Don Marti

Sat 06 Sep 2014 08:56:51 AM PDT

News from the world of surveillance marketing consolidation

Marketplaces tend to consolidate (PDF). Sellers go where the buyers are, and buyers go where the sellers are. Repeat, and everyone is trading in the same place. No surprise that it's happening in online advertising.

Not only are the natural economics in favor of consolidation, but the big marketplaces have more Big Data than the little ones. Megan Pagliuca from Merkle Inc. explains, in Counterpoint: The Third-Party Ad Server Has A Big Future.

The large media platforms with logged-in identity data are in the best position to enable individual level cross-device measurement as well as get the industry past its dependency on the third-party cookie. They may not be independent and objective, but they are well-positioned to solve the problem. Now let's play this out. It’s a year from now and Google and Facebook are operating their ad servers off of IDs that are derived from logged-in identity, rather than off of third-party cookies.

So where does that leave you? If you're one of the best minds of Jeff Hammerbacher's generation, working away in some corner of the LumascapeTM, what happens when the gold rush ends? The new efficient, centralized multi-screen surveillance marketing system won't have a standing desk for everyone. As ever, it's a cubicle job for whoever ends up inside the big winner, and on to the Next Big Thing for everyone else.

Bonus links

ronan: Ad Tech’s Dilemma: Fragmentation vs. Consolidation

Allison Schiff: How Much Cross-Device Clout Do Facebook And Google Actually Have?

ronan: ‘Ad Tech 3.0’ Dystopia or Utopia?

John Koetsier: The next big ad-tech disruption: Not RTB … and maybe not even Google or Facebook

Jérôme Segura: A look at a double-dipping advertising network

John Naughton: We shouldn't expect Facebook to behave ethically

Mark Bergen: Michael Barrett Is Crafting a Plan to Keep Millennial Media in the Mobile-Ad Party

Nicholas Carr: Cluetrain crashes, casualties widespread

Arvind Narayanan: No silver bullet: De-identification still doesn’t work

Jim Sleeper: New shots heard 'round the world

eaon pritchard: shot with your own gun (or the META-return of the texas sharpshooter fallacy)

The Daily Stat: Beware the CEO Who Is Showered with Awards

michaelochurch: Greed versus sadism

Louise Roug: The 'Fingerprinting' Tracking Tool That's Virtually Impossible to Block

Hacker News: The Web Never Forgets: Persistent Tracking Mechanisms In The Wild (via The Privacy Blog)

Jeff Jarvis: No silver bullets

eason: Disconnect blocks new tracking device that makes your computer draw a unique image

Rebecca Jeschke: Stop Sneaky Online Tracking with EFF's Privacy Badger

Lauren Johnson: Half of Smartphone Owners Don't Want Their Locations Tracked

datacoup: Settling the scores: Why data brokers will destroy the advertising industry

MediaPost | Online Media Daily: Ad Exchanges Unclothed

BOB HOFFMAN: The Consumer Is In Charge. Of What?

AdNews News: Bob Garfield: Journalists, publishers, agencies and broadcasters are all fucked

brokenrhino: Wladimir Palant's notes: Which is better, Adblock or Adblock Plus? (via ReadWrite)

Fatemeh Khatibloo: The Evolution Of Consumer Attitudes On Privacy

Matt Asay: Why I Switched To Adblock Plus (And You Should, Too)

Curtis Silver: Privacy as a premium: Why it’s time to say goodbye to the free internet

Doc Searls: What do sites need from social login buttons?

Mark Weinstein: Europe Declares War on Facebook

Sean Blanchfield: So Long, ClarityRay

Jeff Jarvis: Unoriginal sin

Jamie Elden: Marketers: Don't Let Your Brand End Up on Sleazy Websites

John McDermott: Why Facebook is for ice buckets, Twitter is for Ferguson (via Nieman Lab and ... My heart’s in Accra)

Dave Zatz: Amazon Launches Ad Network

Lockstep Blog: It's not too late for privacy

Denelle Dixon-Thayer: Trust should be the currency

Darren Herman: A Call for Trust, Transparency and User Control in Advertising

Dan Gillmor: The New Editors of the Internet (via Nieman Lab)

ronan: Are We Meeting The Privacy Challenge?

eaon pritchard: red stitching turn-ups and creative publicity

ydklijnsma: Malvertising: Not all Java from java.com is legitimate (via Security Affairs)

Tony Finch's link log: Some "dark patterns" of underhanded e-commerce are now illegal in the UK. (via taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog)

Brenda Barron: Mozilla launches browser ads for Firefox

Cooper Quintin and Jeremy Gillula: Blocking Consumer Choice: Google's Dangerous Ban of Privacy and Security App