For one brief, if delusional, moment, marketers thought adtech had made accurate performance measurement a reality. Loss of third-party cookies and device IDs shattered the illusion. The gold-standard alternative has always been controlled experiments to measure incremental results, but that’s been too hard to execute. Measured just raised $21 million to make it easier. On average, they find 40% of media investments are ineffective.
The folks at agency holding company Publicis Groupe no doubt care about security, but their latest acquisition is ecommerce analytics software company Profitero. It’s unusual for an ad agency to own straight-up commercial software, but Publicis must have decided that Profitero’s predictive analytics for product, content, search, pricing, and other decisions is worth the reported €200 million ($210 million) price.
TV manufacturers offer a new path to attribution enlightenment. We reported last week that Samsung had launched a product to track ad consumption, measure results, and make incremental buys to meet coverage targets. Vizio just launched something similar.
It’s tough to get brand safety right, but the industry keeps trying. IPG Mediabrands announced a new set of tools to find and block inappropriate ad placements, while IAS expanded its suitability measurements to include standards from the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). Meanwhile, DoubleVerify admitted a mistake made brand safety on X/Twitter look worse than it really was in October 2023 and March 2024.