Scott McDonald
Scott C. McDonald is president of Nomos Research. Scott has more than 30 years of leadership in the media and advertising industries and teaches popular courses on media economics and measurement at Columbia University.
Is Blockchain a Solution to Digital Ad Fraud?
Media
Fraud has been a problem with digital advertising for a long time. When the incentive structure for direct-response ads focused on click-through, it was not long before we started hearing [...]
What I Learned at I-COM About Cookies, First-Party Data & the Fight Against Fraud
Media
For those of us in the media/data/research ecosystem, one of the best ways to geek out is to attend the annual I-COM conference, a global forum on marketing data measurement. [...]
Ad Targeting Alone Is Not Enough: Advertisers Need Appropriate Context
Media
The recent brouhaha surrounding Google’s inability to provide 100% assurance that brand advertisers won’t find their ads adjacent to objectionable content is just a dramatic manifestation of a long-simmering problem. [...]
Who Deserves to Be Called a Publisher?
Media
What does it mean to be called a publisher? In an earlier era, the term called to mind the entrepreneurial titans of print journalism. William Randolph Hearst. Henry Luce. Joseph [...]
Publishers Need a Better Way to Measure Ad Viewability
Media
When you take Statistics 101, one of the first things you learn is that some variables are “categorical,” some are “ordinal,” and some are “interval.” Categorical variables are the ones [...]
Did U.S. Election Polls Fail? Should Publishers Care?
Media
Many media stories imply that the polling profession suffered a catastrophic failure in the recent presidential election because the national polling consensus was that Clinton would win by a comfortable [...]
Facebook’s Algorithm Tweaks Show Limits of Data Science
Media
As noted in my recent post on Publishing Executive, Facebook has been evolving its algorithm for deciding which content gets inserted into a user’s news feed. In the latest tweak, [...]
Publishers’ Stake in Facebook’s Evolving Algorithm
Media
A couple of weeks ago, Facebook announced the latest in a series of tweaks to the algorithm that determines what shows up in the news feed of its 1.1 billion [...]
How Can Publishers Use Data to Manage and Profit from Ad Block Users?
Media
Most publishers have always had a part of their business devoted to database marketing. In past years, this focused on subscription marketing, customer relationship management, and handling circulation targeting for [...]
Why E.U. Privacy Regulations Spell Trouble for U.S. Publishers
Media
American publishers have benefited from the largely self-regulated regime that has governed the U.S. digital advertising market. Though it has upended traditional business models and forced publishers to develop new [...]