DAA Blog

How can we get ads back into the news business?

During the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) Summit each year, we gather as a community to look at how interest-based advertising and self-regulation carry various marketplace impact.

This year, our program included an important investigation into an area that is vital to our democracy: how do we foster the ad financing of our current and next state of journalism – and specifically, how do we bring brands back to necessary online journalism platforms. In our zeal for brand safety and avoiding fake-news financing, our Summit panel clearly demonstrated that we’ve gone too far the other way – leaving news seriously underfinanced. This is not sustainable.

Coming together to explain this unwanted development – and to illuminate a solution – were three discussants, each...

Once again, Digital Advertising Alliance Summit attendees enjoyed hearing a case study on how advertising data are being deployed for socially beneficial use – this time for an Advertising Council campaign on behalf of Goodwill. 

Using such inputs as geolocation data, Goodwill has been able to shift its campaign central message from “Donate” to “Shop”– effectively expanding and engaging its target audience to new levels. This development represented an entirely new model and data framework for the nonprofit to employ.  With the help of Ad Council and ad tech company Teemo, Goodwill is able to use new data sources to find and identify key shopper audiences, learn more about who these potential customers were, and measure the success of new messaging – built around generating store traffic, rather than donating goods. ...

We had a record turnout for our Summit 19:DC across Hill Day, the Digital Advertising Accountability Workshop and the Summit itself.  It was our seventh annual Summit, as we returned to the city of first such meetup, Washington, DC.

Each Summit, a highlight is having points of view shared with us from policymakers. This year – our policy keynote from Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Ranking Member of the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce – was a highlight of highlights.

Following her address to us, the Congresswoman posted this announcement on her own Website.  I share it with you in its entirety:

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This week, the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) helped launch Privacy for America (P4A), a new coalition with representatives from virtually every sector of advertising, and the entirety of business sectors represented among advertising users. These organizations have pledged to work together to reimagine data privacy and support groundbreaking federal legislation that establishes strong data privacy protections for all Americans.

We have joined leaders from trade organizations representing America’s top brands and advertising agencies, publishers and ad tech companies as a Privacy for America steering committee member, and we have offered our strong support and our 10+ years of experience as the consumer...

This week marked a milestone in the Digital Advertising Alliance novel self-regulatory program for interest-based advertising (IBA). One of our two independent Accountability Partners – the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council (ASRC) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB) – released its 100^th compliance action since it began its enforcement role eight years ago.

Figure 1. ASRC Enforcement Actions related to DAA Principles

Beyond those 100 public actions, our Accountability Partners have...