There’s progress against ad fraud, too. White Ops and the Association of National Advertisers estimate that losses to fraud have dropped 11%, from $6.5 billion in 2017 to $5.8 billion in 2019. This despite a 25% increase in spend. They conclude that, for the first time, more than half of fraud attempts are detected and stopped. Lots of interesting details on fraud methods and rates by device and media.
We reported last week that many companies won’t be ready in time for the California Consumer Privacy Act, so it seems only fair to add that consent management vendor PossibleNow has launched a CCPA compliance module. More good news for procrastinators: the tech industry is still trying to weaken the law, although time may be running out.
Speaking of ignorance, this study from contact center tech vendor NICE inContact finds that most businesses overestimate how satisfied consumers are with their contact policies. But let’s look on the bright side: use of online chat, which consumers really like, has increased sharply (from 47% of respondents in 2017 to 67% in 2018), while use of the much-hated automated phone menus dropped from 78% to 56%. Someone is paying attention after all.
Meta has announced agreements with USA Today, People Inc., and other news publishers to pay for access to their content and link to their articles in its AI chatbot. It’s a sharp contrast to Perplexity, which the Chicago Tribune and New York Times are separately suing for allegedly scraping content and bypassing paywalls. Despite this deal, Meta apparently still opposes compensating publishers for news links in social media posts.