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Sensitive personal information regarding Australian defence personnel and political leaders is being leaked via ad exchanges and the digital advertising supply chain – and potentially accessed by foreign states and non-state actors, raising grave national security concerns.

Pinterest aims to put clear air between itself and rival platforms under pressure globally over mental health and algorithm-induced anxiety and the prospect of teen bans locally. It’s simultaneously making a play for more full-funnel ad dollars as performance media acquisition costs soar, doubling in the last four years and threatening unit economics, especially for ecom pureplays. The platform called out rivals at this week’s annual showcase, with global CEO Bill Ready talking up a “positive business model centred on emotional wellbeing rather than engagement via enragement”, and throwing down the gauntlet to Meta, Twitter and TikTok to use its third party-developed tools to gauge negative impacts on users. Local MD Melinda Petrunoff said it’s been private by default for under-16s for more than a year “before this was a discussion”, and advertisers are buying the positive vibe. Now it’s pushing performance and commerce capability – and the likes of Mecca, Pandora, Adidas and Walgreens are converts.

Responsive rates upwards of 45 per cent against single digit email results, 100:1 ROI on spend, 37 per cent conversion rates on fast cart abandonment – the figures for why retailers say they’re increasingly leaning into SMS as a strategic alternative channel to email are stacking up. Even better: The money invested is not going into Google’s coffers and instead being used to build up the strength of their first-party data sets and insights. During the recent Attentive event in Sydney, marketing and business leaders from Lounge Lovers, Designstuff and Hey Bud spoke to Mi3 about the surprisingly full-funnel ways they’re now tapping SMS – many in increasingly personalised ways, but some even with the odd dose of spray and pray. But given the spam and email abuses of the past, will marketers be able to stop themselves from overusing SMS?

Part One: Terry Kawaja’s New York investment bank Luma Partners is behind the Lumascape spaghetti maps that try to make sense of the sprawling, connected pipes of the adtech industry. Kawaja thinks consolidation has to happen for the industry to shake the cowboys – “the environment is highly fragmented and that allows people to hide,” he says. That’s code for “nefarious” market behaviour which undermines adtech’s credibility. Kawaja argues a clean digital ad system is more important now than ever if open web players are to compete with big tech, especially as he sees retail media quickly eating a third of open web ad dollars. But consolidation and M&A has been lean of late. Kawaja admits adtech is still notoriously opportunistic and has played a starring role in the creation of some of the problems the market is struggling to address with junk digital data, fake people and opaque trading practices that nobody seems able to solve. Regardless, he sees another incoming wave of tech investment and reckons Google’s global advertising trading system being broken up would have huge financial upside for Alphabet shareholders – and the industry at large. Kawaja thinks Google may even be playing to lose.