20 Apr 2026
We still have time to save the halo effect
I’m still on about the attribution cartel, and got in AdExchanger again: What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect? Last time they let me cover The Hidden Dangers Of Privacy-Preserving Attribution (plot twist: it’s a privacy menace) and this time it’s all about the halo effect.
What’s the halo effect? It turns out that in a world where social science results are hard to replicate, and marketing results even harder, one consistent effect is that ads work better in trusted contexts.
Comscore: The Halo Effect: How Advertising on Premium Publishers Drives Higher Ad Effectiveness
Moat Analytics Reveal that Quality Journalism Eclipses Industry Benchmarks for Attention
Newsworks: High-attention media delivers greater profits for advertisers
The Trade Desk: The value of advertising on premium media
(update 14 May 2026) The Trade Desk and PA Consulting: Premium media environments outperform cheap digital inventory by 4.3 times on consideration; study says purchase intent rises 37%
The last two are especially interesting, since The Trade Desk is a demand side platform, so has no incentive to claim more value for the supply side’s inventory.
Meanwhile, the attribution cartel companies are all about doing things the other way around: getting the most lucrative possible ad onto the cheapest, crappiest possible content. (ICYMI, ad “safety” at Google keeps getting worse, and the Meta ad scams are bad enough that there’s now bipartisan legislation to combat predatory online scams.)
I wrote that from an advertiser point of view, because AdExchanger, but the attribution cartel is a risk to everyone.
It’s not just a problem for advertisers who want accurate reports, as Rick Bruner wrote on LinkedIn.
It’s not just a problem for the publishers who deserve a fair share of the revenue for the advertising results they help drive.
It’s bigger than that. Attribution reports help decide whether advertising budgets get spent on legitimate ad-supported resources that benefit the people being advertised to—or if Big Tech can divert ad money to support slop, misinformation, scams, privacy violations of all kinds, and some of the worst people on the Internet.
If you just read the headlines, it looks like Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” project to centralize control of advertising within the browser is over. But the process continues, now with Apple and Meta involved too.
The time to deal with it is now, before attribution cartel reports become part of an easy or default path to justify spending good advertising money in bad places—or to reward privacy harms, which is a bigger deal.
By the way, I thought I might be the first person to mention Shrimp Jesus on AdExchanger, but it turns out that Shrimp Jesus has already been in AdExchanger. They keep up with this stuff. So check it out: What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect?
Also on the Monopoly Report podcast: Episode 74: The Attribution Cartel: Why “Privacy-Safe” is NOT what it’s made up to be
More: How the attribution cartel misleads advertisers: Q&A with Rick Bruner
QoTD: Brian Jacobs
We’ve also lost perspective. Take the Molly Russell case covered
here last week. It seems that we are less concerned about advertising on
channels that play a role in young suicides every week than we are about
our ads appearing opposite a negative news headline.
— Brian Jacobs
Bonus links
Marketers
Vastly Understate The Sales Effect Of Creative And Significantly
Overestimate The Impact Of Targeting by Pierre Bouvard. To
determine what actually drives advertising effectiveness, we turn to one
of largest and most prominent studies ever conducted on sales
effect…
Why
A 1967 Privacy Law Is Powering A New Wave Of Ad Tech Lawsuits by
Allison Schiff. That reality is shaping how companies think about
risk and about settlements in general.
ODDITY
Tech Ltd. Class Action Lawsuit – ODD – Investor Losses & Lead
Plaintiff Deadline The company’s direct-to-consumer model
depended heavily on paid advertising ecosystems and the auction
mechanics that determined where, how, and at what cost its ads appeared.
That dependence matters because ad auction quality directly affects cost
per click, click-through rates, and ultimately customer acquisition
costs. The complaint repeatedly emphasizes this causal chain: better
auctions produce lower acquisition costs, weaker auctions do the
opposite. Investors allege this operational dependency was not a side
note, but the hidden fault line beneath ODDITY’s premium
valuation.
A
Prominent PR Firm Is Running a Fake News Site That’s Plagiarizing
Original Journalism at Incredible Scale by Maggie Harrison Dupré.
We’re not the only target. Once we started looking into National
Today, we realized that it’s doing the same thing to countless other
publications, ranging from top newspapers to local newsrooms across the
country: stealing their original reporting and using it to publish a
torrent of what appear to clearly be AI-generated articles, complete
with bizarre errors and hallucinations.
(related: A Vibe CMS)
Objection
AI: venture capital tries to block bad press by David Gerard.
These guys are rich, powerful, and sort of stupid. The same bunch of
guys has long been trying to reinvent journalism from first
principles—because, as centres of power, they don’t like adverse news
coverage.
The
Nail Test: Why this $54 billion innovation is terrifying Western auto
executives That question would consume eight years of R&D. A
lab burned during the process. The team lost equipment, prototypes,
months of iteration. What they did not lose was the data. They rebuilt.
They ran the test again. And again.
The
Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence by Jon Haidt and
Zach Rausch. Knowing that thousands of jury trials were on the
horizon, we laid out our argument like a hypothetical civil trial,
asking our imagined jury this question: Are social media platforms
dangerous consumer products whose design has led to a variety of harms
to young people? We call this the Product Safety Question. We present
seven lines of converging evidence showing that these platforms are
causing harm.
Server-Side
Tracking to Shape Future of Pixel Privacy Litigation by Ufonobong
Umanah. Server-side tracking might reduce litigation risk but isn’t
likely to eliminate it entirely, attorneys say.