Data-Driven Thinking
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Data-Driven Thinking
As Oracle Terminates Its Ad Business, Here’s How Customers Can Adapt
The news that Oracle plans to shutter its advertising business by the end of September has sent shock waves through the ad industry. Over the past decade, the company has spent billions of dollars investing in various layers of the ad industry, acquiring companies like Datalogix, Moat, Grapeshot and BlueKai. Oracle’s solutions, including its data […]
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Data-Driven Thinking
The Best Of Cannes 2024: Key Moments And Trends For The Year Ahead
Another Cannes Lions is in the books. If last year’s event felt like the best to date, this one felt even better. The challenges facing digital advertising feel bigger than ever, however. We’re still grappling with entrenched but unfounded fears that prevent marketers from supporting premium publishers. And media quality concerns threaten to turn partners […]
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Data-Driven Thinking
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 […]