Which-50 Digital Marketing

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What Are You Hiding, Gotham City Research Asks Criteo. Says The Company Is Destroying Evidence

Andrew Birmingham October 13, 2017

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Attempts by Criteo to circumvent Apple’s new privacy settings have put the company on a collision course with regulators in the US and Europe according to a new report, whose authors also accuse the French digital giant of attempting to cover its tracks and remove evidence of its workarounds.

The performance marketer’s shares fell today after another hostile report from Gotham City Research, a private due diligence investment group that is shorting the stock.

As a shorter of the stock GCR gains when Criteo falls.

GCR has a history of successfully tracking ad tech companies.

Its founder Daniel Yu told Which-50 earlier this year that it has followed the performance of ad techs in the past including Blucora, Blinkx, and Retailmenot as well as some ad agencies.

The point he was making what that Gotham City Research understands the ad tech world, hence its interest in Criteo.

This is the third report published by the group on the company and is the latest in a series of damning indictments of Criteo’s business practices that go back several years and at one stage including litigation with another ad tech business – Steel House – where each accused the other of fraud.

The parties settled out of court.

Among the key findings of this new report;

• In trying to circumvent Apple’s new privacy features the company has put itself in violation of section 5 of the FTC Act which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”

• Criteo will abandon their Apple ITP workaround due to the FTC, client pressure, Apple, and/or our efforts.

• Apple is working on defeating Criteo’s privacy abuses, based on Apple’s response to us from ~1 week ago.

• Criteo’s user tracking & consent practices are in violation of coming European regulation (GDRP, article 7 recital 32) in May 2018, and will face fines of up to 4 per cent of revenues.

• Criteo’s acts of desperation show that Apple’s ITP is a game changer for Criteo and other ad targeting firms.

• Most advertisers, including Criteo clients, would not risk losing the trust of their customers by employing nefarious tracking mechanisms like super cookies.

Perhaps the most series accusation in the new report is that Criteo’s workaround to circumvent Apple’s privacy features in Safari “…is being used in violation 5 of the FTC Act.”

Criteo again attacked the claims by Gotham City Research.

In a statement provided to Which-50 Criteo said, ”Once again, the allegations published by Gotham City include a number of false claims directed at Criteo and demonstrate a continued and fundamental lack of understanding of our business and technology. Criteo has been open with our clients about this solution, which provides full transparency and control to Safari users – and we do not collect any information before users enable Criteo’s cross-site tracking technology.”

“Full disclosure is provided and users can choose to click directly into our learn more page. Once our cross-site tracking technology is enabled, users are provided with another opportunity to change their mind. Users can visit our privacy policy page at any time to change their settings. The technology also fully respects and enforces consumers opt-out choice by stopping all data collection cross-site tracking for opt-out users and removing all associated

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technical identifiers and previously collected data.”

And as it has done in the past, Criteo criticised its accusers for not seeking their comment before publication, “As with their prior reports, the author failed to seek clarification from Criteo regarding any of their claims before writing the report. Criteo, in line with our policy, will not comment further on market rumor and speculation.”

Once again as its practice (and its right) Criteo has not addressed the specific questions we asked* about whether their technology puts the company at odds with laws in the US and the EU however by emphasizing the opt-out provisions of its approach its denial is a little more specific that in the past.

*Our questions are published at the end of this article

To a large extent, Criteo’s strategy of ignoring its critics is paying dividends.

While its shares fall with each new revelation, they typically recover once the spotlight moves on.

And the company is largely getting a free pass in its home market, France where it is considered a star of the local digital sector. Industry opinion there is supportive.

For instance, a few days prior to the latest GCR report, Gauthier Picquet, CEO of Publicis Media France was quoted in the publication JDN, dismissing the previous revelations.

He told reporter Nicolas Jaimes, “I have a fairly clear opinion on this case and I find that the Gotham City Research report was completely burdened. One must be able to support his accusations when the consequences are as important as a sharp drop in the stock market . Of course, there is a real stake in transparency because the market is not enough. But the arguments that were stretched in this particular case were not [enough].”

Of course, Criteo’s problems extend beyond the GCR scrutiny.

After Criteo disclosed its exposure to Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention on the latest IOS update, the company’s stock tanked because the scale of its problem was much bigger than first anticipated.

A number of financial analysts also ended coverage of the stock.

Trouble ahead?

Now according to GCR the latest Criteo workaround to Apple’s ITP puts the company at risk of prosecuting under the FTC ACT.

The authors of the report say “…a Criteo Japan webpage on Sept. 20 included some details about its Apple workaround but destroyed it 1 day later.” And they note there is no mention of Criteo’s Apple workaround (the HSTS super cookies) in the public domain.

“One word buried within a Criteo Japan webpage released September 20th and promptly deleted September 21st gives us the answer: HSTS (“HTTP Strict Transport Security”). Criteo and HSTS are not mentioned in the same sentence anywhere else in the public domain, other than in copies of the deleted Criteo Japan webpage,” says the GRC report.

Later in the report GCR notes that an email Criteo sent to clients used almost identical language to the Japan Criteo web page.

(This, incidentally also shows that some Criteo clients are now sharing information with Gotham City Research).

The authors then write, “We believe Criteo’s usage of HSTS Super cookies is not only dangerous, but illegal. This would explain Criteo’s HSTS coverup. Criteo’s acts of desperation show that Apple’s ITP is a game changer.”

So what’s the deal with the HSTS Super cookie?

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GCR says the HSTS protocol was not originally designed for surveillance purposes: but was rather intended to enhance web browsing security.

“It is only by abusing the HSTS cache, can HSTS be used for tracking users and their browsing behaviour,” according to a security expert quoted in the report named Lachlan Kang.

The problem with the approach for users is that once Criteo inserts the super cookie, any third party can track users, using the super cookie inserted by Criteo, say the authors.

“This makes them far more dangerous than standard cookies, as standard cookies inserted by Criteo can only be read by Criteo… Even if users were to opt out of Criteo tracking in the future, unauthorized third parties can continue tracking them.”

GCR then asserts, “Companies that resort to dangerous and illegal methods – like supercookies – to sustain profits, are not working from a position of strength, but

desperation. And desperation often leads to bad judgment, and/or fraud. Criteo’s usage of HSTS super cookies seems particularly brazen, given that we believe their behaviour is illegal, which we discuss in greater detail later in this report.”

Furthermore, GCR says there are similarities between Criteo’s behaviour today and that of Turn inc., “who settled with the FTC last year for abusing super cookies.”

They argue that FTC concerned itself not just with the intrusiveness of Turns’ usage of supercookies but also with what it says where the misleading and/or false disclosures regarding them.

And Gotham also asserts that Criteo’s clients may face their own legal scrutiny from its customers stemming from Criteo’s use of super cookies.

