"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 Michael McLaren, global CEO, B2B Group, at Merkle.
As more customer engagements move away from in-person contact to digital channels and virtual environments, the trends that were already driving the need for personalization in B2B marketing have dramatically accelerated.
Industry pundits have long encouraged B2B marketers to emulate their B2C counterparts with messaging and outreach tailored to the needs of individual customers. At a high level, that’s good advice, as B2B marketers have typically lagged in this area. During the pandemic, however, B2B marketers can’t just follow in their B2C colleagues’ footsteps – they must go beyond them.
B2B marketing is unique from B2C, and the pandemic-related shifts underscore those differences and their implications for personalization best practices. If B2B marketers want to get personalization right in today’s environment, there are several special considerations they must acknowledge.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Tried And True
Disney has unloaded its video ad tech unit TrueX to location vendor Gimbal for less than $100 million, The Wall Street Journal reported. TrueX specializes in reward-based interactive units that encourage people to engage with ads in exchange for fewer or no commercials. It became part of Disney through its 2019 $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox, which bought TrueX for nearly $200 million five years earlier. Disney never viewed TrueX as a core asset, and it never bothered trying to integrate it. For Gimbal, a spinoff of Qualcomm, TrueX represents a greater foothold in advanced TV and prized relationships with TV app owners. The move follows Gimbal’s acquisitions of the managed services units of Drawbridge and UberMedia in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Burst That Bubble
Snapchat is pitching advertisers on a media buy called "Platform Burst," which would guarantee that advertisers reach at least 40% of their target audiences 15 times within three or five days. The ad blast could neutralize the platform's fleeting nature, which makes ads easily skippable. While there is no fixed price for the campaigns, executives told Digiday that they were quoted around $127,000 – far exceeding similar takeover ads on TikTok ($88,920) and Twitter ($38,110). Is it worth it? “A guaranteed buy like Platform Burst could interest advertisers because it removes the uncertainty of fluctuating costs in an auction,” said Carly Carson, director of social at digital agency PMG. More.
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Another day, another avian-themed web standard proposal in the Chrome Privacy Sandbox. Meet Dovekey, which was committed to GitHub on Wednesday.
But there’s something a little different about this proposed spec.
It’s the first time that Google has incorporated an ad industry proposal into one of its own, and it’s encouraging to see a kernel of collaboration begin to grow between stakeholders that have been at loggerheads since January.
But don’t get too excited, said Tom Kershaw, CTO of Magnite.
“It’s encouraging, but that is more of a reflection on the extremely slow pace of progress in this process than it is a positive indication that we are turning a corner,” Kershaw said. “The fact that Google commented on a proposal from the ad tech community without rolling its eyes in disdain can certainly be construed as progress.”
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The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) has been mostly out of the headlines since enforcement started in July – but that doesn’t mean businesses can take their eye off the ball.
The California attorney general’s office isn’t.
“We’re watching and we’re aware [and] looking to see how the industry is responding,” said Lisa Kim, a deputy attorney general in the privacy and enforcement protection unit of the consumer law section at the California Department of Justice, speaking at an AdMonsters event in late August.
On July 1, which was its first opportunity to do so, the California AG’s office sent a series of warning notices to businesses for alleged violations of the CCPA.
Although the specific content of the letters is confidential, California’s supervising deputy AG, Stacey Schesser, did share a few titbits about the notices at an International Association of Privacy Professionals event in July.
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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 JoAnne Monfradi Dunn, CEO at Alliant.
Brands are attracted to audience targeting because it helps them home in on customers and prospects that represent likely buyers and the highest return on their advertising investments. The tool of choice for achieving this, in almost every channel, is modeling.
But models, especially machine-driven programmatic models and AI, are by their nature exclusionary. That’s good in the sense that the model is using available first- and third-party data sources to select audiences most likely to respond to the advertising. But without careful scrutiny, such models may inadvertently target consumers using innocent characteristics that exclude demographic groups.
Avoiding unintentional exclusion means that brands must plan for and seek diverse audiences that have been assembled intentionally.
Right now, there is no convenient mechanism for evaluating whether an off-the-shelf audience is inclusive and/or diverse, short of reaching out to providers directly for a transparent breakdown. But that takes time and isn’t always possible. Even with an answer, it’s possible that the mix doesn’t meet a brand’s inclusivity benchmarks.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
After Nov. 3
Google will block political ads after polls close on Election Day to avoid confusion during an expected delay in results, the company told advertisers Friday. Any election-related ads running through Google's ad-serving platforms will be banned, as will ads that target election-related search queries, Axios reported. The ban will likely last for a week minimum. But will an ad ban really matter, when misinformation can easily find other means of spreading on tech platforms?
