HEY MARC . . . SO HOW ARE WE DOING?:  It’s fitting that P&G’s Marc Pritchard has come back to Florida, the scene of his now-famous challenge to the digital media industry at January’s IBA conference, to deliver an update on where things stand today.  This time he spoke before 2,500+ marketers at the ANA Masters Conference in Orlando.  His on stage remarks, and follow up interview, are covered in the attached AdExchanger link.  The overall tone was more positive in a “progress is being made” sort of way.  Mr. Pritchard describes the effort as 2/3 of the way complete, with hopes of being finished by EOY.  Interestingly, the publishers are further along in the TAG certification process which is now a mandate for any digital publisher hoping to do biz with P&G.  The bigger delay actually sits with the MRC’s (Media Ratings Council) ability to establish vendor-level accreditation standards.  So maybe we can call this a B+ with hopes of getting to an A sooner than later?

COULD SERVER-SIDE BECOME A HAPPY MEDIUM FOR DIGITAL MEASUREMENT?:  Proving a digital impression was served to and viewed by a human is complicated.  In the early years of digital media publishers self-reported impressions they served and happily sent over their invoices.  This created the current swamp of ad fraud which reportedly wastes 25-50% of the digital media dollars being spent by brands.  To counter this problem an entire industry of tracking pixel vendors came to be.  So now we have tracking tags for viewability, ad completion, audience verification, and every other digital metric you can think of.  But it’s nearly impossible for publishers to add all of these tags from different vendors.  Doesn’t it feel like there should be a better way?  And what if that way was something called Server-Side Measurement.  As described in the attached Jounce Media link, publishers have the ability to send over anonymized log files from their servers, which could be validated through a 3^rd party clearing house by utilizing blockchain technology, which was originally created to track cryptocurrency transactions like Bitcoin.  Could this get the entire industry out of pixel-based tracking jail?  Since the current state of measurement is kind of a hot mess right now, I’d predict server-side measurement to become more popular within the next few years.

THE UNREACHABLES:  Finally this week Wharton University and the agency Hearts & Science, with the assistance of several digital publishers, has created the attached E-Book around the concept of the “Untouchables”.  This group is aptly named because they can’t be tracked, and therefore can’t be targeted, on typical media channels  So they’re effectively a blind spot for marketers.  And the problem with this blind spot is that it’s getting bigger as more and more Millennials and Gen Zers become untouchable.  This trend is driven by cord cutters/cord nevers whose only digital footprint is on a mobile device(s) with zero trackable web usage. This is sort of a meandering read, with several choose-your-own-adventure side roads you can go down.  Maybe spend some time with it over the weekend to get up to speed on this new group which is becoming a vexing problem for our industry.

Have a great Friday (and weekend) guys!