UPDATE:

This article has been updated to include Criteo’s response.

*Our questions to Criteo;

1. Does Criteo’s Apple ITP workaround – the HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) super cookie violate Section 5 of the FTC Act or does Criteo deny the specific accusation contained in the Gotham City Research report about the use of supercookies? If so why did the Japan Criteo website suggest otherwise?

2. Are Criteo’s user tracking & consent practices are in violation of coming European regulation (GDRP, article 7 recital 32) in May 2018, which could result in fines of up to 4% of revenues.

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Oracle Displaces Adobe As Top Digital Experience Platform: Forrester

Joseph Brookes September 29, 2017

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Oracle now provides the best digital experience platform, displacing previous leader Adobe according to the latest Forrester Research Wave report. Oracle moves into top spot with the biggest portfolio and heavy cloud refactoring. Adobe lost marks for a lack of commerce functionality and “no significant PaaS”.

The report, The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms Q3 2017, is written by Forrester Wave authors Mark Grannan and Ted Schadler. It examines the 14 most significant digital experience platform providers based on their current offering, strategy and market presence.

Of the 14, Oracle stood out, holding sole possession of the “Leaders” tag. While Adobe now joins Salesforce, IBM and SAP Hybrid in the “Strong Performers” category.

“Oracle has one of the broadest portfolios — including, content, commerce, marketing, data, analytics, and customer care — of any vendor we evaluated,” the

authors said. The Californian based provider scored top marks in service, vision and product customer count.

However they still have work to do, according to the authors, “The platform still lacks strong customer analytics and digital intelligence tools, and customers still complain about the complexities of their setup experience.”

According to Will Griffith, regional VP, APAC for Oracle Marketing Cloud, the ranking is recognition for both the completeness of Oracle’s cloud platform for digital experience and the maturity of Oracles solution.

He said whilst many of the components referenced in this latest wave report come from discrete acquisitions, Forrester’s ranking recognises the work Oracle has done bringing these together at a data and solution integration level.

“Customers today like Jetstar are leveraging this to drive seamless digital experience across all their digital touch points from unknown browsers to known regular customers – the degree of control over the experience each of their customers receives is helping Jetstar to engage, convert and retain customers better than their competition.”

“I’m also really pleased to see recognition of Oracle’s focus on commerce. More and more customers tell us they need a partner and platform that helps them understand how digital experience effects revenue and drives revenue growth… and which levers they can adjust to continue to improve that growth.”

According to Griffth, “We increasingly see this as the focus for businesses who are either digital natives disrupting traditional markets or legacy players adding digital engagement models to their customer experience.”

Adobe Slips

Oracle’s promotion has come at the expense of sole 2015 leader Adobe (there was no report in 2016). A company spokeswoman told Which-50 that they were proud of their previous leadership positions and their slip was the result of Forrester’s “evolving criteria”.

“By shifting the focus to native solutions vs. capabilities via integrations, Adobe wasn’t given credit for its broad set of partnerships with CRM, commerce, customer service and public cloud platforms providers,” she said.

“However, even with the shift in focus, Adobe continued to score ahead of 10 other companies that participated in the report, and is called out as being “best in class in content, marketing, and customer data management functionality.”

Indeed, Adobe still led several categories, scoring perfect marks in customer data and market presence, with the authors describing them as

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the “cadilac of marketing and experience platforms”.

Adobe received a zero mark in the commerce section as it does not provide any such function and was also criticised for its challenging implementation.

The other standout was Salesforce, bolstered by recent additions to its portfolio. They offset a modest current offering score – lacking in content and some analytics, with high marks in strategy and market presence.

Source: Forrester

“Salesforce, with its converging clouds, is a good choice for B2B and, increasingly, B2c companies, particularly those willing to invest in its PaaS for adjacent applications,” the authors said.

Also included in the strong performers category was IBM and SAP Hybris.

New Players

The 2016 report also saw the addition of new digital experience platform players. Sprinklr, and BloomReach were ranked as ‘contenders’ while Magneto and Liferay were considered ‘cliffhangers’.

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COVER STORY: No, Blockchain Won’t Upend Digital Marketing — Yet. But The Potential Is Real

Andrew Birmingham October 30, 2017

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Will blockchain upend digital marketing, eliminate advertising fraud and usher in a new MarTech ecosystem fuelled by revolutionary business models and bulletproof transparency? Don’t hold your breath.

However, while the current limitations of the technology suggest that such changes won’t happen any time soon, don’t discount its impact over the long haul — and do expect incremental gains in the meantime.

As we will all be hearing a lot about blockchain and marketing over the next 12 months, Which-50 decided to get our reality check in early.

Blockchain’s great promise for marketers is proof and, by extension, trust. That is a crucial issue in the digital marketing world, where both of these qualities sometimes get left behind in the rush by innovators to bleed the edge.

Industry leaders we spoke to as we prepared this report all

recognise the promise, but they also cautioned that there are serious limitations yet to be overcome — and the hype has once again run ahead of reality.

Gartner’s Rajesh Kandaswamy and Fabio Chesini, in a paper called How to determine if you need a blockchain project and if so, what kind, argue that the noise surrounding the technology obfuscates the difference between where blockchain can work versus where blockchain is needed.

What is blockchain? (Wikipedia)

That’s a view shared by AdRoll founder Adam Berke. Now a strategic adviser to the performance marketing company he helped grow to over $US300 million worldwide, Berke told Which-50, “In general, there’s a temptation right now to try to shoehorn blockchain into every possible industry whether it makes sense or not. The concept of a distributed, cryptographic ledger is absolutely an ingenious invention —that doesn’t mean it makes sense for every use case.”

According to Berke, “Often, the unique properties of a blockchain (it is distributed, and ownerless, for example) aren’t actually needed for the use case in question, and often times the current limitations of blockchain make it a suboptimal choice.”

Still, for businesses like AdRoll and others in the advertising and marketing technology sector, the blockchain question is gaining momentum.That is especially so as it relates to digital advertising.

In the US, the Interactive Advertising Bureau formed a blockchain working group earlier this year and the outgoing head of IAB Labs, Alanna Gombert, declared that blockchain would replace data as a key area of focus.

In a statement announcing the working group which was released last month, the IAB acknowledged that blockchain technology is already being utilised in the digital advertising space, and identified nine such initiatives.

Adam Berke - AdRoll co-founder and Strategic Advisor

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AdChain is an open protocol on Ethereum’s public blockchain. Its stated goal is to allow for building of decentralised applications, specifically for use in the digital advertising ecosystem.

• Adex is a decentralised ad exchange that utilises Ethereum to address problems like fraud, privacy, and consent in the digital advertising space.

