3 Challenges for Retail Media Networks

Share this:

Retail media is not without its challenges. Retailers need to determine how to curate advertising partners, avoid spoiling the shopping experience, and navigate the retail media tech stack.

The Middle Ground on Personalization

Share this:

What is the most viable critique of personalization, and what form should personalization take to provide real value to marketers and consumers?

3 Debates Worth Having about Google’s Topics

Share this:

Google’s announcement set off a firestorm of debate over whether Topics goes far enough to secure user privacy, how effective Topics would be as an ad targeting methodology, and what the announcement portends for digital advertising as a whole. Here is a rundown of those three debates over Topics and the relevant perspectives adtech stakeholders should consider.

Personalization’s Chief Risk and Reward: Identity Reinforcement

Share this:

Martech is not an industry that merely measures or codifies consumer behaviors, interests, and identities. It is an industry in the business of manufacturing identities. And that is an awesome political and economic power in both the positive and negative senses of the word.

3 Cutting-Edge Trends in Digital Advertising

Share this:

Many firms claim to propose an ad model that no other company can replicate, but trends are emerging among the “next-generation” advertising technologies. Three of those trends include context becoming a layer of all advertising, real-time updates to messaging, and interactivity driving engagement.

5 Pillars of Strong Tech Thought Leadership

Share this:

Communications professionals and tech executives often ask what distinguishes strong tech thought leadership from pitches that miss the mark. Here are five pillars of high-quality tech thought leadership to guide would-be thought leaders to success.

Personalization is Transforming as Privacy Forces a Consumer Data Drought

Share this:

Facebook’s strategy change points to a much broader shift in digital marketing. The disappearance of third-party cookies and mobile IDs — and the granular customer data they supply — is forcing businesses to rethink how to ‘personalize’ marketing strategies. Facebook’s strategy suggests the future of personalization in marketing could hinge more on customer experience and less on ads.

Apple’s Long View of Data Privacy: Revisiting Jobs in 2010

Share this:

But what is the source of Apple’s self-interest, which drives its approach to privacy? I want to suggest that it’s not just a short-sighted opportunity to one-up Facebook and rival smartphone maker Google. Unlike the vast majority of tech companies recently touting new approaches to privacy, Apple isn’t new to this party.

Anti-Surveillance Group Claims Privacy and Antitrust Are Intertwined Issues

Share this:

Two of the major policy complaints to arise about the technology sector over the past few years have been that advertising platforms, most notably Google, Facebook, and Amazon, compromise user privacy and that a select few companies — the aforementioned names plus Microsoft and Apple — are so powerful that they prevent new innovators from competing. An open letter by privacy-oriented enterprises alleges that the two issues are intertwined.

Where Location Intelligence Stands as Foursquare Founder Steps Back

Share this:

The story of Foursquare reflects what the evolution of smartphones and location technology allowed marketers to achieve — unprecedented awareness of where consumers are and how to cater to them on that basis. But data privacy concerns are pushing the narrative into new territory.

Facebook, Holocaust Denial, and the Refusal of Politics

Share this:

Facebook’s long-term refusal to strike down Holocaust-denial content is not a problem specific to Facebook. It’s not a decision limited to Zuckerberg or a few feckless executives. The problem is not even limited to tech.

Facebook’s purported refusal of politics — its reluctance to accept that it has always been a political actor and that its content-moderation policies and algorithms have real-world effects on what people believe and what they do, up to and including acts of physical violence as in Myanmar — is a structural feature of shareholder capitalism. A content ecosystem whose leaders are so timid as to let Holocaust denial flourish is the logical result of an approach to management that views its only responsibility as minimizing costs and maximizing market capitalization.

Pay to Get Rid of Ads on Social Media? Consumers Say Maybe, Maybe Not

Share this:

Nearly 60% of respondents overall said they’d be at least somewhat willing to pay for social media, and that figure could likely climb if a small monthly subscription fee were added. Twingate contends that Facebook/Instagram would only need to charge users $2.07/month, and Twitter $1.61/month, to earn via subscription fees what they earn via ad revenue. Respondents said they would pay $5.24 and $4.75/month, respectively.

But inertia and apathy are strong, money is even tighter outside the US market, and surveillance advertising, and the size of its audience, are the X-factors that catapulted Facebook to the top of the global corporate order. I’d bet Google, Facebook, and, increasingly, Amazon, will be slow to give up the surveillance revenues and walled-garden ecosystems that have made them this century’s most powerful corporate actors.

