Is Ad Transparency Regulation Coming for Facebook, Google, Twitter?

After a busy week down in Washington D.C., Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg seems open to regulations -- while the social media giant continues its own efforts toward a more transparent ad ecosystem. Considering how much media is being consumed through his site and other platforms like Google and Twitter (and the potential for those sites to drive commerce through mobile), the push should be coming sooner rather than later to clean things up.Obviously the Duopoly (plus Twitter) is working on a fix. But in the meantime, transparency will remain a hot topic.Your full rundown of mobile and online video ad industry happenings are below. See anything else we need to know about? Let us know.Zuck Says Ad Transparency Regulation Would Be ‘Very Good If It’s Done Well’ [TechCrunch]“We’re working with Congress on legislation to make advertising more transparent. I think this would be very good if it’s done well,” Zuckerberg said on Facebook’s Q3 2017 earnings call. “And even without legislation, we’re already moving forward on our own to bring advertising on Facebook to an even higher standard of transparency than ads on TV or other media.”For the First Time, More People Will Do Their Holiday Shopping On Mobile Than Desktop [Recode]If you visit a U.S. retailer’s website this holiday season, you’re most likely to do so on a mobile device. More than half of visits to shopping sites — 54 percent — will come from smartphones and tablets, surpassing desktop computers for the first time, according to Adobe Analytics’ annual suite of online holiday retail predictions. Customers are still more likely to actually complete a purchase on desktop after looking on mobile, but that’s changing.How Publishers Are Getting Fooled by Ads.txt Fraud [Digiday]Publishers say that third-party sellers like Thrive+, Ludius Media and SelectMedia asked to be listed on their ads.txt files, even though the publishers did not have direct relationships with these companies. These vendors say they were merely trying to approach new business partners or form direct relationships with publishers whose inventory they were already reselling.Grubhub’s New Ad is Designed Like an Old-School Video Game to Get You to Order More Food [Business Insider]"So much of advertising today is a passive experience, and we really wanted to make ours a sticky and engaging experience," Mallorie Rosenbluth, the head of social media at Grubhub, told Business Insider. "We wanted to take control as the brand, make this a real engagement play, and get a true sense of how much time our consumers spend with the game, interact with it, and also reward them along the way."‘It Can Be Good to Have a Big Stick’: Thanks to Google, Ads.txt is Taking Off [Digiday]Google isn’t alone in pushing for ads.txt, so it can be difficult to separate correlation from causation when trying to determine what prompted so many publishers to create ads.txt files recently. Some ad buyers have said they won’t buy from publishers without ads.txt by the end of year, ad industry lobbyists support ads.txt and ad tech firms like AppNexus and MediaMath have created tools around the initiative.Measuring the Effectiveness of Video Ad Campaigns [eMarketeter]Although the body of research on video ad metrics is still limited, the noisiness in the data is remarkable given how concrete some of these metrics are. Nevertheless, those who have followed the industry understand that many complicating factors are at play. One such factor is that each company measures activity on its own platform, which is only a small sample of the broader universe. Lack of standards also has an effect.Ad-maggedon! Ad Blocking, its Impact and What Comes Next [MarketingLand]Something I’ve seen lately are publications that attempt to trick ad blockers using various techniques. One maddening method I ran into involved about 20 to 30 separate scripts running that would auto-load and insert ads if one happened to get blocked. This was set up on a news site. When I attempted to block the actual ad object, another script and ad would be loaded in its place. I’ve dubbed this the “whack-a-mole” strategy. To me, it appeared to be an indicator of desperation.Publishers: Get More Value From Fewer Ads [MediaPost]Bayer Marketing VP Weighs in On Transparency, Brand Safety and the Power of Platforms [AdExchanger]How to Avoid Wasting Your Entire Digital Budget [AdExchanger]Snap Reportedly Buys Metamarkets for Ad Data Analytics on Snapchat for Under $100M [Mobile Marketing Magazine]Mobile Video Ads Boom on Facebook [MediaPost]Mobile Sponsored Content is Read More Often, Longer [MediaPost]