• Amino combines technologies from blockchain, payments, and AdTech to bring transparency, integrity, and auditability to online advertising.

• Ethereum is a blockchain based, publicly available open source distributed computing platform that provides a decentralised virtual machine and its own cryptocurrency tokens called “ether”. These attributes make Ethereum an attractive base for the generation of smart contracts and serves

as the foundation of other applications.

• Faktor is a blockchain-based identity management platform that can be utilised by publishers, advertisers, and individual users.

• Hyperledger is an umbrella project of open source blockchain initiatives that was started and managed by the Linux Foundation.

• Kochava is introducing the XCHNG platform, an open-source digital advertising framework based on blockchain technology enabling the industry to operate on common rails.

• NYIAX, a guaranteed media contract exchange, bridges the space between the financial and digital advertising ecosystems utilising blockchain in partnership with NASDAQ.

• Rebel AI secures digital advertising and protects publisher identity and

brand spend using machine learning, blockchain, and encryption technologies.

• The Basic Attention Token (BAT) utilises the Ethereum blockchain to create a token that can be used to obtain a variety of advertising and attention-based services on a purpose-built platform.

It is no surprise that many of the initiatives are focusing on fraud and accountability.

With ad fraud set to reach $US44 billion by 2022 according to Juniper Research, and to grow into the world’s second-biggest black market by the middle of the next decade, there are huge returns available to any company that can tackle the problem. But ad fraud is hardly the only concern.

Time to disintermediate … againJeremy Epstein, author of The CMO Primer For the BlockChain World, writing in a blog on ChiefMarTech, explained why advertising will

most likely be the first function to be attacked.

“Simply put, the number of middlemen and amount of friction makes it ripe for blockchain-based disruption.”

In his book he elaborates, writing “Any industry that is full of intermediaries has a lot of value lost along the transaction path, and lacks transparency and trust is an industry that is ripe for blockchain-driven disruption.”

He argues, and others agree, that there is a huge amount of inefficiency in the digital advertising supply chain.Industry analysts say that intermediaries carve out 56 cents from every digital advertising dollar spent, leaving brands with a minority share of the value from their investment.

Forrester Research, meanwhile, suggests that on the other side of the transaction, publishers could increase their CPMs fivefold by cutting out the middlemen, according to Epstein.

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Despite this, there is very little industry analysis from companies likes Gartner and Forrester about the direct impact of blockchain on marketing. At best there are oblique references to it in wider discussions.

Darren Guarnaccia, now a strategic advisor to Cognigy, but formerly the chief strategy officer and executive vice president of Sitecore, says “Blockchain is really about trust when you boil it down. Think of it as a bulletproof way to record things such that everyone using it has absolute faith in its truth and accuracy.”

“There are certain scenarios where there is scepticism about the validity of certain kinds of data, such as in advertising. Did that ad really get shown? How do you prove that? By using blockchain technology, all parties can see what really happened, and have the absolute faith of the veracity of the information.”

Anywhere there is a dependency of trust and multiple parties involved, blockchain can add value, he said.

Steve Lucas, CEO of Marketo — one of the big four marketing clouds — agrees that blockchain can have a big impact on the way digital advertising is distributed and measured, but he identifies some significant limitations in the technology at the moment, as do Berke and Guarnaccia.

Lucas told Which-50 “Speed is definitely a challenge for blockchain’s application in marketing systems, given the raw volume and velocity of data.Visa’s network can process 56,000 transactions per second, but

Darren Guarnaccia, Strategic Advisor, Cognigy

blockchain currencies, as a point of comparison, process a small fraction of that.”

“Blockchain technologies will have to accelerate orders of magnitude more in terms of interactions per second to keep pace with some of the biggest ad or marketing systems.”

Berke offers an even starker comparison based on his own data. “At AdRoll we process hundreds of thousands of bids per second. Bitcoin, currently the most robust blockchain, processes three or four. There are ways to close the gap, but it strikes me that the driving force (at the moment) is to make blockchain fit the use case as opposed to the use case demanding the technology.”

Timothy Whitfield, Director of technical operations at Group M in Australia, echoed these concerns. “The programmatic landscape requires super-fast responses between the SSP and the DSP world. For instance, in a programmatic auction, there needs to be a response within about 40 milliseconds. AdTech

companies would need to ‘productise’ blockchain and make this something that can fit into the rest of the programmatic AdTech landscape in order for it to enter the mainstream.”

Part of the problem is that blockchain relies on encryption technology, which adds a heavier load to any processing task, says Guarnaccia.

“Blockchain is also immutable — meaning once it’s written, it can’t be changed. That’s a good thing from an archival standpoint, and knowing that data can’t be altered later, but if you need to constantly update existing information, or collect massive amounts of raw data, you’ll always be creating new data, instead of updating existing data. This can lead to large costs of storage over time,” he says.

Praneet Sharma, the co-founder and CTO of Method Media Intelligence — which advises clients on how to maximise the return from their AdTech investments and has a strong practical knowledge in ad fraud — said “I like to point out that the

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main blockchain networks cannot and should not handle the scale of digital advertising.”

Instead, he argues that a good capability would be to “side-chain” information into a separate blockchain and merge it back into the main one. “This is required for impression-level tracking. For other things, like supply verification, the transaction rate is not of much concern.”

Hakuna matata

Of course, making things run faster more cost-effectively is bread and butter for the industry that gave us Moore’s law.

Already there are alternatives to blockchain emerging, like swirlds which grew out of the hashgraph community and which claims to have overcome many of the technical limitations of current blockchain implementations.

Those claims are set to be tested in the real world in the next year, as the company has

partnered with a consortium of credit unions under the CULedger umbrella to help application developers to build distributed applications that can be used by businesses in that sector.

But if it is too early to test the claims of blockchain proponents, by comparison, the hashgraph community is still positively embryonic.

For that reason, we will leave them to gestate for a while and check back in a few months.

Opportunities

While blockchain’s current limitations will slow its immediate impact on the world of advertising technology, the executives we spoke to all saw wider opportunities ahead.

Marketo’s Lucas says that over the long term blockchain could profoundly improve brand-buyer engagement scenarios in an ad-saturated world.

“For example, blockchain tech

could incent some customers to opt in and pay more attention to specific messages from marketers if given buyer actions like reading an email were prosecuted.”

“In some ways, this is the opposite of today’s model, but it’s interesting to consider the paradigm shift as we’ve reached a point of over-saturation in the digital ad space.”

Guarnaccia, meanwhile, said blockchain is like a very secure database with the added benefit of having an archival mechanism built in. “The fact that it can allow multiple parties to have access to information in a peer to peer way has many implications.”

Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas

He suggests, for instance, it could lead to companies being more willing to expose and share data with customers and partners more readily.

