SegmentStream

There’s No Single Solution For Privacy-Protected Advertising

The AdExchanger column argues there is no single solution for privacy-protected advertising. As legacy tracking is deprecating, advertisers must combine deterministic and probabilistic identity methods to preserve reach, frequency, and measurement. The piece highlights progress toward interoperable addressability, citing LiveRamp’s RampID and Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) for about 250 million consumers; Oracle’s integration of BlueKai, Moat and AddThis to create an audience trading platform serving over 300 million users; and TransUnion’s expansion through Tru Optik and Neustar, reaching more than 80 million households across CTV and streaming audio. It notes The Trade Desk’s UID2 open-source initiative as a way to bridge ecosystems, including Disney properties. For measurement, MMM is gaining traction as a privacy-friendly approach, while MTA may lag due to signal loss from deprecated pixels. Advertisers can test privacy-protected solutions and build proprietary data with major publishers while interoperability broadens.

Losing Faith In Walled Gardens, Brands Test New Analytics

As privacy rules tighten globally, attribution and analytics for digital advertising are facing greater scrutiny and skepticism. Brands are seeking new solutions to back up media investments as platform-provided attribution reports become less trustworthy. SegmentStream, a London-based conversion modeling startup, raised $2.7 million in its first funding round in February and is positioned as a new entrant in marketing analytics. L’Oréal’s Lancôme brand in Mexico is piloting SegmentStream to better visualize customer journeys and measure time-to-conversion across first-party and CRM data, addressing diminished visibility from changes to Google Analytics. Ribble Cycles, a direct-to-consumer brand, has also started working with SegmentStream to explore softer metrics beyond direct conversions as attribution windows shrink under policy changes by Apple and Google. EU regulators in France, Germany, Italy and Austria have banned Google Analytics, underscoring the shift toward first-party data and alternative analytics tools for multi-channel journeys.

The Big Story: Meta’s HIPAA Violations And The Rise Of MMM

Meta faces a lawsuit over alleged HIPAA violations after hospitals reportedly shared protected health information with Meta via the Meta Pixel, with the data appearing in Facebook ads. The Markup helped uncover the data leakage. The piece uses this incident to discuss HIPAA applicability to entities handling health data and the risk of sharing PHI with advertisers through ad-tech partnerships. It then examines the rise of Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and incrementality measurement as tools to address gaps in today’s siloed digital advertising ecosystem, noting startups such as Improvado, INCRMENTAL, SegmentStream and Amplitude. Marketers cite higher costs and long delays (weeks to months) for MMM data. AdExchanger’s James Hercher predicts increased M&A and strategic acquisitions in the MMM/incrementality space as brands experiment with new measurement approaches.