Between the IAB’s OpenData initiative, the LiveRamp/AppNexus-led data consortium, and a few other long-simmering initiatives (think DigiTrust), now is a great time for anyone who’s been championing data transparency. Whether these efforts are bearing fruit—that is to say, if they’re actually translating to more utility in sharing and processing data,…
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The line about marketing tech over the last few years is that it’s becoming more closely aligned with ad tech, for both brands and publishers. There must be some truth to that idea, then, if so many people in the industry have trouble explaining what the difference is between ad…
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If you bother Gavin, Brian and I while we’re in the throes of preparing for the day-and-a-half military precision exercise that is Ops, we’re going to complain about the number of speakers to wrangle and calls to make. I mean with 40+ sessions and the 70+ speakers, it’s a bit…
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There are a couple new players in town, quietly but dramatically changing the way the marketing/advertising ecosystem uses big data. Marketing technology and system integrators have been rapidly expanding first-party offline data sets, based on the business intelligence data sets that have powered brands for years.These massive data pools are…
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Congratulations! Digital privacy policy made it to the general-interest news hole this week. Shame it’s not under better circumstances, but, well, at least it’s a reliable conversation-starter, that Congress voted to nix proposed changes to FCC policy to require a user’s opt-in before ISPs could be allowed to sell their…
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Regulation--it’s the bane of ops’ existence. Keeping abreast of various regulations impacting the digital advertising environment is not easy: COPPA, HIPPA, VPPA, cookie laws, and so on. Do you even know what those letters represent let alone mean? Maybe the bigger question is: Where does regulation come from, and how…
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After a term or two as the buzzword du jour, Big Data is no longer quite the cause celebre in digital advertising. Rather than gracefully gliding through the oceans of data created every day, industry players—particularly publishers—have realized they are swamped with far more data than they could ever know…
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The other day, a publisher friend of mine tapped my shoulder about a release the Electronic Frontier Foundation put out fairly recently. This was a release calling for a radical tightening of security around user data.The sense of urgency, as EFF’s argument goes, is that we’re in an increasingly charged…
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Since the tech world can’t get enough of the Pokemon Go phenomenon – it seems a nice distraction from a lot of the other dire news this summer – it was about time for some backlash: safety concerns (maybe catching Squirtle in the middle of the highway during rush hour…
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Anyone can make a guess about why it's taken 20 years or so for the digital media industry to make standardizing data nomenclature a priority. Admittedly, "data nomenclature" doesn't really roll off the tongue, and if anyone thinks spreadsheets are sexy, they're probably a pretty niche group.Yet data nomenclature is…
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