Some standards are developed by industry bodies and others are imposed by industry leaders. Google Open Bidding lets third-party ad exchanges participate in real-time ad bidding. It’s been criticized for siphoning revenue to Google and creating duplicate ad bids. The Trade Desk dropped it in February and the Yahoo and Amobee demand side platforms dropped it last week. Pick your own Star Wars analogy.
Mom always said you need standards, right? Be sure to tell her the Media Ratings Council has just released a draft framework for “outcomes” measures such as funnel metrics, attribution, media mix models, and lift testing. The proposal also covers data quality and privacy. At 53 pages, it’s not light reading but it does illustrate just how hard it is to do measurement right.
IAB Tech Lab will extend its Open Measurement SDK to Connected TV (CTV), starting in Q3. The extension lets a single piece of code deliver viewability information to any verification service the advertiser chooses. It also adds CTV-specific measures such as signaling if the TV is off when an ad is delivered, which seems like a useful thing to know.
With CDP vendors increasing their workforces by 3.4% in six months, compared with an average of 0.2% each six months over the prior two years, the sector seems to be growing again, according to our own semi-annual industry update. There is much talk of composable CDPs but they still employ no more than 5% of the sector workforce. What is a clear trend is the acquisition of independent CDPs by vendors interested in adding a CDP to a larger system (usually an activation system).