“I expect to see blockchain being deployed as a part of more MarTech platforms and solutions over time, given its ability to make data more accessible to others.”

Berke says blockchain might actually loosen the stranglehold that advertising has on the internet publishing sector by finally solving the problem of third-party expense which has inhabited the emergence of micro-transaction solutions.

“The major cryptocurrencies are having their own problems with transaction costs right now, but the promise is still there. If we were able to pay pennies for articles — podcasts, for example — it could alleviate the demands placed on advertising to be the only proven monetisation model for digital content.”

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COVER STORY: No, Blockchain Won’t Upend Digital Marketing — Yet. But The Potential Is Real

Andrew Birmingham September 18, 2017

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Retargeting platform Criteo has been smashed in two new reports.

The first was written by an ad fraud consultancy called Method Media Intelligence and the second by financial analysts Gotham City Research (GCR), which sought to validate the MMI study based on its own analysis.

As a result of that analysis, Gotham City Research last week released an assessment where it said it believes 50 per cent of Criteo’s revenues originate from suspect sources.

That wasn’t the only bad news for the French-based Nasdaq-listed company. It was also revealed that as much as 20 per cent of its revenue could be adversely affected by Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention — much worse than the figure the market expected, which was closer to eight per cent.

Gotham City Research turned its focus to the performance marketing company after

getting hold of a report written by Shailin Dhar of Method Media Intelligence.

Which-50 also has a copy of that report, and we discussed some of the findings with Dhar in May, but agreed to withhold them from publication while he completed his work.

With regard to Criteo, the GCR analysis offers four fairly critical opinions of the company’s business. (At this stage it is also worth filtering GCR’s opinions through the prism of its vested interest — as a short-selling investor, it wins if the share price falls.)

Its opinions include:

• Over 50 per cent of Criteo’s revenues originate from suspect sources (e.g. clickbots, fake/low quality web sites, etc);

• Criteo takes credit for clients’ sales it did not contribute to and, in some cases, that never actually occurred;

• Clients will leave or demand reimbursements from Criteo, out of brand safety and revenue misattribution concerns;

• Criteo’s sales and profits will decline as a result of increased client scrutiny, leading to a 67 to 77 per cent decline in its share price.

In preparing its analysis, GCR reviewed the work by Method Media Intelligence, which analysed Criteo’s engagement by retailer Ivory Ella. It then did its own analysis.

According to the GCR report, “After three months of due diligence, which included an analysis of Criteo and its peers’ web sites, we have concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly supports MMI’s thesis; over 50 per cent of sites where Criteo ads are displayed — and therefore clicks and revenue — seem to be of suspect quality.”

The analysts say they believe Criteo’s stock price could drop dramatically once investors and

consumers develop a better understanding of its exposure to ad fraud.

GCR is promising more disclosures in a second report shortly.

The MMI Study

Method Media Intelligence analysed the performance of Criteo with regard to an online retailer named Ivory Ella.

In describing the purpose of its research it notes, “From August 2015 to May 2017, Ivory Ella had paid $1,063,167.35 to Criteo for clicks generated, attributed to $1,007,280.13 in sales. Ivory Ella agreed to allow MMI to investigate on its behalf, to assess whether Criteo was delivering legitimate traffic and to decide if it should continue spending money with Criteo.”

Criteo, unlike many of its competitors, gets paid when an ad is clicked, rather than on the cost per thousand ads served.

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As Dhar writes in his report, It is fairly easy to understand that within advertising technology, any company whose business model relies on selling clicks as performance is prone to fraudulent traffic activity because industry-wide CTRs are at 0.05 per cent (five clicks for every 10,000 ads).

This CTR includes the estimated 51.8 per cent of all web traffic being robots.

“While we could make theoretically logical claims of why Criteo’s traffic sources and billing activities are opaque and suspicious, we will instead use evidence to prove systematically and methodically that Criteo and its clients have a massive exposure to fraudulent web traffic that results in massive advertising fraud.”

What follows from MMI is a 34-page technical analysis of the Ivory Ella campaign.

You can read the report on the Gotham Research site.

However, some of the key findings with regard to the investigation of the Ella Ivory data include:

• Criteo operates with no transparency as to where the clicks it charges advertisers for are being generated;

• Criteo displays and pays for ads delivered to even simple bots;

• Criteo claims attribution credit to its ads for transactions that were falsely triggered by a bot. It is able to do this despite having a window of up to 24 hours to verify or scrutinise the transaction occurring and reporting it in their console with attribution one way or the other;

• Criteo reported 42 per cent higher clicks than our own tracking code on the same web page;

Gotham City Research’s main observations on Criteo from Friday’s report

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• Visits from Criteo-attributed clicks have an approximately 40 per cent frequency of unregistered referrers;

• Criteo’s average CPC rises from $0.31 to $0.50 with the adjustment of unregistered and unattributable clicks. Criteo charged Ivory Ella advertising costs at least 61 per cent higher than what was truly delivered. and it over-reported $10,312.52 in the amount of attributed sales to its advertised users over a 30-day period;

• Criteo’s transaction timestamps are dated after Shopify’s transaction timestamps, which allows extra clicks to be billed to those user IDs even after a purchase is made.

When we initially discussed his work with Ivory Ella earlier this year, Dhar told Which-50 that one of the early red flags from the analysis was that his client spent more on clicks with Criteo than it generated in revenue.

That first number was substantial — approaching seven figures.

That punctures a typical Criteo response when claims such as this are raised. Responding to criticism late last year the company argued “We make money only when our clients do, because our business model is fully aligned to driving their sales.”

Other problems quickly became apparent.

Criteo told the company its ads would only appear in brand-safe environments — described by Criteo in emails to the client’s agency as “Disney safe”.

However, Dhar told Which-50, “We have screenshots of ads on all types of salacious content. Obviously, things that cannot be justified as PG-13.”

Criteo also refused to provide the client’s agency with a list of sites on which it buys ads, claiming confidentiality agreements with publishers, the report said.

This is despite the fact that the Criteo tags can be scraped from the public source code of sites where they are present.

Criteo also buys inventory on open exchanges, where such privacy considerations are not relevant, Dhar said.

As the researchers dug more deeply into the data, their findings echoed many of the criticisms of Criteo that emerged in the SteelHouse dispute, and which were later publicised in an article in Seeking Alpha and subsequently investigated by Which-50.

Working with Ella Ivory, the researchers were able to see every visit to the site and where it came from. This threw out another disturbing discrepancy.

“We found that Criteo was over-reporting the number of clicks that we could detect as coming from them.”

In the period tested, Criteo reported 3500 clicks.

