As expected, new privacy legislation has made life more complicated for advertisers.

Big platforms like Google and Meta are either working with less data or are keeping it to themselves. At the federal level, President Joe Biden has repeatedly called for privacy legislation, but much of it continues to die, literally, on the Hill.

The patchwork quilt of privacy legislation continues to grow as new state-level legislation gets the green light. Since California’s passing of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2018, 11 other states have signed their own comprehensive consumer privacy bills into law, including Texas, Delaware, and Tennessee, per Bloomberg Law.

“[2023] made things more complex from a compliance point of view for businesses in the US,” Gary Kibel, a partner at Davis+Gilbert who focuses on privacy and data security, told Marketing Brew. Now that many of these newer laws have begun to go into effect, “enforcement is going to pick up” this year, he told us.

• Last summer, Sephora became the first company fined under the CCPA after it allegedly failed to disclose that it sold users’ personal information and did not provide an opt-out link in some circumstances.

“It’s a complex and confusing time for businesses dealing with personal information right now, and it’s only going to get more challenging,” Kibel said.

Continue reading here.—RB

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Less than a year out from the 2024 US presidential election, ad spend for the race has already hit $154 million, according to ad intelligence tracking company Vivvix CMAG.

As of early December, more than 127,000 presidential campaign ads had already aired, Vivvix reported. The spend was dominated by five PACs, with four of them representing Republican interests or candidates.

• The Donald Trump-aligned PAC, Make America Great Again, spent the most, dropping $20 million on approximately 10,300 ads on national cable and in early primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.
• In second place was the Ron DeSantis-aligned PAC Never Back Down, which spent $16 million on more than 15,000 airings across national cable and network TV, as well as in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.

According to Vivvix CMAG Director Mitchell West, PACs are leading spend since the election is still relatively far off.

“I think campaigns are still trying to raise money to launch really big advertising campaigns,” West said. “Maybe [they] don’t have as much money on hand as some super PACs fueled by some very rich people.”

History repeats itself? Ad spend in the 2024 election is expected to be particularly massive and is on track to outpace prior presidential election years. Through mid-October this year, $89 million was spent on presidential election ads across more than 97,000 ad airings. According to Vivvix, in the same time period in 2015, ahead of the 2016 presidential election, only $40 million had been spent on ads across roughly 29,000 airings; in 2019, only $39 million had been spent on about 74,000 ads in the same timeframe.

Overall, Vivvix predicts that ad spending on the 2024 general election will surpass $11 billion.

Read more here.—JS

AI was, without a doubt, the buzzword of the advertising and tech world this year.

Another word wasn’t too far behind: the metaverse. Just kidding. We’re talking about clickbait, or so-called made-for-advertising (MFA) websites, which largely exist to soak up advertising dollars.

After an industry report this year found that advertisers spent billions on such websites, ad-tech vendors have spent the last few months trying to clean up their acts. Is it having an impact? Not yet, at least according to Rocky Moss, an ad fraud researcher and a co-founder and CEO of DeepSee, which investigates publisher quality and web traffic with the help of web crawlers that trawl the deep sea (get it?) of the internet.

“I haven’t seen meaningful differences in the results of audits that I usually run,” he told Marketing Brew. “But it’s been a very short time that these policies have been in place. Maybe it’s too soon to say.”

Rewind: MFA inventory has been an issue for a long time. Marketing Brew was writing about this in 2021, and CNBC once made a fake website that plagiarized content and was able to find advertisers, suggesting a lack of quality controls for advertisers and ad-tech partners.

This year, the Association of National Advertisers published a two-part report that found that about 15% of programmatic, open-web advertising dollars went to MFA websites, totaling about $10 billion in ad spend.

• After the first part of the report was released in June, ad-tech vendors like Pubmatic, Magnite, and OpenX said they’d no longer include MFA inventory in the curated publisher lists they sell to select advertisers. (Advertisers buying on the open web will still have to sift through MFA inventory.)
• Both DoubleVerify and Integral AdScience, two of the largest verification and brand safety companies, recently announced separate detection tools they say will help keep advertisers from MFA inventory.
• Demand-side platforms, which often represent advertisers, have been largely silent.

Keep reading here.—RB