Smart thinking about Retail Media Network consolidation from Andrew Lipsman's Media, Ads + Commerce newsletter. He proposes the concept of an Ecosystem RMN that bundles the inventory from long-tail RMNs and sells it programmatically. The benefits of first-party data and native categorical relevance are preserved while providing inventory scale.

Your phone isn't secretly listening to you for ad targeting Anyone looking for reasons to be critical of the data collection and utilization undertaken in digital advertising is spoiled for choice. But the idea that advertising platforms -- and especially boutique advertising agencies -- can harvest audio data from smartphones to use for ads targeting is almost certainly a delirious myth.

This is such an absurd recurring delusion: - the “Facebook partner” cited here is a small marketing subsidiary of Cox Media Group. It claims to have built a product — “Active Listening” — that can be used to target ads on various channels to specific people based on keywords detected via their smartphone microphones; - This product originally surfaced late last year. This isn’t new, although the agency scrubbed all references to it from its website after the revelation last year; - Small, obscure marketing agencies often promise preposterous targeting solutions that are little more than smoke and mirrors. I’ve seen tools be promoted that claim to target based on a person’s walking gait. These types of alternative data products are nearly universally utterly improbable and when a company suggests their existence (usually without providing much detail on how they function, as in this case), they merely disqualify themselves from being taken seriously; - Both iOS and Android indicate when the device’s microphone is active. If the microphone was always active, the phone battery would be depleted quickly; - Lastly, I simply believe that any targeting based on arbitrary uttered keywords would be ineffective. If an agency offered that type of targeting to me, I wouldn’t want to use it.