Fashion in New York City within the next three years. Amazon already employs about 1,800 people in Manhattan, but to accommodate its new recruits, the ecommerce giant will move into splashy new digs at Brookfield 5’s Manhattan West. The development, which is directly adjacent to the mega-development Hudson Yards, will house Amazon Advertising’s New York HQ, although the company isn’t detailing specifics on the exact headcount that’ll be based there. However, Amazon’s hiring spree isn’t ending anytime soon. More on CNBC.

Facebook Forces Transparency On Political Ads

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2017 at 5:13 pm.

Under mounting pressure over its use by Russian meddlers in the US election, Facebook is imposing new transparency on ad buyers to make it harder to obscure who paid for an ad, and who saw it.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes in a Facebook Live video posted Thursday afternoon.

"When someone buys political ads on TV or other media, they're required by law to disclose who paid for them, but you still don't know if you're seeing the same messages as everyone else," Zuckerberg said in the video, which enumerated nine actions designed to hinder and expose political ad shenanigans on the platform. “So, we're going to bring Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency."

He continued, "Not only will you have to disclose which page paid for an ad, but we will also make it so that you can visit an advertiser's page and see the ads that they are currently running to any audience on Facebook. We will roll this out over the coming months, and we will work with others to create a new standard for transparency in online political ads."

Zuckerberg called the change "maybe the most important step we're taking" to prevent the use of its platform to manipulate elections.

Podcast: Criteo CEO Eric Eichmann Defies Gravity

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2017 at 2:04 pm.

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here.

Clocking at 44 minutes, the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks with Criteo CEO Eric Eichmann is our longest yet. Pardon our loquaciousness, but there was just so much to talk about.

Criteo is one of the high flyers in the data-driven marketing space, with a $2.7 billion valuation that’s higher than any other pure-play ad platform stock. The company has accomplished that by focusing purely on data.

"The company didn't start out thinking about advertising," according to Eichmann. "The company always started by thinking, ‘How can we use the data that users leave on sites to drive sales?’"

Initially, that founding principle led it to experiment with machine-learning-driven product recommendation. That turned out to be a hard business model. So it transitioned into ads, about which its founders knew so little that they had to Google "ad server." True story.

Adobe Integrates Analytics And Audience Manager To Connect Marketing To Media

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2017 at 12:00 pm.

Adobe said Thursday it had integrated Adobe Analytics into its Audience Manager data management platform (DMP).

The integration makes it easier for marketers to combine first- and third-party data sets to deliver consistent messaging, and marketers can pull execution data back into their reporting tools for a better view of their customers.

“Over the last few years we’ve seen our customers gravitate toward the ability to deliver experiences to customers across every device and channel,” said Ali Bohra, director of strategy and product marketing for Adobe Audience Manager. “We saw the [need] to bring sets of insights closer to systems of action.”

Cruise line Holland America, a subsidiary of Carnival Corp., beta tested the integration. The company wanted to make its site more adaptive and personalized to how a consumer interacts with the brand off-property, said Aaron Fossum, direct of digital analytics at Holland America.

“We want our marketing tied to a conversation with our customers,” he said. “It’s all about segmenting and testing for us.”

Before the integration, Holland America manually tied its CRM and first-party data to its DMP. For example, it would download audience segments from its DMP and pull them into its email execution tool one by one. The process took a lot of time and required a precise coordination effort by its team and its agencies. It often led to messaging discrepancies on- and off-site, Fossum said.

“We might be messaging someone [off-site] to take a Caribbean cruise and then emailing them about Alaska,” he said.

Facebook Rolls Out Online Retargeting Based On Offline Activity

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2017 at 11:00 am.

Starting Thursday, Facebook will let advertisers retarget based on what people do in the real world.

“Reporting on the impact of ads is great, but other companies provide something similar,” said Gabriel Francis, global product marketing lead for the offline sales group at Facebook. “We’re letting people actually do something with those reports.”

Google’s offline conversion tracking tool lets advertisers measure offline activity after a user clicks on an ad. Last year, Facebook released its Offline Conversion API, which lets retailers see how many people made purchases offline after being exposed to a Facebook campaign.

Now Facebook is making that data actionable for audience targeting, said Francis, who noted that connecting online ads to offline outcomes will continue to be “a big investment area for Facebook.”

Businesses can build audiences of people who, for instance, made an offline purchase or called a call center. To do this, advertisers must share that offline data with Facebook by either manually uploading a spreadsheet or with one of Facebook’s partners, including digital receipts companies, point-of-sale vendors and CRM and marketing software providers.

“They can also create lookalike audiences off of Custom Audiences to find new potential shoppers that share characteristics similar to people purchasing offline,” Francis said.

Select advertisers will be able to create Custom Audiences composed of people who recently visited a store location.