Salon

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Long-Tail Retail Walmart Connect and Target Roundel are the two retail media players with the biggest adoption outside of Amazon, according to a recent Digiday survey. But both lag far behind Amazon’s 76% adoption rate. Twenty-four percent of those surveyed used Walmart Connect’s […]

The machines are learning. They’re also generating emails. And publishers that monetize on identity could be in for a rude awakening if they don’t have an “MGE mitigation plan” in place as part of their overall email authentication strategy, said Scott Messer, a media consultant and founder of Messer Media. Yes, MGE. Add it to […]

Publishers are fed up with brand safety and verification vendors using crawlers to scrape their sites for contextual signals, then using those signals to sell contextual ad products.

Buyers already have access to the same information from the same trusted third-parties that publishers use to define Contextual Categories. So why bother?

Google Ad Manager (GAM) was out of commission for about three hours Thursday evening across web, app and video inventory. Any ad placement served through GAM, even ads monetized by a non-Google SSP, went dark, leading to lost revenue for publishers of all sizes at a time when they can least afford to lose out on revenue.

Google’s decision to kick the can on cookie deprecation even further down the road to 2024 did not come as a shock to many in the digital advertising industry. The longer runway will give advertisers and publishers more time to test post-third-party-cookie solutions. But despite the temptation to procrastinate, publishers and tech vendors told AdExchanger they don’t anticipate straying too far from the road maps they’d already established to meet the previous 2023 deadline.

The impending Google customer force-shift from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) represents a major change to how advertising ROI will be measured via Google’s services going forward. But publishers that spoke to AdExchanger about their migration plans aren’t feeling the same pressure as with, say, preparation for third-party cookie deprecation, Google’s other major upheaval scheduled for next year.

Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.

A publisher’s job nowadays is “to be a systems integrator and experimenter,” said Ryan Nathanson, COO of Salon Media Group, a news and culture publisher known for liberal commentary. That’s been Nathanson’s approach since taking the reins of Salon’s operations a year ago. The company has explored new payment and supply chain vendors, for example, […]

While some publishers – like BuzzFeed – are going the native-only route, Salon thinks the the best way to serve advertisers is by combining custom native programs with scaled options like programmatic. The highbrow news organization creates bespoke native content for clients like Mercedes Maybach, Glenlivet scotch, Panera and HBO. Eighty-five percent of the advertisers […]