Data + Privacy

It’s getting tough for demand platforms as they face the rising cost of supply of programmatic inventory. Rising levels of invalid traffic and made-for-advertising (MFA) sites – together with the number of intermediaries entering the bidstream and taking their cut – are raising the cost of inventory. A June 2023 Association of National Advertisers (ANA) […]

When Adalytics broke the news that Forbes operated the subdomain www3.forbes.com, it exposed a different kind of made-for-advertising (MFA) site. The URLs behind MFAs are often bland and unrecognizable, while Forbes’ hosted slideshow versions of its content crammed with ads, and most of the eyeballs came from paid traffic. Also, in some bid requests, Adalytics […]

Clean rooms are one of the buzziest technologies in the advertising industry. Sparked by a need to activate first-party data in a privacy-compliant fashion, many brands are eager to adopt this solution.  Amid any industry boom comes the eventual consolidation, and it looks like that day has come for the clean room space. Snowflake kicked […]

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at the 2024 IAB Public Policy and Legal Summit in Washington, DC, about the importance of standardization in privacy compliance, discuss the IAB Diligence Platform and hear directly from regulators about what they are looking for. Standardization is an urgent issue for three reasons. Advertising is now […]

TV ad buying platform Cadent acquires AdTheorent, setting its sights on omnichannel. Also in this episode: The less-than-kosher attribution game that retail media networks are playing with brands.

Recent reporting from Adalytics and the Wall Street Journal exposed that Forbes, a publisher with more than a century’s worth of brand equity, was running a parallel made-for-advertising site in the shadows.  One of the most trusted brand names in business reporting was using tactics advertisers usually associate with bot farms or clickbait content. This […]

US state comprehensive privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have been garnering much attention over the past year. However, new requirements with respect to the processing of children’s data are occurring at the US state level and seemingly flying below the radar.  Participants in the ad tech ecosystem should take note. These […]

Inside the Nubai Ventures lawsuit against Outbrain over alleged bot traffic. Plus: The broadcaster-backed Joint Industry Committee and the Media Rating Council clarify their complementary roles.

Google Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation plan is in effect, and the industry continues to await the fallout from the death of the cookie.  However, it’s worth recognizing that the third-party cookie actually stymied the development of digital advertising.  Sure, that little http text file was key to the evolution and dominance of programmatic advertising – […]

In our ever-changing industry, staying quick on your feet is paramount to overcoming obstacles. But even by typical standards, this past year was particularly tumultuous. One of the most significant concerns has been the official onset of cookie deprecation, a long-anticipated development that has sent publishers scrambling. Between the alphabet soup of alternative IDs, addressability […]