Do advertisers care about bots?

This week, Parag Agrawal, who recently succeeded Jack Dorsey to helm Twitter as CEO, published a thread explaining the company’s approach to fighting spam on the platform. That spam, primarily perpetrated by “bots,” or representations of Twitter users controlled by software, had been cited as a point of concern by Elon Musk, who has agreed to buy the...

3d

With its Audience product, is Shopify creating a Content-Fortress-as-a-Service?

Yesterday, Shopify officially unveiled Shopify Audiences, a new product that allows Shopify Retailers to target relevant audiences using aggregated customer data from across the Shopify platform. Details on the functionality of the Audience product are light: the existence of the product was leaked from an alpha program last year, and a limited amount...

2w

Podcast: Is panel data the future of marketing audience discovery? (with Rameez Tase)

In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Rameez Tase about the applicability of panel data in the new advertising environment in which device-level and user-level identifiers are not available for use in creating behavioral profiles. Rameez and I speak about the use case for panel data in developing marketing audiences for both product testing and...

2w

Why in-app personalization, not probabilistic attribution, is the future of post-ATT advertising

The term probabilistic attribution has been co-opted, somewhat cynically and disingenuously, as a synonym for mobile device fingerprinting. This is unfortunate because, conceptually, probabilistic attribution describes a broad basket of model-based activities that attempt to credit ad interactions with user-level engagements with products. The models...

3w

Podcast: Are ads in console games inevitable? (with Adam Lieb)

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, Adam Lieb and I discuss the prospects for advertising in console games, following news that both Microsoft and Sony will pursue advertising programs for their game consoles. In our conversation, we consider what ads might look like in console games, what types of developers and games are capable of integrating...

3w

Unpacking Alphabet’s Q1 2022 earnings (but mostly: YouTube)

Alphabet reported its Q1 2022 earnings yesterday: its results were mostly mediocre, with the only meaningful bright spot being above-expected revenue in the Google Cloud business unit. The company missed expectations for top-line revenue at $68.01BN (vs. $68.2BN expected) and EPS at $24.62 (vs. $25.65 expected). Year-over-year revenue growth was 23%,...

4w

Unpacking the DSA’s impact on digital advertising

Early on Saturday morning, a trilogue negotiation between EU member states, the European Parliament, and the European Commission ended with an agreement on the final terms of legislation called the Digital Services Act, or DSA. The DSA is sister legislation to the Digital Markets Act, or the DMA, the terms of which were agreed upon late last month....

4w

Is consumer tech entering a new age of Dark Patterns?

This guest post is written by Dr. Julian Runge, Visiting Scholar in the Marketing Department at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business Humans tend to resort to nefarious tactics when resources are scarce. When talking about online platforms and marketplaces, this behavior likely applies, too. As changes to the privacy landscape lower the...

Apr 2022

Microsoft’s Xbox advertising ambitions

Last week, Insider reported that Microsoft is in the exploratory stages of establishing an advertising platform for its Xbox console. According to the reporting, Microsoft would allow select brands, via a Private Marketplace, or PMP (effectively an invite-only auction), to advertise in free-to-play games on the Xbox console. Details about the platform...

Apr 2022

Unpacking Google’s deprecation of the GAID and the Privacy Sandbox for Android

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Yevgeny Peres, the VP of Growth at ironSource, about Google’s announcement that it will deprecate the GAID as well as its introduction of the Privacy Sandbox for Android. I unpacked Google’s announcement of its Privacy Sandbox and the deprecation of the GAID in a post that was published shortly...

Apr 2022