October 14th-October 20th // Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

FTC approves Publicis’ $2.2B LiveRamp deal with 'neutrality' conditions - Publicis' agency holdco competitors worried that it would use LiveRamp, the data platform many of them rely on, to see their data or limit their access. Omnicom and WPP have already stopped using LiveRamp or plan to. The FTC’s proposed order requires Publicis to follow these rules for five years post-acquisition:

• Give LiveRamp customers fair and equal access to, and support for, LiveRamp’s standalone products and services

• Build firewalls so Publicis can’t see LiveRamp customers’ data in LiveRamp

• Hire an independent auditor to check compliance every six months for two years, then once a year for three more years

• Let any LiveRamp customer request an audit of how its own data is protected

Publicis says it suggested many of the conditions itself. The deal is expected to close by year’s end.

Opinion: These measures seem reasonable and fair. Nice to see regulators actually understand the ad industry for once and preemptively block unfair business practices. For five years at least. 

Regardless of the measures, Publicis’s competitors will not want their customers using LiveRamp, and they’ll move them off. And that’s probably okay with Publicis. It bought LiveRamp to win more accounts and juice its principal–based media buying practice. And if it wins those accounts from its competitors (as it has been), it will just move them back onto LiveRamp again.

Apple publishes its plan to wipe out web tracking - In a blog post, Apple’s Safari engineers explained why iOS 27 is blocking identity resolution companies that turn email addresses into IDs to track people across the web. Apple argues that email replaced third-party cookies as the main way to track people🔒 after it fully blocked cross-site cookies in Safari six years ago. Apple says the "tracking industry has not sat idle since," creating "post-cookie" tracking methods to build user IDs that recognize the same person across sites. Apple says this kind of tracking is harder to escape than cookies, because most people keep one email for years and use it on every device. Apple now blocks an ID vendor’s entire web domain from collecting user data in Safari. Some vendors have set up new domains that aren’t blocked yet. LiveRamp, ID5, The Trade Desk’s UID2, Permutive, and Audigent were reportedly the first companies blocked. But sources told AdExchanger that Apple has a longer, private list of hundreds of other ad tech and data companies that Apple can block at any time.

Opinion: The revived Apple privacy crusade vs. ad tech saga continues. Here’s what we wrote last week:

Publishers and ad tech cos can complain all they want. It won’t matter. Fair or not, Apple’s privacy crusade takes aim at a common public enemy: advertising. So, it’s fair to assume the crusade will continue. The most durable strategy for marketers and publishers is to figure out how to make ads work without user-level data. And good news: if they can figure out how, valuable Safari impressions will be cheaper!

Not much else to say at this point. Onward.

Salesforce buys Braze for $5.66B - Braze, a customer engagement platform, offers brands AI tools that send customers and prospects personalized messages across apps, websites, email, text, and WhatsApp. Salesforce plans to use Braze to help Marketing Cloud, its own marketing software, personalize messages across channels. Braze will also work with Agentforce, Salesforce’s platform for building AI agents. Salesforce says the deal will enable it to offer a more complete Customer 360, its main suite of business apps. Braze has about 2,770 customers, including Canva, Instacart, and Venmo. Salesforce will pay $47.50 in cash per share, about 58% more than Braze’s closing price on Monday. Braze will keep its name, and co-founder Bill Magnuson will stay on as CEO.

Opinion: Salesforce is buying a company that’s been eating its lunch. Salesforce Marketing Cloud runs on ExactTarget, which Salesforce bought back in 2013. Braze is the newer, mobile-first platform that legit brands use and love. Buying your fastest-growing challenger is a classic big tech move, and cheaper / quicker for Salesforce than trying to rebuild Marketing Cloud with Braze’s capabilities (especially in the current SaaS-pocalypse environment where valuations are depressed).

The bigger angle for Salesforce is embedding Braze into Agentforce. AI agents are only as useful as the data they see and the channels they can act through. Braze brings real-time behavioral data, omnichannel messaging, and an AI decisioning engine. That gives Salesforce agents that can actually do things, like push notifications and real-time offer customization.

Prebid’s proposed auction overhaul would do what the court wouldn’t: separate Google's AdX from GAM - A federal court ordered Google to connect its ad exchange (AdX) to the open source publisher ad monetization framework, Prebid, and rival ad servers as part of its ad tech antitrust case remedies. But the judge didn't explain how, so Prebid has created a new model that it hopes Google will agree to. The framework calls for ad servers to bid into Prebid, instead of Prebid bidding into ad servers. That means AdX competes in the same auction as every other exchange, and publishers can tap AdX demand without using Google’s ad server. The model assumes Google integrates through Prebid Server, the server-side version. Google could push instead to integrate only with Prebid.js, the browser-based version that works on websites only. 

Opinion: The judge made a ruling but didn’t explain how it should be enforced. Prebid is doing the judge’s work. Prebid’s members are mostly the SSPs and publishers who would love to see this happen.

The flip is a bigger deal than it may seem. GAM has always been where the final auction happens, which is why leaving GAM meant leaving money on the table for publishers. If GAM becomes one more bidder in a Prebid auction, Prebid becomes the decisioning layer of the open web and the ad server becomes a commodity.

But … this might take a while to play out. Google will resist. By then, the open web might not matter much anyways.

Netflix Ads Suite updates promise better buying, planning, and results🔒 - The new Netflix Pixel and upgraded Conversion API let advertisers track more than 20 types of conversions, like sign-ups and purchases. Advertisers can use that conversion data to power Netflix’s measurement tools for conversion lift, attribution, and A/B testing. They can also use their own conversion data for targeting and building audiences. Starting next month, advertisers buying Netflix ads through The Trade Desk can also layer in audiences from third-party data partners or their own first-party data, similar to the Amazon and Yahoo deals Netflix announced earlier this year. The updates come during a rough stretch for Netflix, which is grappling with slowing growth, laid off about 1,000 employees this month, and parted ways with chief content officer Bela Bajaria and film chief Dan Lin.

Opinion: Performance is eating TV advertising. Or is TV advertising eating performance?

Regardless, performance buyers want proof that ads drive sales, and until now Netflix couldn’t show them that.

Netflix needs ads to work more than ever. Engagement grew just 2% in the first half, the stock is down sharply, and the company just cut 1,000 jobs. It also lowered its ad revenue forecast because these tools rolled out too slowly. Subscription price hikes can only go so far. Ads are the growth lever Netflix has left. It has to start acting like a performance ad platform.

Thanks for reading!