Thoughts on User Data, Privacy & the Global Data Supply Chain

There are numerous coding practices and server setups that can result in unexpected cached pages -- pages that shouldn't be able to be served to another user. One of the most-abused page caching features is "search index caching" -- aka using a website's search feature to inject your own content/domains/spam into a permanently cached version of that page, so that other users who stumble across that page via Google or other means, they could see content on the search result page input by...

As someone who has been working on enterprise digital stacks for over 12 years and building analytics stacks for over 7 years, I've broken my fair-share of client websites with malformed javascript. It happens to pretty much every analytics professional *on accident* at semi-regular intervals --  but there are very few organizations that have teams trying to take down the data layer on a daily basis *on purpose* - an Advertising & Analytics Red Team. When was the last time you heard about...

Here's a short video explaining the scope of this vulnerability and my initial test: I recently came across a website that I won't name that had a very interesting problem -- certain pages had almost no 3rd party javascript firing, but they had dozens of javascript pixels hardcoded and the pages were setup to fire additional javascript via tag managers. Something was broken, but it was broken in a weird way... A few javascript pixels *were firing* and firing without any errors. After...

This a guest post from Maneesh Sethi, Founder, and CEO of Pavlok (https://www.pavlok.com), an innovative company that creates wearables and technology designed to help people break bad habits and change their behavior for the better. Victory Medium and Pavlok have worked together for a number of years - this original a/b test was conducted nearly 18 months ago in Spring 2017, but we decided to embargo the results due to competitors attempting to model Pavlok's industry-leading strategies...

A couple weeks ago I submitted submitted public feedback on the IAB Tech Lab's proposed ID-Level Data Transparency Standards. IAB's Taxonomy sets forth new metadata standards for online advertising being deployed later this year. In other words, the Taxonomy is poised to define how advertisers identify and define audiences. These new audience standards are a game-changer - a new kind of standardization for online ads that aims to change the way audiences are organized on a global scale....

Written by Maggie Lawson Anyone who is interested in the advertising business at all will soon know Ken Auletta’s name if they don’t already. Auletta has written the Annals of Communication column for The New Yorker since 1992 and he is the author of 11 books, including his newest book, Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (and Everything Else). Frenemies is a very interesting book in which Auletta uncovers the real world of advertising and marketing, who are both under...

We're proudly building some beautiful and insightful Data Studio reports that combine all advertising and website data into clean and filterable pages.  Click here to view a demo Google Data Studio report using dummy Google Analytics and advertising data.  Reach out to us at contact@victorymedium.com if you're looking to jump into the dashboards game and flatten out the data in your organization. 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting Facebook is about to launch video ads on their Instant Articles tech stack. This should come as no surprise -- in April 2015, Facebook filed a patent to combine a unique content network + video advertising. Business Insider had a fascinating take on how this could change the advertising market. It's been the writing on the wall for a year now! ...  No big surprise, Facebook has taken the steps to dominating external ads! http://t.co/8MwZ6hYLTs...