Yet the researchers could only reconcile 2100 clicks to the dedicated url (IvoryElla.com/product1234/UTMsource=Criteo)

This is a significant discrepancy — about 40 per cent. After initially planning a seven- to ten-day analysis, the test was extended to a month.

“Now, we’re looking at all visits coming in. We are seeing lots of headless browsers, which are just phantom browsers. We were also seeing referrers. If you just rely on Criteo or Google Analytics, you only see the first referrer.”

However, Method Media Intelligence was able to look a few further steps back in the chain, and that also set alarm bells ringing.

“We started seeing a frequency of referrers like r.search.yahoo. That’s associated with a well-known piece of malware from a company called Spigot.”

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While not a 100 per cent confirmation, says Dhar, the frequency of this referrer strongly hinted that traffic is being purchased from adware companies.

This was one of the few allegations Criteo specifically denied after the Seeking Alpha story was published earlier this year. In responding to the Seeking Alpha and Which-50 stories, most of the rest of its denials were general in nature.

“If there is no connection, there is no reason for that to happen,” Dhar told Which-50.

Nothing to see here, move along

In June this year, after being briefed on the MMI research, Which-50 wrote to Criteo with a set of detailed questions raised by the report.

Criteo declined to answer the questions and instead sent us the following statement which we are now free to publish.

Whilst Criteo does not comment on individual cases, we would like to reaffirm that Criteo’s goal has always been to serve as a trusted partner and ensure a high quality, brand-safe environment for our community of more than 15,000 advertising clients.

When advertising with Criteo, brand safety covers both the appropriateness of the site content and the integrity of the traffic the site generates.

We are committed to detecting and combating fraud in digital marketing through numerous internal and external prevention methods.

Our proprietary targeting and bidding engine has built-in detection of signals that indicate non-human activity.

We have a dedicated operations team who constantly monitors the extensive reporting from our systems to pick up suspicious click activity which could indicate fraud.

When such activity is uncovered we immediately reimburse affected clients.

Criteo also employs a robust blacklist process to enforce our brand safety guidelines.

Our publisher account teams regularly review advertiser performance metrics on publisher sites to spot suspicious trends, and terminate any sites that may be generating invalid traffic.

Criteo continuously enhances its protection by adding any new fraudulent agents or suspect behaviour types to our detection tools.

In addition, we are a member of TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group) and work with leading third-party vendors to assess any additional protection they can offer to our own tools and processes to prevent fraud and non-human traffic.

Why is this troublefor Criteo?

Criteo’s business model and practices were already under scrutiny following its legal dispute with Steelhouse last year.

The research by MMI raises some significant questions but as a single piece of research it would have been easy for Criteo to ignore it and perhaps settle any concerns directly with its client Ivory Ella.

Many of MMI’s findings have now apparently been validated independently by a third party — Gotham City Research — which says it will release more information shortly.

Already, however, its initial assessment raises important questions that Criteo’s management should address.

Among them: GCR says that based on an analysis of over half a million web sites, the majority of Criteo’s ads seem to be displayed on suspect web

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sites and as many as a third of its disclosed business partners and suppliers have proven ties to click fraud adware, malware and viruses.

They also say they found that almost a thousand “… malicious files/urls have been detected/associated with Criteo domains.IP addresses.”

The GCR analysts also looked at the hit the company would take if its revenues were to decline by just five to ten per cent. Under such circumstances, net earnings would decline by 29 to 44 per cent.

So who is Gotham City Research?

According to the Financial Times in London, the company has a solid track record in its assessments.

In 2014, for instance, the FT wrote, “Over the medium term, the group’s record has been good.”

That FT article followed a Gotham City Research report that wiped 900 million pounds off the value of claims-processing company Quindell.As of Sunday evening, September 17, Criteo has not formally responded to the Gotham City Research report.

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Open Source Header Bidding Organisation Launches

Andrew Birmingham October 4, 2017

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AppNexus and Rubicon Project last month announced the creation and launch of Prebid.

org an organisation dedicated to the development and promotion of open-source header bidding solutions.

“A fragmented header bidding landscape poses a great risk to the industry,” said Michael Richardson, Product Line Manager, AppNexus and Chairman of Prebid.org. “Rather than independently competing, duplicating efforts, and wasting resources, we can push for fair competition and better results as a team. The collaboration around Prebid.org by industry partners has been incredible, showing it to be the pragmatic path forward.”

Header bidding is a technique created to offer publishers a more efficient way of working with programmatic vendors, equipping them to improve their monetisation strategies in an unbiased environment.

We asked Paul Gubbins, a London based ad tech

consultant who we have featured on Which-50 in the past to provide a layman’s description of header bidding.

He told us, “Publishers can ask all advertisers at the same time to bid for their ad placements, rather than sequentially, auctions happen in milliseconds so speed is everything.”

And Jonas Jaanimagi, an executive consultant and the former head of Media Strategy and Operations at REA Group added to definition by saying, “Header bidding enables publishers to simultaneously access more auctions, thereby increasing demand via more bids”. However, he noted, “Buyers often have to bid multiple times for the same inventory.”

Meanwhile, Paolo Modolo, an account director at AppNexus in Sydney wrote to us via Linkedin that header bidding is basically a monetisation solution which eliminates the inefficient hierarchy of the waterfall. “It ensures that every demand partner gets a chance to bid on

every impression, and increases yield for publishers by allowing greater competition.”

Continuous Updates

As opposed to proprietary technologies, open-source header bidding solutions are updated on a continuous basis by a multitude of industry players – the Prebid.org community currently spans 81 demand partner adapters, 5 analytics providers, and 191 individuals who contribute code to the project.

The collaborative nature of the organisation instills transparency and accountability into the ecosystem.

It also enables the Prebid solutions to adapt quickly to market and publisher needs, claim its advocates.

The initiative as a collaborative effort of industry partners, and say Prebid.org is open to all parties advocating for unbiased and efficient monetisation solutions and a

digital advertising ecosystem that thrives through fair competition.

In joining Prebid.org, partners have to commit to a Code of Conduct containing directives for header bidding wrapper mechanics, data and transparency, and user experience.

We asked Pieter de Zwart, President of Prebid.org and VP Engineering at Rubicon Project how independence could be ensured given the project seems to have been driven by Rubicon Project and Appnexus.

“From a governance standpoint, Prebid.org will be run by all of its members through board representation. Though it is only Rubicon Project and AppNexus right now, we are actively expanding membership in the near future, so stay tuned for updates in this area. ”

According to de Zwart “From an execution standpoint, Prebid.org is built much like the Apache Software Foundation: the board

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is responsible for creating the different verticals (Prebid.js, Prebid Server, Prebid Mobile, Prebid Tools), but once created, each initiative is managed by the Project Management Committee itself. This structure creates an environment where the contributors are the ones managing the roadmap and feature set. Being open-source allows for anyone to contribute, and therefore there is no process for Rubicon Project or AppNexus to enforce their vision.”

