Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
All About Antitrust
Facebook and Google’s legal woes are expected to get worse as federal and state antitrust authorities prepare to file new lawsuits against the tech giants. The Wall Street Journal reports that authorities are readying as many as four more cases targeting Google or Facebook by the end of January, following the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google last month. Officials are probing whether the tech giants abused their power in the internet economy – Google in search and ads, and Facebook in social. If Facebook were to be sued, it would mark the first government antitrust action against the company in the United States. Apple and Amazon are also under scrutiny. Former FTC chairman William Kovacic sees growing bipartisan concerns among elected leaders. “The supportive chorus of elected officials is giving assurance to DOJ and the FTC that they have the political support they need to blunt [the companies’] efforts … to pressure the agencies to back off or water down their cases,” Kovacic said.
Social CRM
Facebook has acquired Kustomer, a company that enables social commerce functionality for businesses. Kustomer clients such as Glossier and Sweetgreen use its platform to field customer inquiries that come in through Facebook Messenger. The deal, worth an estimated $1 billion, follows Facebook’s launch of online shopping functionality on Facebook and Instagram. It speaks to the growing buzz around not only commerce, but also the need for omnichannel customer service that can integrate CRM touchpoints wherever they happen. See also: Twylio’s $3 billion-plus acquisition of identity resolution platform Signal. Press release.
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"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Alex White, COO at Peer39.
While conversations around connected TV tend to center on the leading streaming services, there are more than 200 CTV providers. A complex, fragmented ecosystem has created a lot of confusion about what’s for sale to advertisers, how they can target their ads, and what kind of data is available.
As CTV gets off the ground, advertisers are already looking for more transparency. But part of the reason that transparency remains an issue is that advertisers are only looking for transparency into one part of the picture. CTV holds the promise of digital ad buying strategies, but it is still viewed as TV, and therefore, the content or context matter, too. CTV advertisers are falling into the same flawed habit that they have for the last 10 years: an over-reliance on the audience data regardless of context. We know where that story goes.
Unnecessarily complex
CTV advertising marries the promise of granular targeting, such as programmatic digital advertising, with the engaging power of TV. While industry analysts believe programmatic advertising in CTV is the future, getting there remains a challenge. And in these relatively early days, advertisers have been left to blaze their own trails.
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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 Myles Younger, Senior Director of MightyHive and Ken Archer, VP Product of Upwave.
In recent years, innovation in digital ad effectiveness measurement has been constrained by an addiction to person-level tracking data, an addiction that fuels the search for 1:1 cookie replacements from fingerprinting to hashed emails. With Apple’s announcement that hashed email sharing by iOS mobile app publishers will violate its privacy policy beginning early next year, it’s time to look beyond 1:1 identity solutions and take a serious look at micro cohorts, an exciting, privacy-safe area of innovation in digital ad measurement whose time has come.
Why was person-level measurement important?
Much of the value of digital advertising historically has been associated with its ability to be more finely measurable than traditional broadcast media such as print or linear TV. Device-level tracking data enabled deterministic, bottoms-up measurement for the first time. Bottoms-up measurement offers marketers more detail than traditional top-down aggregate approaches such as media mix modeling. The focus of innovation, as a result, has been on the data set – associating devices with people through device graphs to deliver increasingly accurate deterministic measurement at the person-level. This focus on the data set has come at the expense of measurement methodology, which is often ignored or left at “default settings” in a platform or media plan.
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Snap Is Back
It’s been a loooong, dark year for publishers, but there has been at least one bright spot: Snapchat. Digiday reports that publishers are netting higher revenue for their Discover content within Snapchat, both year over year as well as quarter over quarter. Some of that boost is coming from an increase in CPMs, up between 10% and 20% YoY for Q4. Publishers are also reaping the benefits of changes Snapchat made this spring, including plugging non-skippable Snap Ads into slots when it wasn’t able to sell pricier Snap Commercials, thereby improving fill rate – an issue that Snapchat Discover publishers have complained about in the past. Despite, or perhaps due to, the pandemic, Snap has been having a pretty decent year itself. The platform had 249 million DAUs in Q3, up 18% over last year, and the average number of daily snaps on the platform rose by 25%. “That [engagement] bell curve hasn’t flattened out yet the way some people thought it would,” Paul Greenberg, CEO of video strategy firm Butter Works, told Digiday.
Check It Out (Or Not)
After three years on ice, Twitter is rebooting its verification system. These proposed new guidelines could see persistent rulebreakers stripped of their coveted blue check mark, according to Business Insider. The move would be another blow to President Donald Trump, who in January will lose his "world leader" protections for rule violations, meaning he might also lose his verified status if he continues to tweet in his … inimitable way. Twitter gives "verified" status to selected accounts belonging to public figures and organizations signified by a blue check mark next to their account name. Twitter hit pause on its verification program in 2017 after granting its blue check mark to one of the organizers of the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparking outrage. Both Twitter and Facebook have been criticized for enabling the dissemination of hate speech on their platforms while simultaneously being accused of censorship by conservatives. Twitter said that its revamped application process for verified status will relaunch early next year.
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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Jed Hartman, Chief Commercial Officer, Channel Factory
The 30-second spot has been the undisputed ruler of advertising units since the birth of broadcast TV. The storytelling, the emotion, the impact and the ROI have all helped this resilient format retain its position as the lynchpin of commercial messaging in TV in a changing world. Agencies and brands still plan their ad investments around it, while media owners owe their atmospheric stock prices to it.
