Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by Engine Media Exchange.
Research forecasts are constantly being revised and replaced based on emerging data – all the more immediate during a pandemic.
“We were spinning those wheels so fast, it’s a wonder we didn’t come off the tracks,” said Geoff Ramsey, co-founder of eMarketer and Chief Evangelist of Insider Intelligence.
eMarketer made the biggest changes to its forecasts in two areas: ecommerce and time spent. Social distancing drove people to spend online instead of stores, and to fill their time online instead of dining out or being with friends.
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Add the term “privacy measurement” to your repertoire.
On Monday, consent management platform Sourcepoint launched a tool to help ad buyers make sure their media suppliers are up to snuff when it comes to privacy compliance, brand safety, brand suitability and data ethics.
Privacy Lens, as it’s called, uses scanning technology to measure how well a website or app is complying with regional privacy laws, which trackers it uses, whether it uses fingerprinting techniques, what data it collects, where that data goes, whether it’s got a user-friendly opt-out workflow in place and if it’s adhering to industry privacy standards and any specific parameters set by a brand or agency.
The tool, which Sourcepoint CEO and founder Ben Barokas said is complementary to more classic viewability and fraud solutions, such as DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Moat, also logs every time a cookie is dropped (whether first- or third-party) and checks to see whether a publisher is properly using the IAB’s Transparency and Consent Framework and/or the IAB’s CCPA compliance framework where applicable.
Three agency holding companies are already using the technology. Omnicom’s media unit OMG participated in the six-month beta program and plans to be in market with Privacy Lens during the first half of this year.
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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 Todd Wooten, founder and president at VRTCAL.
Soon, Apple will remove the device ID from mobile app ad requests. Google’s Android platform will follow suit. For many in the mobile advertising space, the shift toward a privacy-centric model feels like the sky is falling. In reality, it’s a big opportunity.
Even with today’s relatively relaxed policies, many mobile applications send as little as 50% of their ad requests with device IDs to programmatic advertisers, as consumers switch off tracking themselves.
Inevitably, we’ll soon be looking at a much smaller percentage of ad requests with IDs in the future. Liberally, I’d estimate that roughly 30% of mobile app ad requests will come with device IDs.
While our industry has put enormous effort into developing identity solutions for ad targeting within that 30% group, what about the remaining 70% of mobile app ad requests without device IDs? Is that simply remnant inventory? Should we just forget about it?
Absolutely not. That 70% has a lot of value for advertisers, regardless of what happens with new privacy laws and antitrust litigation. But in order to tap the value of that inventory, we have to look in the right places.
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"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
With CTV ad spending in the United States expected to increase from $8.1 billion in 2020 to $11.4 billion this year, scammers are following the money.
In the midst of an OTT boom that has created more opportunities for fraudsters, ad fraud detection companies such as DoubleVerify, Oracle Moat, and White Ops have recently uncovered massive bot schemes called “spoofing” in which scammers use server-side ad insertion to generate fake CTV inventory across a large number of apps, IPs and devices. SSAI technology combines content and ads into a single video stream to enable seamless playback on OTT devices, such as Roku, Apple TV and Fire TV.
Some scams, they claim, have cost advertisers and publishers millions in ad spend. Between January and April 2020, DoubleVerify detected a 161% YoY increase in fraudulent CTV ad impressions.
Though some have said that reports of fraudulent activity in CTV are often skewed to make the problem appear larger than it actually is, companies aren’t taking any chances and are bolstering their security capabilities in OTT/CTV.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Hyperlocal Hyperdrive
TV advertising was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to market and media research firm Kantar, TV advertising experienced a 9% drop to $66.8 billion in 2020. Only spot TV advertising witnessed an uptick in ad dollars last year. Cable TV, network TV, Spanish language programming, syndicated television and total national TV media were all down. Broadcast TV networks slipped 10% to $15.8 billion. But there was one bright spot in TV Land: Local TV seems to have come out ahead. Advertising in local TV was up 8.3%, hitting $16.25 billion, driven by record-high political ad spend. Based on Kantar’s estimations, 2020 political advertising on broadcast TV was $3.5 billion – a record amount. Still, TV stations suffered somewhat from the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics being postponed until this year to the pandemic. Elsewhere, national TV media paced worse than the market overall – down 13.3% to $50.5 billion for the year – while cable TV networks had the biggest drop in 2020, down 17% to $28.7 billion. MediaPost has more.
Facebook’s (Out)back
One week after it began, Facebook’s Australia news blackout is over. Reuters reports that Facebook has “preliminary commercial agreements with three small local publishers.” Who are the lucky three? Schwartz Media, Solstice Media and Private Media, which together own weekly papers, online magazines and specialist pubs. Facebook didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deals, which will become effective within 60 days if a full agreement is signed. Although these non-binding arrangements allay some of the fear that small Australian publishers would be left out of revenue-sharing deals with Facebook and Google, they’re also evidence that when Facebook throws its weight around, it often sees results. On the eve of the Australian government’s plan to pass a law forcing big platforms to pay local media for using their content, both Facebook and Google threatened to yank their services from Australia. Google later reneged and struck deals with a bunch of publishers, including News Corp. But Facebook dug its heels in and blocked all news content from the land down under. A few days later, Facebook got its way. Its hardnosed stance led to the addition of several amendments to the law, including one giving the government power to exempt platforms from mandatory arbitration. Facebook began restoring Australian news sites on its platform on Friday.
