AdTech News Round-up
After numerous delays, Google finally seems set on its deadline for phasing out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser. At the start of this year, Chrome deprecated third-party cookies for one percent of traffic, kicking off a testing period set to ramp up mid-way through Q3, when the total removal of cookies will begin. And executives have repeatedly confirmed their commitment that cookies will be completely gone by the end of the year.
That’s Google’s take, at least. But the problem is, the deadline isn’t just up to Google. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, in an effort to address competition concerns raised within the industry about the impact of Google’s Privacy Sandbox (its set of tools to replace third-party cookies), secured a number of commitments from Google a few years back. One of these commitments is that Google won’t proceed with third-party cookie deprecation until the CMA is happy that any competition concerns have been addressed. And as its recent update makes clear, it’s currently? not happy.
Meta’s business was lambasted by lawmakers during a Senate hearing about online child safety on Wednesday.
But if you thought scenes like CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizing to families who say their loved ones were harmed by Meta’s platforms would ding the company’s stock price – guess again.
Meta’s shares surged by nearly 15% after reporting Q4 earnings on Thursday. It was the company’s fourth consecutive quarter of revenue growth, following a dismal 2022.
In case you were wondering: No, Zuckerberg did not mention the Senate hearing during his call to investors. And not a single investor pressed him about it, instead focusing their questions on Meta’s energized ads business and its investments in AI.
I never thought I would get paid to watch Snoop Dogg’s latest movie but, well, here we are. Prime Video is playing with ads now, making it the latest entrant to the AVOD streaming wars.
There is skepticism out of the gate. Consumers are protesting the default to ads, with some threatening to cancel their subscriptions rather than pay an additional $3 per month to avoid ads. Media buyers also had a lukewarm response to Prime Video’s pitch deck, according to Insider Intelligence, despite the promise of wide scale and low CPMs compared to the competition.
But if Prime Video can get its subscribers to stick around and watch ad-supported content, advertisers will gain yet another place to shift their budget from linear TV.
OpenAI has been told it’s suspected of violating European Union privacy, following a multi-month investigation of its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, by Italy’s data protection authority.
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Details of the Italian authority’s draft findings haven’t been disclosed. But the Garante said today OpenAI has been notification and given 30 days to respond with a defence against the allegations.
Confirmed breaches of the pan-EU regime can attract fines of up to €20 million, or up to 4% of global annual turnover. More uncomfortably for an AI giant like OpenAI, data protection authorities (DPAs) can issue orders that require changes to how data is processed in order to bring an end to confirmed violations. So it could be forced to change how it operates. Or pull its service out of EU Member States where privacy authorities seek to impose changes it doesn’t like.
After a difficult 2023, brand sponsorships are trending upward in esports in 2024 — but in a more experimental manner than the blind trust of past years.
The cold of esports winter is ongoing, but the weather has been feeling balmier in the first month of 2024. Brands such as Kia are re-entering the space by sponsoring both teams and leagues, and the Overwatch League, which died an ignominious death last year, is returning in the form of ESL/FACEIT Group’s Overwatch Champions Series.
But brands are getting smarter about esports, too, and spending less blindly than some did during the hype-infused FOMO days of 2018 and 2019. It’s become clear that the ROI of esports sponsorships is far behind that of traditional sports partnerships, and marketers are no longer willing to simply copy and paste their sports marketing budgets over to esports. Furthermore, esports companies remain reliant on brand partnership revenue, forcing them to cut deals with brands in order to stay afloat.
As data privacy remains a crucial focus in ad tech, upcoming concerns for 2024 include the enforcement of state laws like Washington’s My Health Data Act, the exploration of PETs to navigate restrictions on sensitive data, potential shifts in business models to secure opt-in consent, and the need for companies to prepare for audits, assessments, and accountability amid a lack of federal privacy regulations.
Last year, for Data Privacy Day, fellow privacy lawyer Farah Zaman, pondered whether the recent focus on data privacy in advertising would continue.
Well, another year around the sun, and data privacy is still a hot topic in ad tech. Data privacy and compliance are at the forefront of every publisher’s list of concerns. With cookie deprecation finally here, how could it not be? Whether ad tech is thinking about testing the Privacy Sandbox or alternative IDs, or even the lack of federal privacy regulations — data privacy remains a hot topic for the industry.
Publicis Groupe may have snagged the headlines yesterday with its massive investment into AI, but it’s far from the only agency that’s putting together an AI-driven platform to help clients unlock new value.
Digiday has learned that independent agency group CourtAvenue — which has invested in social media shops, e-commerce and other burgeoning areas of marketing — has quietly assembled a generative AI-driven platform it has dubbed Genjo (soft G).
A mashup of the phrase “generative journey,” Genjo is the result of CourtAvenue seeking client input as to what they are looking for, then assembling the pieces and expertise to execute on those goals — it attempts to take all the lanes that generative AI travels today and coordinates them to generate even more knowledge, creativity and power. Kenny Tomlin, CourtAvenue’s co-founder and partner, describes it as sort of what Salesforce did for using the cloud for marketing, Genjo does for generative AI.