The parties are stressing the open source nature of the initiative and de Zwart told Which-50, “The great thing about open source software is that anyone can use it, tweak it and submit changes. This has been a very popular model in software engineering. Take web servers for example: nearly 70 percent of the world’s websites operate on top of open-source web servers (Nginx and Apache’s httpd). ”

He said these systems were built through community involvement and contributions.

“Our goal with Prebid.org is to foster the same environment, where each codebase is managed by a team of people from a variety of companies, and whose goal is only to reduce friction in the marketplace and improve performance for both buyers and sellers.”

“PubMatic and AOL/Oath are both good examples of this (outside of Rubicon Project and AppNexus): they have also developed “enterprise” versions of the Prebid.js wrapper that are based on the core principles of Prebid.js but provide additional ancillary features for their specific publisher use-cases,” he said.

According to Kershaw, Chief Technology Officer, Rubicon Project and a director of Prebid.org, “The formation of Prebid.org marks a crucial step forward in the push for industry-wide adoption of open-source header bidding technologies.”

The launch of Prebid.org as an independent organisation does not alter the functionality of existing Prebid products,

but rather bolsters support for their development and adoption within the industry. Amongst the products currently contributed to Prebid.org are client-side wrapper solution, Prebid.js, server-side header bidding solution, Prebid Server, as well as Prebid Mobile, Prebid Video, and Prebid Native.

The solutions support all device types.

Publishers and ad tech vendors are encouraged to join Prebid.org, to further develop and champion best practices for open-source header bidding. Companies interested in participating should visit prebid.org for additional information.

Open-source header bidding technologies are developed in a way which favours growth for publishers and the programmatic industry as a whole, versus proprietary solutions, said Evan Simeone, SVP of Product Management at PubMatic. “Development in open-source projects is self-correcting for the benefit of the community

as opposed to benefiting any one party, as we all should be up front and helpful in addressing our industry’s challenges to move forward.”

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How To Use Digital Feedback To Deliver A Better Customer Experience

Terry Anderson October 5, 2017

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Digital feedback has the potential to have a far-reaching business impact on things like customer loyalty and revenue. But only if it’s harnessed correctly.

For instance, there are a handful of absolutely critical strategies you should be following, such as making sure you capture the right data.

That may sound easy, but it is surprising how many large businesses do not get the basics right?

So what’s the first step? Simply, start by listening to what your customers have to say, and in their own words.

This may sound straightforward but many companies get this wrong.

And this is something leaders do much better than laggards. According to the Temkin Group, 61 percent of organisations that have “mature” Voice of Customer programs and $500 million or

more in annual revenue believe that open-ended verbatims from customers provide the most value when it comes to customer insights.

This makes sense.

When your customers initiate a conversation with you, they will tell you exactly how you can improve their experience, and what aspects of their experience they expect for you to take action on to improve – but only if you let them.

But it is just the start. How else can you ensure digital feedback delivers a better customer experience.

1: Listen to what your customers have to say…don’t just let them speak at you

If you already use a digital feedback solution or are capturing direct customer insight online, you need to be clear that there’s a subtle but important distinction between letting your customers speak to/at you and actually listening to what they have to say.

Listening involves a two-way communication exchange, where your customers speak to you and you then take the time to consider what they are actually saying.

As more and more exchanges between customers and businesses take place online, the fewer opportunities there are to have the same level of two-way exchange typical of face-to-face communication.

One of the main goals in gathering feedback is to enable communication between you and your customer: information is delivered (by the customer), and a message is received (by the company).

And ideally your customers’ messages compel you, as an organisation, to take action.

Think about it: if a customer in a brick-and-mortar store approached a manager and indicated that product pricing on tags didn’t match with the store’s promotional signage, that manager would take action to correct the mistake – more than likely, immediately.

That customer’s expectation for you to take action is no different on digital channels.

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2: Ensure you don’t influence responses

To get the true and honest digital feedback you require, be careful not to influence customer responses in any way.

When requesting digital feedback, think about the following points:

1. Let them speak in their own words – enable your customers to leave actual open-ended comments about what they want to tell you.

2. How you ask is important – invite online feedback with an open-ended comment so as not to influence the nature of what your customers want to tell you. If, for example, you instead ask a specific attitudinal question such as “how do you feel about content of our site?” – odds are that the information you get will focus specifically on content.

3. Ensure the location for providing the comment is front and center – By prominently displaying the comment box when your customer opts to leave digital feedback, they will tell you exactly what first came to mind when they elected to speak with you.

The best and most actionable feedback is direct, undiluted and most reflective of your customer experience.

So invite comments from your customers that encourages this insight.

3: Invite feedback across all digital touchpoints

You should offer your customers the capability to provide you with feedback across all of your digital touchpoints.

In other words, let them talk to you from every single page of your website, mobile apps and other platforms.

Customer-initiated feedback is just that, initiated by the customer, and more often than not at the moment when they have encountered some barrier to their success.

As an analyst working with businesses to improve their digital customer experience, I often encounter situations when companies have gaps in their perspective on drivers of CX – all because key site sections, sub domains, or even specific digital tools are devoid of a continuous listening solution.

Often in these situations, organisations assume that

no problems exist on these neglected touchpoints simply because no feedback is being relayed on or about them – which is obviously a big mistake. To give you an example of what I’m talking about – modal pop-up windows for password recovery are a perfect example of a commonly missed opportunity to gather feedback, particularly on mobile devices.

If your goal is to create a comprehensive view of all possible exchanges between yourself and your customers, then allow for users to leave digital feedback on all digital touchpoints.

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4: Make providing digital feedback easy for your customers

If you want your customers to speak to you about whatever’s on their mind so that you can then listen and react, you need to make it easy for them to do so.

Take the below example (which incorporates an invitation to provide feedback via a tab on the right side of the page and in the header), which is mirrored throughout the website – users are in no doubt at any point of their interaction how to tell you what they think about you.

The invitation is easily findable/accessible and ever-present across the experience.

Another benefit of a highly visible invitation to leave feedback is that you end up with a far more balanced view.

For example – if you bury your digital feedback invitation in the footer of your site, or too deep in the hamburger menu of your mobile applications or mobile web experience, the more negatively skewed and customer support oriented the commentary tends to be.

Because your customers will have to work hard to figure out how to leave feedback, only the most motivated will do so…and making it so difficult will only irritate them further.

If you want digital feedback to be actionable, and related to in-moment pain points, make it easy for your end users to speak to you as close to the actual moment of truth as possible – whether that “moment of truth” is a page itself, or even an aspect of a specific page such as search results or account details.

