Data-Driven Thinking Archives - Page 5 of 7

Media Buying Doesn’t Have To Be A Mixed Bag

Growing up in rural southern Italy, town festivals honoring various saints or traditions were a recurring delight. My grandfather or uncle would always take me and, without fail, buy me a special bag of candy unique to these fairs. I enjoyed some of the sweets, but others weren’t to my taste, and I still recall […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

The Cannes Lions Roared As Usual, But The Ad Industry Needs More Than Talk

Another Cannes Lions is almost behind us. The senior advertising execs who convened on La Croisette confidently shared their visions for the future of transparency, AI, attention, identity, privacy and curated marketplaces. I have been writing about these topics for AdExchanger for years and have sometimes been considered naïve and utopian for pushing for change […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Navigating New Brand Safety Complexities: A Digital Marketer’s Perspective

A couple of years ago, I listened to a speech that affected me deeply and triggered serious self-reflection on my role as a digital marketer. The presentation, “The Decade of Delusion,” based on the book Advertising For Skeptics by Bob Hoffman, painted a compelling and alarming picture of digital advertising as a corrupt, wasteful, secretive […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Unlocking The Power Of AI In Contextual Targeting: A Guide For Agencies

The rise of AI is rapidly changing the way agencies and marketers must approach media. Technology companies have developed AI solutions that inform how they shift budgets and strategies toward contextual solutions that bypass the need for any third-party data. However, a change is occurring as platforms pivot and push hard at AI-driven optimizations. Advertisers […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Embracing Incrementality: Navigating Post-Privacy Measurement Challenges

As privacy changes lead to signal loss, digital advertising is diverging from user-level data and specific measurement methods like multi-touch attribution (MTA) and media mix modeling (MMM) in favor of bigger-picture analysis of marketing performance and a multi-methodology approach. Relying solely on MTA and MMM is not enough. There’s also a third method: incrementality. This […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

RAG Against The Machine: Injecting First-Party Data Into AI Models For Better Results

First-party data has long been in a marketer’s toolkit as a critical instrument to personalize the customer experience across media touch points. But it has yet to influence how most companies use generative AI technology. However, proprietary data sets have the potential to play an important role in several key marketing applications for generative AI […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Political Advertisers Promoted Polarization. Now We Need To Help Fix It

The 2016 presidential election gave Americans a taste of the disinformation, misinformation and platform manipulation that’s coming for political media. These strategies aren’t new, but tactics are more effective than ever. This year, platforms and advertisers are far more sophisticated and have greater reach, with streaming and data-driven media replacing old media that could not […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

We All Have A Role To Play In Ending MFA

Like any addiction, buying cheap impressions on made-for-arbitrage (MFA) content is a vicious cycle that feeds itself. If our industry doesn’t stop the cycle at the source, it will continue indefinitely. The need for a solution is growing as junk publishers tarnish the reputation of the open internet. We’ve even reached the point where The […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

How Mobile’s Focus On Performance Helps It Avoid The MFA Problem

Much has been said and written in recent months on the made-for-advertising (MFA) phenomenon, or the diversion of ad dollars from legitimate publishers to sites that exist purely to sell ads at a higher cost than the traffic they acquire. We know MFAs are a big problem on the open web. But what about mobile, […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

A Pragmatic Approach To Banishing MFA From The Supply Chain

The open web stands as a testament to freedom of communication, innovation and the collective pursuit of knowledge. However, lurking within our dynamic ecosystem is a growing threat: the proliferation of made-for-advertising (MFA) publishers. These entities are simply not publishers. They’re better described as master traffic arbitragers that exploit the system for profit without contributing […]

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