• by Nina Lentini , Staff Writer @Nina_Lentini, October 4, 2019

Left to right: Lisa Singer, Event Editorial Manager, MediaPost; Mike Brooks, Senior Vice President of Revenue, WeatherBug; Jeff Lustig, Manager, Programmatic Operations, News Corp, and Christopher Moore, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Publishers Clearing House.

Mike Brooks, Senior Vice President of Revenue, WeatherBug, said that "privacy is an incredibly defensive state for us to be in. We have to lock our shit down for privacy purposes. The weather category is always under fire from a privacy perspective. We have a ton of location data on our users, and where is that going? What are the controls? We are defensive on the behalf of our users. We're not worried about a cookie-less world yet." 

"We are preparing for it," said Jeff Lustig, Manager, Programmatic Operations, News Corp. The crux of that is going to be on contextual targeting. We're focusing our resources and tools internally to move beyond third-party segments. We'll be able to utilize all the content that we have, move it into contextual and figure out how it moves the needle for us."

"There's an opportunity for a first-party data owner with logged-in, registered users," said Christopher Moore, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Publishers Clearing House. "It's a differentiation factor for any brand." 

As for fraud, Lustig offered that News Corp does not experience true fraud very often. "We don't utilize traffic drivers. We're running ad fraud solutions across our sites. The kind of fraud that worries us is site spoofing. As a premium publisher, it's what keeps us up at night. It's about having the guts to push back and be able to explain what it is that we're seeing." 

Over at Publishers Clearing House, Moore said, "often our users look like bots because they're so active, they're playing so many games. We are sensitive to that. People get slightly crazy when they're wanting to win a million-dollar sweepstakes."