This approach also encourages cross-channel feedback. Where is the first place your customers go to engage with you or research your products or services?

More often than not, it’s your website.

Providing an easy-to-find platform for delivering feedback means you not only receive the insight to improve your digital customer experience, but also CX within your store or branch

network or the quality of your products and more.

Staying on the theme of making it easy, make it easy for yourself by implementing a “channel selector” like the one highlighted below.

This means you can segment and route data easily for action, while also asking questions specific to channels or services.

If you want to find out more techniques for making providing digital feedback easy for your customers, this is covered in a recent OpinionLab eBook.

Let your customers be your guide.

Comments directly from your customers in their own words captured via digital feedback help bring CX issues to life. Remember: every comment represents the voice of an actual person.

Listening will help instill you with a greater sense of organisational empathy, and

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better allow you to truly see your business processes from the perspective of your actual customers’ journeys.

Familiarising yourself with verbatim digital feedback is the ultimate way to challenge your own assumptions about your customer experience, gain a true sense of customers’ desired outcomes, and shed light on unmet needs that you never even considered to be factors in their overall satisfaction with your company.

When you think about it like that, the impact of digital feedback on your customer experience – both online and offline – can be immense.

But make sure you follow these four crucial steps to maximise its full potential to uncover the type of insights that drive discernible CX and business improvements.

About the the Author

Terry Anderson is part of the Insights team, which works with leading brands to improve their customer experiences using the OpinionLab digital feedback solution.

OpinionLab which is a member of the Which-50 Digital Intelligence Unit. Members contribute their expertise and insights to Which-50 for the benefit of our senior executive audience. Membership fees apply.

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In-House Programmatic Drives Sharp CPA Reductions, Says CommBank CMO

Tess Bennett October 10, 2017

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The Commonwealth Bank’s decision to bring its programmatic and social buying in-house has been hailed a success by its acting CMO Monique Macleod who described the experience as a “very worthwhile journey.”

“In 2015 we took the conscious decision to in-house most of our performance and digital media,” Macleod said during a presentation at IAB Australia’s Measure Up conference in Sydney today.

Since then the bank has seen a 20 per cent reduction in its programmatic CPA and a 30 per cent reduction in paid search.

The decision to bring the digital buying in-house was motivated in part by a consideration for trust and transparency.

“Customers are very, very sure about what they expect from us, in terms of their data and how we utilise it, we have to protect that so we really felt the need to do this in-house,” Macleod said.

“By bringing together our first party data with what we want to do with our targeting and messaging we knew that we could deliver better outcomes and so far that’s what we’ve seen.”

As an industry Macleod argued the digital media needs “new formats that genuinely engage with customers” and “tight process around brand safety are critical for us.”

To continue to grow the industry needs, “access to global best practice and benchmarking, quality programmatic inventory that we can buy and greater insights around targeting capability for our activity.”

Measurement builds trust

News Corp CDO Nicole Sheffield also spoke at the event where she argued that measurement is “absolutely critical” to establishing trust in an industry that’s facing increasing scrutiny.

“It’s incumbent on us to stay committed to measurement,” she

said. Adding the industry has a responsibility to advertisers and the 19 million Australians “that choose to spend time with us – and a lot of time with us – every single day.”

“Trust is the secret sauce and for us,” Sheffield said.

“Having trust means that people need to not just trust that every eyeball is a real eyeball, they have to trust the engagement measures … and Australians need to trust the content they are consuming.”

Sheffield acknowledged the digital measurement is more complex than traditional media, but argued the industry should be proud of its efforts.

“Devices are changing all the time, browsers are changing, handsets are changing. Trying to measure that is not the same as measuring 2,000 television sets in 2,000 homes. It is incredibly difficult and different.”

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Marketers Still Struggling To Act On Attribution Insights: Survey

Andrew Birmingham October 4, 2017

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The vast majority of marketers are now using attribution modeling. However, most still struggle to act on the insights their models reveal.

That is a key finding of the 2017 State of Marketing Attribution report by performance marketing business AdRoll, which conducted the study in partnership with Econsultancy.

Among the key findings:

• Single-click attribution models are still the most commonly used (44 per cent last-click and 39 per cent first-click for brand direct and 58 per cent last-click and 33 per cent first-click agency clients);

• Of the 25 per cent of marketers using a custom attribution model, 48 per cent deem it to be ‘very effective’;

• 59 per cent of marketers that have not yet implemented an attribution model state a lack of

knowledge is the main obstacle;

• Joining online and offline attribution is increasing — last year’s European report showed 42 per cent of marketers were using multichannel attribution while the 2017 global report shows 60 per cent of marketers linking the two;

• An equal 43 per cent of marketers are using spreadsheets and vendor technology to carry out their marketing attribution;

• 71 per cent of marketers describe their attribution model flexibility as ‘very flexible’ or ‘somewhat flexible’.

AdRoll argues that customer journeys are becoming increasingly complex and fast-paced with multiple devices and touchpoints.

The promise of attribution its that it helps marketers understand the effectiveness

of their campaigns and how each channel contributes to the success of a campaign.

According to the study attribution remains a top priority for marketers but they still capture the benefits.

The authors say defining the online customer journey remains the most significant barrier to more effective usage.

“Attribution continues to be one of the hottest topics in the industry for a reason: it has huge

Infographic: State of Performance Marketing

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consequences, such as lost revenue and wasted ad budget, if not done properly,” said Shane Murphy, AdRoll VP of Marketing. “The State of Marketing Attribution report gives a sense of how marketers are dealing with this challenging topic. Marketers are being held to higher standards of measurement and accountability than ever before, and attribution models have the ability to show the true impact our discipline has on the bottom line of a business.”

In terms of benefits, 70 per cent of respondents said the better allocation of budget across channels was the big driver, with a better understanding of how digital channels work together coming in second (at 64 per cent).

There is also some evidence that attribution modeling is leading to increases in digital advertising spends.Some of the biggest attribution challenges facing marketers in 2017 are defining the customer journey (35 per cent) and attracting staff with the right skills (77 per cent).

Creating a culture of measurement and accuracy is more difficult for brand direct marketers (80 per cent) than for agencies (71 per cent).

“There’s increased recognition of the role marketing attribution can play in helping companies to maximise their business outcomes, but knowledge and confidence surrounding the use

of various methods could prove to be a stumbling block,” said Econsultancy Head of Commercial Research Services Monica Savut. “This year’s research shows that companies need to take a more holistic and nuanced approach to attribution, constantly adjusting and refining until the correct balance is achieved.”

Methodology: Based on a survey of nearly 1,000 brand marketers and agencies across Asia-Pacific, North America, Japan and Europe, the report provides detailed insight into a marketer’s perspective on the changing dynamics of attribution. Now in its second instalment, this year’s report provides a global comparison, expanded from the European report released in 2016.

