Archive

The Gap Between Real and Perceived Brand Safety Issues

The discussion around brand safety has risen from a murmur to a prolonged roar, and it doesn’t seem to be quieting down anytime soon. In part, that’s because more issues and more sub-threads keep getting pulled into that discussion. My colleague Gavin Dunaway wrote a bit about this recently, and…

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Cut Data Thieves Off at the Pass

Often enough, when the topic of data leakage comes up, someone—whether they’re coming from a buy-side or a sell-side point of view—will say: “Hold on. Is this data leakage stuff real, or is a bogeyman?” Understandable response. This is digital media: Wherever there’s just the perception of a problem, you’ll…

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Overselling Cord-Cutting and “Buying on Values”

Are We Overestimating Cord-Cutting? Digital media people love talking about cord-cutting and how the old broadcast model is disappearing for what we used to consider "TV." But Simulmedia CEO Dave Morgan's POV in MediaPost last week reminds us that cord-cutting is not universal, and the reach of broadcast TV is…

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Targeting Consent Is a Publisher/Vendor Team Effort

Retargeting companies were in the industry trade headlines last week, as a couple of the leading retargeters had made efforts to allow users to opt into having their data collected. There are a few timely issues these companies are trying to address—Apple’s limits on the amount of time it’s acceptable…

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Data Leakage Is Real, Video Ad Activation Is Complicated

Agency Insider: Yep, We're Buying Publishers' Data Indirectly Digiday’s “Confessions” series most recently brought us a chat with a programmatic buyer at an ad agency. For publishers who fret over how much valuable data they’re losing to wily buy-siders, this more or less confirms several of their fears. The buyer…

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Can Sandboxing Defeat Redirects?

(Editor's Note: Hear more about sandboxing iframes and ad quality at this special attendee session during the PubForum Huntington Beach, March 4-7, 2018.) Recently, premium publishers have reported an uptick in malicious ads on their sites—particularly pesky mobile redirects, the never-ending scourge. While pubs’ first response tends to involve tracking…

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DSP Hidden Fees, Retargeters and Consent

DSPs Hidden Fees Dragged Into the Light AdExchanger published a lengthy explanation of the infamous hidden fees DSPs sometimes charge. It's common knowledge in the industry that DSPs are often inclined to take a cut off of the transactions they enable, and then add extra fees on top of that.…

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Assessing Amazon’s Alexa Advertising Advantage

The big news from Amazon’s direction this week is that the digital powerhouse (“e-tailer” doesn’t really suffice) has been having conversations with some major companies about how it might rev up its advertising efforts in Echo devices. Because Echo is driven by the voice-recognition tool Alexa, we’ve been seeing this…

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What Is Ads.cert?

With adoption of ads.txt ramping up among publishers, this is as good a time as any to look toward whatever is next in the battle against ad fraud. The good news (that is, it’s good unless you were hoping for a bit of a breather) is that the IAB Tech…

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