CDP Institute

Tracking consumer identities is also getting more complicated as marketers struggle to replace third-party cookies. Ad tech vendor PubMatic has hedged its bets by launching Identity Hub, which lets publishers support multiple identifiers for each ad impression. This means they can manage programmatic ad bids from different sources for the same inventory. Clever.

New privacy rules threaten access to all types of third-party data. Big retailers are offering access to their own customers as an alternative. Walmart has just added a self-service portal for buying search and sponsored product ads on its Web site. Targeting doesn’t currently make full use of Walmart’s detailed customer data, but likely will in the future. https://adexchanger.com/search-2/walmart-launches-self-serve-ad-platform-but-retail-and-audience-data-isnt-available-yet/

I guess we’ll eventually feel that privacy technology is over-hyped and stop paying attention to it. But that hasn’t happened yet, so you probably still care that BigID has just raised a $50 million Series D, bringing their total funding to $146 million. BigID helps companies find personal data in their systems and has recently added products to fulfill data access requests under privacy regulations.

Blockchain has already passed the point of overexposure. So the folks at IoTeX are probably clever to couple it with privacy in their announcement of a “blockchain-powered private home camera”. If you’re puzzled how blockchain can power a camera, you’ll be relieved to learn that it doesn’t: IoTeX uses blockchain to validate user identities.

Consumers may already be using more privacy tech than we think. PreciseSecurity found that more than 30% of North Americans used the “dark Web” regularly in 2019. If you’re asking for a friend, the “dark Web” refers to portions of the Internet that are hidden from search engines and can be accessed without leaving a trace (or so we’re told). Reasons for using it include online anonymity, retrieving locally blocked content, and overcoming government censorship.

Digital advertising exceeded traditional U.S. media spending for the first time in 2019 and will account for two-thirds of the total by 2023, according to this PubMatic report. You knew that programmatic transactions and mobile ads are dominant. But did you realize that private marketplaces accounted for 49% of U.S. real-time bidding spend in 2019 and will reach 51% in 2020?

Television may be losing ground to Internet advertising but it’s far from dead. In fact, it’s being reborn as a highly targeted medium by companies like 4INFO, which maps multiple devices back to TV households. Cadent, which sells ads across traditional and non-traditional TV, just bought 4INFO to bolster its cross-channel capabilities.

The premise behind all this digital advertising is that consumers will see more relevant ads. Most consumers (82%) agree that’s what they want, according to this DISQO survey, although just half (53%) say they usually get it. Unsurprisingly, irrelevant ads make most people unhappy (57%).

The News Gods clearly have a better union than you or I, Dear Reader, since we’re back at work today and they’re still on holiday break. They did telegram one real piece of news: CDP vendor BlueConic has raised a $13 million Series B, bringing total funding to $25 million.

Otherwise, the best I can offer is a new first-party data platform from Vox Media, holding data on 125 million unique visitors to titles ranging from titles range from New York Magazine to The Verge to Eater. If you squint very hard you can see this as illustrating the growing importance of first party data. Or you can just give and let The Eater explain https://www.eater.com/2019/9/14/20865463/whats-the-difference-between-lox-nova-smoked-salmon the difference between lox, nova, and smoked salmon.

Even Jamie, our tireless Senior Intern in the Department of Obvious, doesn’t have much today. He did find a Socialbakers report that 96% of paid social ads are viewed on mobile devices. Also: Walmart is the most common brand associated with Instagram influencers, which must mean something but I don’t know what.

Also helping to fight back: Ghostery has launched Midnight, which expands ad blocking and privacy protection features beyond the browser to include desktop applications. The product also includes a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to further obscure online activity.