Is privacy a competitive differentiator? Fewer marketers seem to think so: the annual Salesforce State of Marketing Survey found just 51% exceed the legal requirements for privacy compliance, compared with 61% in the previous report. Maybe they’re just busy with other work: the number of average data sources grew from ten to fifteen, and the number of marketing metrics used increased by 13%.
Comscore is best known for measuring ad audiences, but they play the game in addition to keeping score. They just expanded their programmatic targeting business with the launch of Proximic by Comscore, which combines the context targeting provided by the company’s 2015 Proximic acquisition with ID-based and ID-free segments based on other Comscore data. Activation runs through integrations with LiveRamp, Xandr, Freewheel, and others.
The scare headlines for this report from CHEQ scream that fake traffic costs companies $142.8 billion in lost revenue, although a closer reading shows the actual ad budget spent on is closer to $35.7 billion, based on 5.9% of paid traffic being fake. Still, that’s enough to worry about. Download for interesting details by traffic type, region, and industry.
The U.S. Department of Justice has formally requested the sale of the Chrome browser among other measures following last August’s guilty verdict in its search advertising antitrust suit (not to be confused with last week’s guilty verdict in the adtech antitrust lawsuit). Google is asking for a much narrower focus on deals to be the default search engine for Apple, Mozilla and others. There will be a three-week hearing on the government’s proposals.