Data + Privacy

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 […]

At the Cannes Lions, generative AI applications for advertising were out in force. Plus: takes from the Croisette on retail media and cookie conspiracies.

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 […]

The move from in-store to digital shopper marketing continues, as United Airlines, Costco, PayPal, Chase and Expedia make new retail media plays. Plus: what the DSP Madhive saw in advertising sales software company Frequence.

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 […]

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 […]

SPO is moving from efficiency to curation to ranking the top 500 publishers. We talk through industry reactions to The Trade Desk’s SP500+ product. Plus: Seedtag acquired Beachfront, a deal that’s emblematic of multiple trends in CTV, privacy and the rise of contextual.

The open web is getting smaller, with the squeeze happening in two directions: Curated deals are skimming the cream off the open web, and exposed made-for-advertising websites are shuttering.

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 […]

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 […]