Pipe Dreams

Verizon’s plan to unite data from a range of telco partners faces some hurdles before it’s off to the races. Even setting aside the “unusual competitive politics” that come into play when Verizon licenses data from Sprint or T-Mobile, those carriers use inconsistent measurement standards (e.g., some measure households, others by ZIP). LiveRamp CMO Jeff Smith tells Mike Shields at Business Insider that telcos have the most persistent audience identification data because they see phone numbers tied to home addresses and a credit card. Web cookies and email addresses are straw in the wind by comparison. More.

We Hear You

Facebook will release new metrics for advertisers about every month. “We’ve heard feedback from businesses that they want more transparency and understanding around their Facebook performance,” according to a blog post. This month, Facebook reveals “landing page views,” which tells advertisers how many users landed on their page after clicking an ad. Advertisers also can now optimize toward users who click and can get more information about follow activity. Related Facebook news: The platform is changing its algorithm to reduce clickbait in the news feed. Read that.

Bid Fair Well

Changes to the programmatic auction are subverting advertisers’ bidding strategies. Digiday describes some shenanigans that effectively turn second-price auctions into first-price auctions. Thus, an aggressively high bid might clear at a higher price than the advertiser had budgeted for. “With this hybrid situation, it is hard to understand what levers we should pull and how high we should bid,” Liane Nadeau, DigitasLBi’s associate director of programmatic, tells Digiday. More.

Sorry Not Sorry

Remember when advertisers bailed on YouTube en masse after finding their brands ran against extremist content? Of course you do. Well, YouTube is officially saying sorry – with makegoods.  The rebates are tiny, frequently less than $3. “The optics of giving these refunds are not great, but my guess is that Google had a technical responsibility to offer them,” said GroupM Chief Digital Officer Rob Norman. More at Financial Times.