Regardless, the block adds to what is already shaping up to be a challenging time for political advertising, which will likely face approval delays due to a projected deluge of ad buys. Google has warned advertisers to expect ad creative approvals to take as long as two days, "and we will not be able to expedite requests during that time given the volume."
Mislabeled
Programmatic is making it hard for publishers to identify and evaluate political ads that are mislabeled, misclassified or have their domains obscured, Digiday reports. The Trump campaign, for example, has classified ads as Business & Industrial, Computers & Consumer Electronics and Finance, as well as for different brands, such as Kraft Heinz. Oftentimes, the publisher doesn't learn about the ads until they receive irate emails from readers. Despite any potential uproar, however, it's hard to say no to those dollars. (Political ad spend is expected to top $1.3 billion this election.) “Our editorial leadership isn’t happy about it, but we’ll take political advertising of all sorts,” said one chief revenue officer. “It’s going to polarize most of our audience, [so] we try to minimize it as much as possible.”
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Sarah Hofstetter is a board member at Campbell Soup Company and president at ecommerce analytics company Profitero. She will appear next month at AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO conference, in conversation with Elizabeth Bennett, VP of global ecommerce at Kraft Heinz. Register to hear their session, along with more than 40 others, at Programmatic.io.
CPGs and food marketers are sizing up the ecommerce channel with renewed urgency.
“Ecommerce has been a hot potato for brands for quite some time. People knew it was important, but especially in grocery it was a smaller percentage of overall revenue,” Hofstetter says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Now all that’s changed. In addition to a revenue line item, ecommerce has become a marketing channel for product discovery, SEO and paid media. Add the technology accelerant of COVID, and suddenly the heads of ecommerce at packaged food brands – previously several rungs down the corporate ladder – are frequently being summoned to C-suite meetings to explain ecommerce technology and customer behavior.
The biggest challenge with online grocery isn’t necessarily the technology – it’s dealing with new competitors, according to Hofstetter.
“You’re not just competing for market share and sales with your usual suspects. You really are getting long tail,” she says. “It’s a much more democratized level on which to be discoverable, whether that’s through retail media or paid search or smart optimization ... The SEO of ecom can allow smaller players to be bigger players.”
“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 Matt Spiegel, EVP of marketing solutions and head of the media vertical at TransUnion.
You would be hard pressed to find someone in this industry who doesn’t think marketing has a jargon problem. Our industry has the tendency to describe things – whether that’s processes, platforms or assets – with labels that are neither descriptive nor useful when put into real-world business application and strategy. At best, this becomes fodder we laugh about at industry conferences and networking events (remember those?). At worst, it morphs into narratives that ultimately become removed business outcomes.
I’m currently most annoyed by how we label and assign value to data, such as always calling data I own/originate first-party, and data from other companies third-party.
This labeling creates more questions than answers as the meaning or interpretation can depend on the use case – take a marketer using an audience from a publisher’s cookie pool as an example. To the publisher, this is their first-party data, but a marketer might consider this to be second- or third-party data. As use cases become more sophisticated, that variability makes the dated connotations associated with these terms problematic.
The real issue is these labels are subject to an increasingly false notion equating to an expected standard of quality and performance in which good data (first-party) is pitted against bad data (third-party).
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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 Alessandro De Zanche, an audience and data strategy consultant.
Digital advertising is becoming subtly and silently polarized. Not in the angry, conflicted way currently witnessed in politics, but a bifurcation in the road ahead is clearly taking shape.
On one side is a group with a worldview that identifies the ad slot – rather than the content – as the end product that should be monetized. From an audience perspective, they take a “hunting for identity and addressability” approach that views the user as a means to an end, rather than what should be the dominant focus. Everything – whether it’s stitching IDs together or collecting emails – happens in the background with little or no user engagement.
On the other side are the media owners who realize that audiences have been ignored for too long. They envision a holistic engagement strategy, aimed at regaining the trust of their audiences and all the mutual benefits that come with that, which can maximize their assets and strengthen and differentiate their business models. In contrast to their colleagues, it’s the “building identity in collaboration with the audience” approach.
I believe that the latter can turn media owners’ fortunes around.
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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
