Run Ventures

In Video, Publisher Guarantees Spur Private Deal Success

Private marketplaces and preferred deals are increasingly used in video advertising, though adoption has been uneven. Publisher audience guarantees are viewed as a solution to forecast fill rates. Business Insider reports a 100% year-over-year rise in programmatic guaranteed video deals, while Teads shows 76% of its impressions transacted through PMPs and 24% via RTB. Condé Nast supports outstream video formats, often sold through direct deals. Google’s DoubleClick has expanded its programmatic guaranteed activity, with video impressions in this channel quadrupling over the past 10 months. A programmatic guaranteed deal requires a publisher to pledge a fixed volume of impressions at a set price, with buyers committing a budget. Tim Sims of The Trade Desk suggests revenue assurance could push publishers toward more complex deals, though there remains a need for education on PMP versus programmatic guaranteed.

LiveRamp Expands Omnichannel Solution, Caesars Entertainment Takes It For A Spin

Caesars Entertainment is expanding its use of LiveRamp's IdentityLink identity-resolution platform to enable omnichannel, people-based marketing across its technology partners. The rollout unifies online and offline data from channels such as POS, mobile, CRM, call centers, programmatic, email, addressable TV and social, to support cross-partner campaigns. Launch partners integrated with IdentityLink include comScore, Rocket Fuel, Adobe, AppNexus, The Trade Desk, LiveIntent, RUN, Lotame, MediaMath and Datorama. Caesars leverages its large first-party loyalty data and recently merged its database with Atlantis, Paradise Island Partners to enhance targeting. LiveRamp emphasizes that identity-based marketing reduces waste by focusing on real people and that embedding identity resolution into partner platforms helps capture people-based budgets from major platforms. The piece underscores a broader industry shift toward unified, privacy-conscious audience targeting across partners.

Is Verizon Burying Its Header In The Sand? Privacy Concerns About The ‘Zombie Cookie’ Abound

Verizon's UIDH, a unique header attached to mobile traffic, has sparked privacy concerns as critics describe it as a 'zombie cookie' that can persist even after users clear caches or use private browsing. The header is used by Precision Market Insights, Verizon’s data-driven advertising arm, to help identify devices for targeting. Investigations by Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer suggest that some partners, including Turn, have used the UIDH to resurrect deleted cookies, contrary to Verizon's assurances that it would not enable persistent user profiles. Turn has stated its usage is as a device identifier and temporarily suspended the reassociation of cleared Turn cookies with the UIDH pending reevaluation; BrightRoll (now Yahoo) and RUN are named among PMI's marquee partners, with BrightRoll acquired by Yahoo and RUN by Publicis Groupe. Verizon maintains the UIDH is intended for privacy-protected advertising, but industry observers warn that opt-out mechanisms are often ineffective and that regulation could follow.