With Stimulus Funds Delayed, Small Businesses Digitize for Survival

Share this:

Experts at helping SMBs adapt to a tech-first commercial landscape say the pandemic has led some businesses to tap into their long-dormant potential as digital marketers and sellers, possibly setting them up for gains in the aftermath of the recession. Now that e-commerce is the only path to survival, mom-and-pop shops, aided by martech firms, agencies, and Silicon Valley giants, are capitalizing on cutting-edge marketing and retail techniques, many for the first time.

Thousands, if not millions, of Main Street businesses will close their doors for good as a result of the pandemic. Those that survive will be technologically savvier and sleeker than they were before.

Ad Tech Execs Weigh in on Coronavirus Ads, Google and Twitter, and Misinformation

Share this:

I turned to a number of ad tech execs for their expert perspectives on the risks and rewards of digital advertising on this extraordinarily high-stakes issue. While expectedly optimistic about the benefits of coronavirus-related messaging for savvy brands, the business leaders diverged on the responsibility and capability of Google and Twitter to monitor the veracity of the content they host. They also made distinct cases for advertising at a time when brand messaging requires extra sensitivity, arguing that both brands and their customers have something to gain if businesses provide accurate information, focus on customers’ needs, and showcase the ways they are adapting in a time of crisis.

Amazon’s Just Walk Out Cashierless Solution Is an Antitrust Signal

Share this:

It’s well established that Amazon dominates at dominating industries adjacent to retail. But that’s what makes its Just Walk Out solution more suspect. By doubling down on retail as a service, Amazon is courting enterprise customers in the very industry — brick-and-mortar retail — that its main e-commerce business gutted. The Seattle behemoth is asking firms like Walmart and Macy’s to pay it for the chance to meet the same Amazon-driven standards that put some of the retail champions of yesteryear out of business.

The California Consumer Privacy Act’s Promise and Limitations

Share this:

At first glance, the California Consumer Privacy Act marks a major achievement for privacy advocates, the first statewide bill in the US to offer consumers control over how companies handle their personal information. It’s all the more significant that CCPA happened in California, a frequent bellwether for federal legislation and the state where many of the world’s top tech companies are headquartered.

It’s not entirely clear, though, that CCPA will put significant fetters on Silicon Valley’s hitherto unrestrained collection and monetization of user data. Major weaknesses include the law’s enforcement protocol, continued lobbying efforts to defang it, and its opt-out structure.

Google’s Fitbit Purchase: Peek into Next-Level Local Dominance and Healthcare Hacking

Share this:

Prescriptions by Google, then? The company indeed lacks Amazon’s delivery capabilities but has a stranglehold on search and therefore on consumers’ connections to local businesses. It is not hard to imagine a world in which Google appears to keep its privacy promise by refusing to sell ads directly based on Fitbit user data but still capitalizes on the data by using it to connect Fitbit users with local health care service providers, pharmacists, and even gyms. That would just constitute one more way Google is edging out the digital middlemen that once closed the loop from Google search to a local service provider.

Facebook, Free Speech, and the Responsibility of Power

Share this:

The many arguments adduced to spare Facebook the responsibility of monitoring its content, of removing content that leads to physical violence all the way down to false political advertising, fail because they are based on under-developed understandings of responsibility itself. To argue that Facebook should be spared almost all regulatory expectations because it is a technology like the telephone rather than a media site like the New York Times or that Facebook should not be entrusted with taking down false advertising or striking down violent speech because those are tasks best left to the government is a failure of imagination and a failure to imagine what (civic) responsibility entails. As the word suggests (respons-ibility), the responsibility of any company or person who provides the possibility of speech, who can take it away from any given user and makes billions in profits off it, is to answer for and consider the admittedly unpredictable and deeply complex ramifications of the speech spoken under the company’s or person’s auspices.

Impending Brand Safety Woes: Nasty and Misleading Political Ads Hit Facebook

Share this:

If brand safety in the 2020 election season does not immediately seem concerning, consider the following: You’re an advertiser hoping to run digital ads for your advertising tech solution. You pay a publisher with huge traffic big money to score impressions on its platform. But as soon as a Democratic voter navigates to the site and sees your ad, along with it pops up a big Trump ad making inflammatory claims about Biden. The web surfer navigates away from the site. Who wins?

The Privacy Movement Is Not (Just) About Privacy

Share this:

Privacy has been slipping away from us since before then-CEO of Sun Microsystems Scott McNealy said we had none of it in January 1999. Americans still do not understand how companies use their data. While that is a transparency issue incumbent upon businesses to fix — and legislation will to some degree remedy it — I think it more likely than not that Americans will continue to hand over their data to Amazon for two-day delivery and Google for the sleekness of search. What we typically conceive of as privacy itself — concern about how much of our information companies possess — is not the factor that will turn the tides on company practices and legal standards.