Mobile ad platform LifeStreet released a new version of its DSP on Tuesday that shows developers what’s happening behind the scenes when they make a programmatic buy.
“Supply transparency is table stakes,” said CEO Levi Matkins. “The question isn’t just what are you bidding on; it’s why are you bidding on it?”
LifeStreet’s rearchitected DSP, called Nero, allows developers to quickly test variables that might impact a programmatic buy (e.g., cost, budget, KPI or bid type) and predict the likely outcome of different bidding strategies on campaign performance.
These tests run on a small portion of traffic, and the bid strategies with the best return on ad spend are applied to the overall campaign.
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Probabilistic attribution is just a “stopgap,” says Simon “Bobby” Dussart, newly appointed CEO of AppLovin-owned mobile measurement and attribution company Adjust.
Depending on who you ask, “probabilistic” could simply be a synonym for “fingerprinting,” but there is a distinction between them, Dussart says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Fingerprinting is explicitly verboten under Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency policy, but probabilistic attribution is a grayer area, because the goal isn’t to kludge together a persistent ID but rather to track people across sites by looking at a handful of parameters (clicks, time of install and basic device info) in order to estimate where an install came from. The data is obsolete after a few hours.
Even so, Apple could easily crack down on the practice.
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“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Marc Rossen, SVP investment and activation analytics at Omnicom Media Group.
Clean rooms are emerging to provide the advertising industry a life raft in the era of cookie deprecation.
On the one hand, clean rooms are significantly better than relying on cookie-based ad server data. They enable more stable connections to consumers and their media engagement behavior for each supply side partner. However, the unintended consequence is fragmentation. While it’s possible to dig deep into a single source, it’s much more challenging to look across the media ecosystem to deliver insights, optimization and incrementality.
Taking the “room” metaphor literally, the current system is akin to a collection of stand-alone rooms existing outside the form and function of a house. That’s why the next level must look beyond clean rooms. It’s time to build a clean house using a method called distributed analytics.
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Game On
TikTok is testing in-app games in Vietnam and plans to push further into gaming, starting with Southeast Asia, sources tell Reuters. People can already share gameplay content on TikTok – like a video of them from Twitch, for example – but there are no actual TikTok-based games. In-app games would help TikTok make inroads with game developers, which tend to be some of mobile marketing’s biggest spenders, and also help boost the amount of time people spend in the app even higher than it is.
Plus, the Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, has had in-app gaming for years, and so it would be a relatively easy lift – in terms of the tech, that is.
TikTok gaming would likely precipitate app store policy drama. (Just ask Epic Games.)
Google and Apple, in particular, have held the line on in-app games that essentially recreate standalone apps within another app. (As in, Apple wants people to download Zynga games, not play Zynga in TikTok.)
It’s not impossible that TikTok could make gaming work while giving Apple and Google a 30% cut, but that only leaves 70% to split between mobile developers and TikTok itself. And building a strong ad-based monetization ain’t easy.
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The IAB’s Podcast Upfronts in May touted advancements in dynamic ad insertion, measurement and attribution and brand safety and suitability, as well as the rise of podcast networks.
The three-day event felt like a victory lap celebrating the continued growth of the podcast ad market.
But ad agencies say the technology powering podcast-based marketing is not sufficiently developed to deliver what advertisers need to effectively target impressions and measure campaign effectiveness. And they believe the industry should do more to address brand safety concerns around podcast content, which is typically looser and more informal than content found in more traditional media channels like TV and radio.
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Netflix plans to introduce ads … and ad tech vet (and mayor of ad tech Twitter) Ari Paparo is rolling out an SVOD service of sorts. Weird world.
On Monday, Paparo, who sold his last company, Beeswax, to Comcast in early 2020, launched Marketecture.tv, a startup to help prospective technology buyers understand and evaluate the technology they buy before they buy it.
Marketecture.tv is a media company with a twist.
Rather than covering industry news, Paparo enlisted a handful of ad tech and mar tech experts to conduct roughly 45-minute video interviews with CEOs and product leaders that dig into the details of each vendor’s offering and ask what Paparo referred to as “the uncomfortable questions.”
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By Mark Mitchell, VP, Business Development, Xandr
As audiences across all demographics continue to shift from linear viewing toward long- and short-form digital video, the continued growth of streaming was front and center during this year’s upfront presentations. And major subscription-based platforms announced their plans to add an AVOD version to their offering.
But it can’t be ignored that the majority of TV spend will remain in linear for the 2022-2023 broadcast year.
For advertisers, this stark contrast between viewing behavior and ad-buying behavior emphasizes the importance of using both digital and TV in order to reach consumers where they engage with media.
Follow the viewers
Consumers are moving more quickly to connected TV than marketers – eMarketer forecasts that 82.4% of the population will have a connected TV device in their home by the end of the year.
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“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Michele Madaris, media director at Boathouse.
TV is not dead, nor is it dying. It is in an evolutionary state. Gone are the days of the family gathering in the living room, huddled around the one TV in the household, to watch NBC’s primetime lineup. What we have now is a fragmented viewing experience across multiple devices (TV, desktop, mobile, tablet) and services (linear TV, OTT, CTV). And they’re all fighting for viewers’ attention.
The pandemic was a watershed moment. Stay-at-home orders changed media consumption behaviors across all channels. Nielsen reported that video viewership increased by 60% thanks to CTV. And 44% of households have cut the cord or have never had traditional cable or satellite services.
Choice in programming has grown, too. There are more than 817,000 unique program titles across US linear TV and streaming services, up from 646,000 in December 2019.
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Retail Media Mania
Feels like everyone and their Marriott – I mean, their mother – is or has a media network now. At its Digital Media Summit last week, LUMA Partners projected that retail media alone will be a $60 billion market by 2024, poised to rival TV ad spend.
Why the boom? It’s all about attribution.
Retail media networks are like mini walled gardens compared with the open web, where last-click attribution still reigns (even though everyone hates it), according to Mike Shields in a recent Substack.
Although consumers spend as much as 60% of their online time on the open web, purchases usually happen elsewhere. That’s why Google gets credit for ad clicks even when those clicks were driven by a CTV ad, for example. Great for Google … not so great for everyone else.
The challenge for everyone else is how to track users throughout the purchase journey. “You need a huge footprint and a huge amount of data,” Shields writes.
Barring that, the open web can only hope that retail media networks, brands and publishers share their wealth and work together. “The more reasons you can give them to share,” Criteo CEO Megan Clarken said at LUMA’s event, “the more access you have to first-party data.”
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Third-party cookies will soon be off the menu.
But even if 3P cookies weren’t on Chrome’s chopping block, brands would need a strategy to navigate signal loss online, said Chip Overstreet, CEO of Spiceology, a DTC company that sells spices, rubs, flavoring and condiments primarily online.
“Even in a world where third-party cookies exist, there’s still a huge swath of consumers who have already blocked them,” Overstreet said. “The problem is here today – it’s not a future challenge; it just gets more challenging in the future.”
Spiceology is used to rolling with the macro punches.
When the pandemic hit and restaurants shut down, for example, Spiceology pivoted from selling primarily to professional chefs to focusing on home cooks.
Addressing addressability (or the lack thereof) requires a similarly flexible approach.
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