Just in time for the holiday season, Google slipped some coal into publishers' stockings. Google announced that on Feb. 15, its browser Chrome will begin blocking units that don't meet the Better Ads Standards from the Coalition for Better Ads. Moreover, Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a "failing" status…
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Apple Is Buying Shazam On Dec. 11, Apple officially announced it was buying Shazam, news TechCrunch had broken a few days earlier. Reportedly, Shazam had had discussions with other companies in months prior, including Spotify and Snapchat parent Snap, but ultimately Apple bit to the tune of $400-ish million (according…
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Throughout 2017, the discussion on the AdMonsters site, at our events and on our listserv has spun off in countless directions. A person has to wonder: Was there ever a time when it seemed the industry focused on one or two issues at a time, or do we just have…
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Discrepancies in campaign reporting may be an ever-present scourge--but let's not mistake them for a force of nature beyond anyone's control. As the digital ad ecosystem evolves and gets smarter about its business, there's more value at stake with each impression. That said, managing discrepancies can feel like a long…
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Net Neutrality on the Chopping Block Earlier today, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced plans to end net neutrality regulations. If his strategy was to sneak this one out on the wire during a holiday week, to make smaller waves, I'm not sure if that's going to work, because…
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The 43rd AdMonsters Publisher Forum has taken us to Nashville, where we'll be spending the next few days wrapping our heads around a particularly intense season in digital media. From what I could gauge from chatting with attendees and sponsors at last night's dinner, there are loads of questions in…
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Last week a lot of my industry connections passed around the Buzzfeed story, “Attack of the Zombie Websites,” about a programmatic, bot-driven web of lies that may have shorted advertisers tens of millions of dollars. Although it was meticulously reported, I had a hard time reading the full article not…
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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has been catching heat from all over the internet since this past Thursday, when she told Axios editor Mike Allen that Facebook was not a media company. Her rationale was that Facebook doesn’t produce original news content, doesn’t hire journalists (which it actually has done), and…
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A World Without CPG Spend? Okay, maybe we shouldn't be bracing for a world without CPGs dollars, but maybe we should be ready for a substantial reduction in their digital spending. Procter & Gamble famously slashed its digital ad spend by $100 million earlier this year and cut off the…
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Google Delivers Insights Engine to Pubs Google announced it’s releasing a suite of tools to give its DoubleClick publisher clients audience and performance insights. It’s called the Insights Engine Project, and it’s angled to give publishers a view of performance similar to what the company gives advertisers when they target…
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