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GDPR mayhem: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe - Digiday

“They [Google] thought they could bully everyone into using their own [GDPR] system, and the industry has turned around and kneed them in the balls."

digiday.com

• GDPR has teeth and costs: penalties and implementation + 💰 lawyers
• Ad industry will survive
• What is YOUR country doing to protect YOUR personal information?
• What about micro-targeting?

Since the early hours of May 25, ad exchanges have seen European ad demand volumes plummet between 25 and 40 percent in some cases, according to sources.

The frustration for many has been directed at Google. The day before the deadline, buyers were warned also to not buy any inventory via Google on third-party exchanges, especially those using tracking and ad-verification pixels, as Google couldn’t verify whether those partners were compliant or not, according to sources. Some agency groups were alerted to this late on May 24, while others felt Google’s guidance had been nonexistent, according to agency sources.

“It was arrogance,” said an ad tech vendor who agreed to speak anonymously. “They [Google] thought they could bully everyone into using their own [GDPR] system, and the industry has turned around and kneed them in the balls. They have had to do an embarrassing about turn to now integrate with the [IAB] framework.

It’s not been an easy day for anyone. Google and Facebook have both been hit with a raft of lawsuits accusing the companies of coercing users into sharing personal data, as reported by The Verge. The lawsuits, which propose Facebook to be fined €3.9 billion ($4.5 billion) and Google €3.7 billion ($4.3 billion), were filed by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems.

Google and 16 other companies have formed a coalition that wants to police ads on the web

"The Coalition for Better Ads" was announced on Thursday at digital advertising trade show Dmexco in Cologne, Germany. 

The Coalition will focus on several initiatives in the coming months:

• Create consumer-based, data-driven standards that companies in the online advertising industry can use to improve the consumer ad experience
• In conjunction with the IAB Tech Lab, develop and deploy technology to implement these standards
• Encourage awareness of the standards among consumers and businesses in order to ensure wide uptake and elicit feedback

Facebook Will Force Advertising on Ad-Blocking Users

Facebook is going to start forcing ads to appear for all users of its desktop website, even if they use ad-blocking software.

www.wsj.com|Jack Marshall

“Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they’re not a tack on,” said Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of engineering for advertising and pages.

“This isn’t motivated by inventory; it’s not an opportunity for Facebook from that perspective,” Mr. Bosworth said. “We’re doing it more for the principle of the thing. We want to help lead the discussion on this.”

The digital ad world has been is a state of disarray since Google shared the results of a study18 months ago that a whopping 56.1% of display ad impressions are not even seen. And the criteria for whether an ad is officially considered “viewable” by the IAB is a pretty low bar: at least 50% of the ad pixels on screen for at least a second.

Brands that historically have been paying for “ads served” rather than “ads viewed” are naturally pushing to change the industry. Why would they pay for an ad impression that is technically never even on screen?

And even if an ad is technically viewable, of course, that doesn’t mean anyone actually paid attention to it. “Viewability” is just a measure of whether the ad had a chance to be seen, not whether it actually broke through the clutter. There’s also a big problem of fraudulent ad inventory. And the fact that 99.8% of viewable ads are never clicked.

Marketers have never had better access to data reach consumers in more targeted ways that never before. But the digital advertising ecosystem is still in its adolescence.