Washington Eyes Adalytics Reports; Kroger says attention isn’t worth the hype

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The true verifiers

The DOJ and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service are speaking with advertising industry executives about brand safety issues uncovered in recent reports by Adalytics. Marketing brew Reports.

Adalytics uses congressional offices, the armed forces, and other high-level government agencies as examples for advertisers in its reports. (A screenshot of the Navy or FBI running recruiting ads on a sanctioned Iranian website means a whole different level of unpleasant customer calls.)

While Google played the lead role in Adalytics’ investigation, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science are also being name-checked by investigators.

Of course, such inquiries do not necessarily lead to comprehensive investigations. Regardless of the scope of this investigation, it is part of a trend that is putting brand safety and verification services in an uncomfortable spotlight. On the buy side, advertisers rely on “100% fraud-free guarantees”! these are simply not true. Advertisers buy the bot and fraud detection services and still pay to advertise bots and fraudsters.

Publishers, on the other hand deeply disapprove IAS and DV leverage pressure on web publishers and the vendors crawl websites to create their own contextual technology.

Attention deficit

Maybe brands are paying too much attention To Attention.

As Ad age A new study from the Advertising Research Foundation recently reportedly found “almost no connection” between attention metrics and brand success, based on a study of 12 different companies that perform eye tracking, facial coding and other forms of attention measurement.

Likewise, research from retail media network Kroger Precision Marketing on DoubleVerify’s Authentic Attention solution suggests that it doesn’t have a major impact on incremental sales.

Interestingly, Kroger also noted that viewability, which measures an ad’s potential to be seen, did correlate positively with sales. That’s ironic given that Attention and visibility are so often comparedoften in favor of attention.

Of course, corporate attention research tends to say the exact opposite – that attention not only trumps visibility, but also significantly influences business results.

The whole thing is reminiscent of an informal poll during the CIMM summit last week, observed by AdExchanger, in which only a handful of viewers said they thought the attention was ready to be traded against them.

With this back and forth, it’s no wonder that not many media buyers are yet convinced of the monetary potential of attention.

What’s up?

New details are emerging about behind-the-scenes haggling between Google and California lawmakers over legislation to support the local journalism industry. Bloomberg Reports.

Google was reportedly prepared to back out of the deal unless California taxpayers donated tens of millions of dollars to fund newsrooms alongside Google. Google apparently wanted to include the tax support provision as a precedent that would serve as the basis for future legislative attempts to compensate publishers for using local media content in the platform’s search results.

The taxpayer support arrangement also ensured that if Google were responsible for paying newsrooms, it would also get some of the deal in the form of AI funding. And Google probably needed the public funding commitment to ensure that any other lawmakers who wanted to hold the company accountable would pay a heavy political toll for doing so.

Making matters worse, California Governor Gavin Newsom was reportedly hesitant to support either of the two original proposed bills because he believed it introduced a new tax that he had opposed.

Meanwhile, weeks after the deal was originally announced in August, there is still only a framework. And the California legislature still needs to approve the tax contribution.

But wait, there’s more!

A deeper look into how TikTok Shop works with affiliates to drive sales. [Rest of World]

Meanwhile, TikTok’s own research admits that the app has a negative impact on teen users. [TechCrunch]

Adobe launches a new suite of generative AI video tools for social media advertising campaigns. [Ad Age]