Finally, we’ll note that Nielsen has backed down on its plan to include Amazon data in its Thursday Night Football audience measurements, at least for purposes of ad billing. This particular tale has more twists than an arthritic rattlesnake; I’m only mentioning it here since our last report said Nielsen was steaming ahead and we want to keep the record straight.
Next comes news that advertisers will be able to connect Epsilon’s individual-level CORE ID with LiveRamp’s RampID. The integration will expand the reach available to advertisers because CORE ID tracks identifiers that RampID does not. It’s all based on first-party data without third-party cookies or mobile device identifiers.
What a difference three years makes. IBM, which in 2020 told Congress it would stop offering “general purpose” facial recognition in response to concerns about resulting racial profiling, has just signed a $69.8 million contract with the UK to develop a national biometrics platform. The purpose is to provide facial recognition capability to government immigration and law enforcement – but IBM stated this is not in conflict the 2020 promises because it won’t be used for public surveillance.
Media mix models (MMM), originally developed in the 1960’s, have undergone a resurgence as new technologies make them easier to execute and click-based attribution becomes less credible. But evaluating MMM brings its own challenges. Australia-based Mutinex offers a vendor-neutral Open Source MMM Validation Framework which is now available for free to North American marketers and agencies.