But with the rise of TikTok (and other mobile video platforms), the acceleration of OTT and the proliferation of skip buttons on digital videos, we’ve entered a new age of ad avoidance. Will the king of ad formats be unseated? Yes and no. The winning creative ad plans of the future will still contain 30-second spots (along with other units), but the creative execution of these longer ads will change dramatically.
Mobile creativity
Video ads have been changing for a while, even as the 30-second spot has extended its epic run. Many advertisers are already comfortable with six-second bumper ads, which are commonplace in mobile experiences. The key statistic here is that 70% of YouTube traffic is on mobile, where attention spans are shorter and access to the skip button instantaneous.
Shorter ads and ads with uniquely mobile features – such as swipe-up and vertical orientation – perform better on platforms including TikTok and Snapchat that center on transient, bite-sized content. Consumer lifestyles no longer match well to 30-second ads, and this is especially true on mobile.
But this hasn’t stopped brands from trying. Many ad buyers still shoehorn 30-second ads onto YouTube in a bid to extend reach, without editing creative. Consumers predictably drop out before the brand is first mentioned, perhaps seven or 10 seconds in, and the impression is wasted. (A video ‘view’ as defined by MRC is two seconds in view, meaning advertisers can and frequently do pay for a viewable video with no brand recall.)
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Too bad there isn’t a Black Friday deal on Facebook inventory – because it’s getting pricey.
Following a massive 38% spike in CPMs on Facebook between September and the week before the election, prices dipped back to more normal levels during the first week in November before climbing back up again, according to digital agency Aisle Rocket.
Coming into Thanksgiving week, Facebook CPMs were up by 30%, and Aisle Rocket expects to see the highest CPMs in history on the platform during the last two weeks of November. Prices will likely remain elevated until roughly Dec. 20 before coming back down to earth.
There are three primary reasons for the trend, said Noah Freeman, head of product at Aisle Rocket.
One, Facebook always sets a new record for most expensive CPMs every December. Two, the election triggered higher-than-normal pricing during the start of the holiday season. And, three, the pandemic is causing a massive uptick in online shopping.
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The first half of 2020 was pretty lean. This year is on track to be the slowest since 2015 in terms of deal activity, according to LUMA Partners.
But set the table and get out the gravy boat, because strategic M&A started to pick back up in Q3 and the momentum has continued into the fourth quarter.
Just last week, Norwegian telco Telenor sold Tapad to Experian, location data company Near bought fellow location data company Teemo and HuffPo finally found a new home with BuzzFeed.
Perhaps “the forces of M&A and consolidation have finally turned the page on what was certainly a gloomy string of fire sales [and] bankruptcies … that brought an end to some very storied ad tech companies,” says executive editor Zach Rodgers, pointing to Videology, Rocket Fuel and [x+1], Sizmek, AudienceScience and Collective.
But what about potential privacy issues loitering with intent in the background of some of these deals? Although Experian, for example, no doubt did its due diligence on Tapad, it’s a mighty interesting time to be buying a cross-device tracking (ahem, sorry, ID resolution) company considering that privacy regulations are coming into effect in the United States and around the world.
Also in this episode: What can brands and agencies do to take a more active role and make more responsible, positive choices about companies they work with and the environments that their media dollars support?
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Matt Prohaska, principal and CEO at Prohaska Consulting.
The quote in the headline, echoed by numerous political pundits, typifies the overreaction during and after the United States’ Election Day. Like many watching election results on that Tuesday night, I thought how badly the pollsters got it wrong, again.
Yes, presidential election polling has flaws – just read here, here, here and 25 other places for all the critiques and fun handwringing.
But remember, polling is near-impossible to be perfect, since under 100% of those surveyed tell the truth, or make themselves available to pollsters, or do exactly what they said they were going to do. These discrepancies make an accurate representation of what is likely to happen very difficult, which is partially why there are margin of error footnotes.
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Amazon’s CTV Boom
Amazon may be a little late to the CTV advertising game, but it’s catching up quick thanks to its troves of shopper data and the built-in base of brands already selling on its platform, The Drum reports. Most of Amazon’s CTV ad inventory comes from content on Amazon’s Fire TV device and through its IMDB TV platform (rather than Prime Video), and industry watchers predict that advertiser interest in it is only going to grow. Amazon’s purview into the shopping world means that it knows, and in an identifiable way, what specific shows and products people and households are watching and buying. These factors are “especially compelling” to advertisers that are already selling on Amazon, and these are the buyers have have already leaned into Amazon’s CTV product, says Will Margaritis, senior VP of ecommerce at IPG’s Reprise Digital, who notes that packaged goods, electronics and DTC brands, in particular, are all pretty keen to buy Amazon CTV ads. [Related in AdExchanger: “Amazon Advertising Surges, And Plans Upgrades Around Twitch, Video And Platform Usability.”]
Spending Freefall
So much for a rebound. With the United States currently being rocked by a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, advertising and marketing spending will fall 7.1% this year to $494.23 billion, according to a new forecast released today by market researcher PQ Media. That’s a steeper rate of decline than the 6.8% downward spiral that global advertising and marketing spend is projected to sustain, MediaPost reports. But wait, what’s that? There’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. “While the economic damage wrought by the pandemic,” says PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn, “will squelch a decade-long expansion of the media economy this year,” don’t forget about the emergence of new advertising and marketing opportunities. There’s streaming video, audio, mobile gaming and apps, social media and influencer marketing, digital product placement, content marketing and virtual events – all of which are expected to hasten the industry’s recovery going forward. Even so, PQ Media projects that the global advertising and marketing economy will fall to $1.278 trillion this year, its lowest volume since 2017.
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