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The Halo Effect: Why Seven Invested In TV Attribution Startup Impulse Screen Media

Tess Bennett October 26, 2017

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Late last year Seven Group Holdings (SGH) acquired a 28 per cent stake in an Australian advertising attribution and analytics start-up called Impulse Screen Media (ISM).

SGH has set aside capital to invest in new technology companies that it believes have the potential to disrupt the market in some of its traditional industries, like television broadcasting.

ISM’s technology recognises what is being broadcast on TV and triggers a digital ad campaign against pre-determined keywords or images. The platform also offers an analytics solution which keeps track of how many times a brand like Coca-Cola was mentioned on TV and in what context.

The technology allows broadcasters like Seven to increase their data and digital capabilities, pushing back against the growing dominance of Google and Facebook in the advertising market.

It also addresses Accenture’s research on the “Halo effect” which found multiplatform TV advertising should get the credit for 18 per cent of the ROI attributed to search and social.

This means marketers need to consider halo effects across advertising channels — rather than siloed, channel-specific ROI — and balance their media planning and budgeting accordingly, Accenture argues.

Paul Garrity, CEO and Founder of ISM, says the data reinforces this thinking.

“Interestingly, having now run close to 1,000 campaigns and having two years of marketing performance data to analyse we think the pendulum has swung too far to ‘digital only’ campaigns,” Garrity told Which-50.

“Marketing budgets should always consider multi-channel activation and how to leverage the reach and access of traditional media to ensures better return on investment for CMO’s across all their marketing channels.”

Potentially every TVC campaign could be in sync with a digital campaign to capture the attention of consumers looking to their smartphones during the ad breaks.

“When running a TV campaign at least 20 per cent of the digital budget should be allocated to strategies that optimise the addressable audience with cross screen activation and make it easy for new customers to find and reach your product as their interest is engaged,” Garrity said.

How It Works

In order to “listen” to what is being broadcast on free to air TV, ISM has data centres with a digital antenna that picks up the FTA broadcast signal exactly as consumers receive it in each metro broadcast area.

“This is processed on the ground by specialist hardware that splits up the video, audio and metadata in the transmission to make it suitable to be processed by our recognition engines,” Garrity said.“A number of AI engines that are

tuned for rapid video and audio analysis techniques work together to convert the pictures, sound and data into triggers that are sent into the cloud where our campaign management system utilises them by integrating in real time with leading digital advertising platforms to optimise campaign investment.”

ISM is integrated with all major Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) enabling television-synced ads across display, video, social and mobile.

The goal is to increase advertising effectiveness by targeting digital ad buys more targeted to the minute.

But ISM clients can also exploit competitor TV buys by triggering their own digital ads against rival TVCs.

For example, Kogan could choose to advertise during every Harvey Norman commercial to capture consumers Googling 4K TVs.

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A New Way To Buy TV

For broadcasters the technology strengthens their pitch to advertisers both as a way to influence consumer behaviour, backed up by the analytics piece.

“Historically, commercial networks and traditional broadcasters have been data and insight poor,” said James Scott, group executive director of technology and innovation for Seven Group Holdings.

Discussing the ISM investment with Which-50, Scott said the technolgoy would change the way advertisers, brands and agencies buy television by using data to measure the impact of their advertising dollars.

“The key here is brands and advertisers want and need access to data,” Scott said.“Attribution is key to knowing should ‘I spend an extra dollar on TV or should I spend that dollar on search and social?’”

Growth Potential

SGH outlined the growth oppurtunities for ISM in its annual report, stating it has the potential to scale quickly across geographies and unlock new revenue streams by monetising the data from its large attribution data set.

Building on its existing operations in Australia and New Zealand, ISM has begun its Asian expansion with hardware deployed in Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia.

As well as international expansion, ISM is hoping to grow by capturing a greater slice of the cross-screen advertising market.

“According to analysts like Accenture at least 20 per cent of all digital activity is initiated after influence from television. That means that the revenue directly attributable to cross-screen activity is an addressable market of over $300 million per annum in Australia and a multi-billion-dollar global market,” Garrity said.

“We believe we can optimise that spend for advertisers and publishers by at least 30 per cent, improving the performance of digital and reducing the large amount of wastage seen across the industry.”

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Bridging The AdTech And MarTech Divide

Andrew Birmingham October 24, 2017

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After 20 years of parallel development, the worlds of marketing technology and advertising technology remained largely disconnected.

However, data is now forming an essential piece of customer experience infrastructure.

That, in turn, requires marketers to understand both marketing technology and advertising technology, and most importantly how they plug together.

To that end, Which-50 and Adobe are today releasing “Bridging the AdTech and MarTech Divide” a glossary which describes in simple terms many of the key technologies in both disciplines. The glossary won’t answer all your questions, but it will get you started!

The next wave of digital transformation is all about experience.

Becoming an Experience Business means leveraging a single view of customers and

providing a truly integrated journey across all owned, earned and paid channels.

The wealth of advertising and marketing data available enables brands to acquire new customers and retain their loyalty through personalised and relevant engagements.

Smart CMOs today know they need to understand the complete marketing stack. You only have to look at the long list of companies who have brought their programmatic buying or attribution modelling in-house to see how this manifests.

But there is a problem. While many marketers are very familiar with the technology that makes up a typical marketing campaign stack, they find themselves at sea when it comes to the language of advertising technology.

Likewise, many agency professionals have deep practice knowledge in AdTech but only a passing understanding of marketing technology.

The big opportunity is to understand both and more importantly how they can work together.

The market is moving quickly and marketing cloud providers are increasingly adding advertising technology into their offering. Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul last year was just the most spectacular demonstration.

Smart marketers will want to get ahead of the curve and improve their product knowledge in both camps quickly.

Win a trip to Adobe Summit in Las Vegas

To coincide with the launch of the glossary Which-50 and Adobe are also providing one lucky marketer with the opportunity to supercharge their technical expertise.

From now until November 30 we are running our #SendMeToSummit competition.

Simply tweet your own 120 character definition of one of the terms in the glossary or share your definition on LinkedIn or Facebook with the #SendMeToSummit hashtag and earn the chance to win a trip to the 2018 Adobe Summit in Las Vegas from March 25 to March 29 next year as a guest blogger for Which-50.

You can enter as many times as you like using as many of the definitions as you like.

The winner will travel to the Adobe Summit with the Which-50 Editor-in-Chief as a Which-50 guest blogger on the Adobe Media tour, attend keynotes, press conferences, executive briefings along with all the other official and unofficial media activities.

This is a great opportunity to meet some of the best minds in the digital marketing ecosystem and to learn about the latest technology driving marketing and advertising.

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