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In this episode, Experian Marketing Services President Genevieve argues for greater fragmentation of identifiers as the best path to herd immunity against future advertising disruptions.
Instead of driving marketers to a single solution, she says Experian is focused on addressing what she calls “healthy fragmentation.” In the early days of ad tech, fragmentation was an evil made necessary by the breakneck pace of VC-fueled innovation. No longer.
“We don’t see any one third party alternative solution becoming completely dominant,” according to Juillard. “And frankly that is a healthy thing. We believe that as an industry we have an opportunity now to build an advertising ecosystem, to reimagine it into one that is more resilient, more adaptable, better able to take advantage of new data types as they emerge while also being more privacy friendly and transparent.”
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Apparently ad tech is so hot right now that ad networks can get acquired in the year 2021 for hundreds of millions of dollars.
On Friday, Digital Turbine acquired AdColony for $400 million from its parent, Norwegian internet company Otello Corp. (formerly Opera Software). The transaction is expected to close in March.
Otello and Digital Turbine are both public companies. LUMA served as the financial advisor on the deal, and Hogan Lovells served as legal advisor to Otello.
Digital Turbine helps apps and advertisers build relationships with mobile carriers and phone manufacturers.
For operators and OEMs, it helps simplify app and content discovery on mobile and smart TV devices. For developers, it has technology to facilitate installs by bubbling up certain apps during the device setup process and by serving advertising on properties owned by carriers and OEMs.
Digital Turbine works with more than 40 mobile operators and device manufacturers, including AT&T, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Samsung, Verizon, HTC, Singtel and Sony.
The acquisition makes sense from a strategic point of view, said AdColony’s CRO, Jude O’Connor, in a release.
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“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Mike Peralta, Global CRO, Future plc
After a difficult 2020, the publishing world is bracing for an uncertain 2021. With ambiguity swirling around the future of the cookie and its potential replacement, many publishers, along with advertisers and agencies, are spending this year focused on digital identity.
The absence of the cookie means that content is king again.
Let me explain why: Every publisher is trying to figure out how to maintain or grow revenue while navigating the loss of the cookie. Meanwhile, online purchasing is surging amid the pandemic. Fortunately for publishers, there is a ray of hope: content commerce, or better connecting audiences to sales through content.
Successful content commerce requires three things: an ad tech stack, an ability to drive potential customers to a site, and the most old-school component, the content and context of the site itself.
Just as with baking, if one of these key ingredients is missing, there’s no extra revenue coming in via content commerce. While many publishers are preparing for the post-cookie world by touting their tech stacks and embracing social channels to drive traffic, the content piece is getting less attention than it should.
Not all content is created equally.
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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 Patrick O’Leary, CEO at Boostr.
If last year was any indication, 2021 is going to be the year of the SPAC for digital publishers. SPACs – or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies – are “blank check” investment instruments used to take companies public without passing through the traditional IPO process. This formerly little-used tool is gaining popularity across the investor ecosystem and is a particular draw for digital media and ad tech players who have typically struggled to break into the public markets.
Just last month, content syndication giant Taboola took itself public with a SPAC and a valuation of $2.6 billion. Later this year, Group Nine Media will take the same path, having already taken its own SPAC public on January 15th. Further, Buzzfeed is considering a similar move, and a number of media-focused investors are raising money for SPACs which puts much of the digital media landscape in play.
With all this activity, two questions remain: Why is the SPAC boom happening now? And what does the rise of SPAC IPOs mean for the digital media ecosystem?
The timing is right
The simple answer is that there’s pent-up demand among media investors. The digital publishing and ad tech boom that began over a decade ago hasn’t produced many of the big exits that early investors expected, and the public markets haven’t been particularly welcoming to digital media ventures. SPACs provide an exit for early investors and allow companies with strong brands and businesses to enter the public market without the wilting scrutiny of a traditional IPO. Add to that the role COVID-19 has played in accelerating digital transformation, and many investors see this as a unique time of unparalleled opportunity.
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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 Ben Isaacson, Principal at Lucid Privacy Group.
By now, you should be well aware of Apple’s imminent changes to its App Store terms that will require consent for ‘Tracking’ iOS users across apps and websites, kicking off with the release iOS14.5 in the next month—or so. (Apple hasn’t confirmed a release date, but their reference to ‘Spring’ and prior history of releases within a month of their beta release indicates a March release date.)
While the advertising and marketing industry is well-versed in getting consent for cookies and email marketing, Apple’s approach attempts to go beyond consent exclusively for their device-specific Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) to include any data collected or associated with an iOS device, including registered user email addresses. For the first time in the marketing industry, a technology platform is attempting to apply its own self-regulatory privacy principles to the entire world.
The new challenge for marketers is defining where Apple’s policies end, and their own data rights begin. It should be clear that retargeting an iOS app user with interest-based ads on another iOS app by using a hashed email address or phone number will be restricted without Apple’s ATT consent, but there are many additional scenarios to consider based on Apple’s ‘AppTrackingTransparency Framework (ATT)’ policy language and FAQs, including:
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