Digital media types have been buzzing for a while about a shift in the marketing tech world: Marketing tech is being drawn closer to advertising tech, and this is going to change the way advertisers and publishers do business. The messaging in advertising will become more personal, and in order…
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For years and years we've been told that if the click isn't on its deathbed, it should be shivved to death immediately. While early display ads in the mid-90s could boast CTRs above 40%, the likely number you'll see attached to a campaign these days is below 0.1%. But for…
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I can’t say I was surprised by findings from research firm L2 Marketing that Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is more likely to push Amazon Prime products on users seeking a variety of wares. There’s nothing scandalous in that—if I had an Alexa, I’d probably want it to look for Prime…
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Science fiction turns fact—the term artificial intelligence seems ubiquitous at the moment, whether it’s marketing technology firms boasting about superior processing power for campaign personalization or the coming singularity and robot apocalypse.Those of us in the trenches of the digital advertising world have become immune to the lure of buzzwords,…
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No, I didn't go to Cannes last week. Did I want to? Honestly, yachts and rosé have never been my thing (Cheap beer in a dirty rock club? Now you're talking my language), and the gladhanding awards bit makes me roll my eyes just thinking about it. Cannes used to…
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Malware is a blanket term that applies to any software planted on the user’s device with malicious intent. It’s come a long way from that old bogeyman of the rogue hacker launching “gotcha!” viruses, which captured the public imagination in the ‘90s. Now it’s a very different bogeyman, and malware…
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The IAB held a call this week to present its latest Internet Advertising Report, developed from a semi-annual survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. And the way the numbers sorted out, it became clear that 2016 was the year of… wait for it, this might be a shock…MOBILE!Kidding aside, we all know…
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I found it bizarre that the same day that the IAB released digital advertising revenue numbers for 2016 that point to Google and Facebook—the Duopoly!—vacuuming up about half of ad spend and almost all of growth, ESPN conducted layoffs of 100 mainly editorial employees. As several sites noted, most of those…
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For years, we’ve joked that brands don’t care how the digital advertising sausage is made. Their modus operandi seemed along the lines of: Let the agencies and publishers deal with the frustrating minutiae involved in making digital media transactions work.Funny how quickly things change. As increased spend hits digital channels…
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Read Part I of this two-parter here.If you recall from Part I of this series, we'd been talking about how arbitraged video impressions are bad. There are a number of reasons why arbitraged video impressions suck from the buy-side perspective:1. Most obviously, they make the same ads cost more than…
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