Comcast Advertising took another reality-based approach to media optimization, analyzing more than 20,000 multi-screen TV campaigns to see what’s working. Their chief conclusion was the budget optimal mix is 20-30% streaming with the rest going to linear TV. There some other intriguing data about the growth in programmatic and audience-based buying, but they show percentages without base values so it’s tough to assess.
Contextual advertising is a more realistic option to replace cookie-based targeting. Sadly, this Nielsen study finds that contextual data alone is among the least valuable signals for delivering return on investment, although it does help in combination with other factors. Their conclusion is based on multi-touch attribution studies, which find that individual-level purchase data and look-alike models work best.
While having location data is quite valuable to Google, the company announced it will begin automatically deleting location history when it deems there could be personal risks. This includes visits to abortion, weight loss and cosmetic surgery centers, and to fertility clinics. Google is also making it easier to delete data from app logs, and it has committed to transparency and advocacy to not divulge excessive personal information in instances of governmental or law enforcement requests.
Nearly one-third of major news publishers have blocked generative AI tools from reading their content. But that’s a drastic measure which could also exclude their results from conventional search engines. Microsoft has just given publishers the option to block access by Bing Chat without also removing their content from search results. We’ll see if competitors do the same.