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.
The past year has been tough for all kinds of tech investments. This LUMA report offers an overview of martech, adtech, and content tech financial activity in public markets, private financing, and mergers and acquisitions. To summarize a mixed picture: the bleeding has stopped but growth has not yet resumed.