Monthly brandtech blend – September 2019

IAB launches a new consent framework… and Google is about to join it

IAB Europe and IAB Tech Lab have launched TCF 2.0 (Transparency and Consent Framework), a solution that aims at helping companies perform programmatic advertising in compliance with GDPR. After a first version that had attracted fierce criticism across the industry, this revised TCF increases consumer transparency and choice, while giving publishers more flexibility in the way they manage consent. Google had expressed its commitment to join the framework, but only if it was revamped to be more adapted to the ecosystem. As a result, it finally announced that it will integrate TCF as soon as it goes live in March 2020. 

Read more on Digiday, and on IAB Europe’s blog. 

Facebook is launching its third-party data clearing tool

Announced in May 2018 at its annual F8 developers conference, in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has finally made this new feature available… in three countries: Ireland, South Korea and Spain, accounting for only 1% of its monthly users! The feature – called “off-Facebook” – allows users to see, delete and block the data that other sites and apps might have sent to Facebook about them… hence potentially affecting the company’s business, as third-party data generally helps advertisers target their campaigns more precisely on the platform. Which probably explains why the Menlo Park firm has not yet announced the release date of the feature in the US.

Read more on AdExchanger.

Huawei’s HarmonyOS has arrived

The Chinese giant has announced the launch of its own operating system last month, Harmony OS. Launched to ward off its dependence to Android, it was initially meant for IoT devices when the project was launched in 2012. But the firm has had to make a slight turnaround since the suspension of its Android license by Google, due to the measures taken by the Trump administration, as part of the commercial and technological war between Washington and Beijing. Seems like the telecom giant was never off guard.

Read more on The Verge.

The future of agencies: towards the end of the fee-based model 

It is time for the fee-based agency model to evolve. As clients are gradually looking to cut costs, they have been massively evolving towards a project-based model, which results in inconsistency of revenue for agencies, making it even more difficult to retain talent. The media landscape is becoming more and more fractured, leading to a shift in the CMO’s role towards a more complex and diverse position. A climate in which agencies have to adapt to a new model and a new way of doing business. 

Read more on Digiday.

WPP sells majority stake in Kantar to Bain Capital

Kantar, the world’s second biggest market-research player after Nielsen, is being acquired at 60% by Bain Capital Private Equity, in a deal valuing Kantar at $4 billion. WPP wanted to offload its subsidiary in order to reduce its debt faster, after a period of growth decline. The group’s new CEO Mark Read expressed his goal of divesting non essential activities to focus on growth through data and digital. The holding indeed disposed of more than 16 of its companies, making room for new mergers with creative agencies such as Young & Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson.

Read more on AdExchanger.

British Airways’ and Marriott’s record-breaking GDPR fines: UK’s ICO is tightening the noose

The ICO – UK’s watchdog for data protection – recently sentenced hospitality giant Marriott and airline company British Airways to pay record-breaking fines for massive data breaches that happened last year. Respectively fined £183 million and £99 million, British Airways and Marriott were both accused of weak security measures in the protection of their clients’ data. British Airways – whose fine accounts for 1.5% of its total 2017 revenue – saw the banking data of almost 500 000 of its clients stolen, while Marriott’s subsidiary Starwood had its central reservation database hacked in 2014, a breach that was only discovered in 2018.

Read more on CNBC.