Audience measurement is a challenge across all channels, even when cookies aren’t involved. Nielsen in particular has struggled to keep up with TV audiences, as delivery methods expanded beyond linear broadcasts to streaming networks, mobile devices, and on-line video. Their latest extension is “Four-Screen Ad Deduplication”, which adds deduplicated YouTube viewers to its Total Ad Ratings data.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Google is extending its support of third party cookies in Chrome. They now “intend to begin phasing out” the cookies “in the second half of 2024”, which is a far-from-ironclad commitment. The official reason is to give developers more time to adjust to the Privacy Sandbox APIs, but business and political considerations are also surely at play.
Out-of-home advertising includes not just billboards but video displays in retail stores and other public locations. Geopath specializes in measuring those channels. They’ve just done a deal with in-store audio ad network Stingray to expand their coverage of out- of-home audio ads, addressing a problem you may never have even considered.
Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike. Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else. Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed. It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.