Ad industry group ANA has issued a Request for Proposal for a study of programmatic media transparency, which the ANA described as “riddled with material issues including thin transparency, fractured accountability, and mind-numbing complexity.” ANA CEO Bobo Liodice added that “Marketers do not have a fully transparent line of sight into their programmatic supply chains”. Jamie in our Department of the Obvious is impressed.
Contextual advertising is being reborn as an alternative to cookie-based ad targeting. Adtech vendor Criteo is improving contextual results by adding insights based on each publisher’s first-party purchase data. Specifically, it will identify the content related to each purchase, find other pages with similar contents, and show ads with relevant product recommendations. Old-school contextual targeting wasn’t refined with purchase history.
Market research firm Numerator is joining the omni-channel measurement wars with a new marketing share measurement system that fixes the problems with retail sales data, which now capture less than half of all purchases. The system achieves this magic by using a 1+ million household panel. Numerator was bought earlier this month by Kantar for $1.5 billion.
The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that could potentially ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, does not sell its holdings within a year. The bill now goes to the President Biden, who has said he will sign it. Court challenges are likely to follow.