Street Fight Daily: AT&T Buys AppNexus, Programmatic Recovering Post-GDPR

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

AT&T Is Buying Ad Platform AppNexus, Reportedly for $1.6 Billion or More (TechCrunch)
Another legacy carrier built on offering phone services is now taking a deeper dive into the world of advertising and specifically ad tech to help catapult itself into the next generation of tech and communications. Quartz: AT&T may have what it needs to challenge Google’s ad biz

Home Services Platform Porch to Partner with Overstock.com (Street Fight)
Porch’s partnership with Overstock—an e-commerce platform that sells primarily home goods— will allow customers to arrange set-up and installation for their purchases.

A Month After GDPR Took Effect, Programmatic Ad Spend Is Starting to Recover (Digiday)
Programmatic ad spending has started to recover a month after the arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation caused it to nosedive. Advertisers’ panic toward the EU privacy law has turned to pragmatism.

Using Location Data to Gauge the Efficacy of MLB Stadium Sponsorships (Street Fight)
With baseball season in full swing, and marketers beginning to demand more from their sponsorships of sports teams, Gravy Analytics leveraged foot traffic to examine whether the sponsorship investments made by brands at popular baseball stadiums around the U.S. are worth it.

App Publishers Must Avoid the Audience Circulation Trap (AdExchanger)
Evan Rutchik: When app publishers advertise their platform on other apps to increase their own visitors, they’re often just trading app audiences and not growing their user bases.

Users Spend Almost as Much Time on Instagram as on Facebook (Recode)
This month, Instagram users in the U.S. spent nearly as much time in the Android app as Facebook users spent on their app, according to new data from online measurement company Similar Web.

Google URL Inspection Tool Shows Marketers What the Search Engine Sees (MediaPost)
Google will now allow marketers to check specific URLs on their websites to learn how Google’s search technology actually sees them. The feature, made available on Monday in the Google Search Console, is called the URL inspection tool.

Eversight Uses AI to Optimize Pricing in Brick-and-Mortar Stores (VentureBeat)
It isn’t easy for brick-and-mortar retailers to compete with internet behemoths such as Amazon, Jet, and eBay. Online shoppers spent a record $108.2 billion last holiday season, according to Adobe Analytics, and that number is only expected to grow.