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Moving A $20 Billion Market: How Local TV Is Fighting To Evolve Brand Velocity Partners Combines PE Investments With … An Ad Agency Ofer Druker On Tremor Video’s Plan To Buy Scale And Share In Ad Tech EMarketer: TV And Bloomberg Will Fuel Political Ad Spend This Year Criteo Expects 10% Revenue Drop In 2020, As CEO Clarken Lays Out Survival Plan Has The IAB Lost Its Way? With Google’s Latest Policy Change, Publishers Feel Control Slipping Away How LiveRamp Plans To Win After ‘Seismic Impact’ Of Chrome And Regulatory Changes Facebook Is Killing Off Its Web Supply In Audience Network – And Don’t Be Surprised If It All Shuts Down

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Moving A $20 Billion Market: How Local TV Is Fighting To Evolve

by Alison Weissbrot // Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2020 at 12:30 am.

As the local TV market grapples with falling ratings and viewership, it’s getting harder to meet the reach demands of advertisers.

“We still hold our stations accountable to their guaranteed ratings,” said Joe Cerone, EVP of local investment at Zenith. “It may take extra spots to make it happen.”

Local media sellers are trying to automate supply and extend their reach into OTT while maintaining margins, a tough balancing act that keeps them from fully committing to new buying methods. And advertisers are struggling to move away from legacy metrics as the industry pushes toward adopting CPM as a common currency.

“It’s a very antiquated business approach, and it’s going to take a little while for us to fall out of that,” said Kathy Doyle, EVP of local investment at Magna Global. “The task of turning this all around is so huge.”

But while local TV evolves at a snail’s pace, its audience continues to slip away. Here’s how the local TV market is readying itself for the future.

Embracing automation

As buyers must purchase more spots to maintain reach, negotiating ratings and executing buys has become more complex. Some buyers may have to negotiate every line item in a media plan across up to 210 markets for a multimarket campaign.

The CDP Service Layer

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2020 at 12:07 am.

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With the rapid proliferation of customer data platforms (CDP Institute counts more than 100 vendors) comes a need for support. On AdExchanger Talks this week, Actable CEO Matt Greitzer discusses the nascent competitive set of service companies that has emerged to help companies configure and deploy their CDPs.

“If you’re a marketer today, you’ve got data from your website, email, mobile app, events, in-store and other sources,” Greitzer says. “There is this incredible need for some way of utilizing data. That’s the function of a CDP – to stitch data together from different sources.”

As with most software companies, CDPs would prefer not to provide managed services directly, though it happens sometimes (“because they need to create power users and because most of the power users are in their organization,” Greitzer notes.)

Long term, a services ecosystem is likely to emerge, and we’re seeing the beginnings of it now.

Turns out, CDP consulting and execution services bear scant resemblance to traditional agency services. Among the differences: Clients have less tolerance for error when their first-party data is at stake than they do with campaign work.

“Marketers have media budgets set aside for testing,” Greitzer points out. “In the first-party data space, because you’re dealing with existing customers, it kind of has to work.”

A Buyer’s Perspective: How Publishers Can Flourish Post-Third-Party Cookiepocalypse

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2020 at 12:05 am.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community.

Today’s column is written by Jay Friedman, president and partner at Goodway Group.

Change only occurs when there is sufficient dissatisfaction with the status quo. For the last 20 years, the number of events that have dissatisfied publishers has been building, yet the degree to which publishers have changed their business model – from this buyer’s perspective at least – always seemed to be short of what’s needed to thrive.

Some 20 years ago publishers devalued their inventory by selling to ad networks. This only confirmed that direct prices were inflated to begin with. Then came fraud, partially self-inflicted and enabled through traffic acquisition. Then came limited viewability, partially caused by site design. Then came Safari and Firefox users, which drove down those CPMs by 30-40%. Each step here required meaningful change. Instead, most publishers seemed to change just enough at each turn to avoid disaster.

With the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome, this time will be different. Publishers will need to change significantly to avoid seeing their entire inventory priced 30-40% lower.

Comic: Marie Kondo-ing Of Ad Tech

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2020 at 12:04 am.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...

Grocery Chains Pivot To Data And Away From Blunt Shopper Marketing Deals; Will iOS Open Up?

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2020 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Shelf Life

Many CPG brands have become iconic through the twin marketing pillars of TV advertising and in-store shopper marketing. The latter includes shelf positioning, aisle displays and end-caps, among other strategies. But linear television is steadily eroding, and access to prime shelf space is squeezing traditional brand staples, The Wall Street Journal reports. Whereas heavy-hitter brands have traditionally paid for the the best shelf space, grocers such as Walmart and Kroger now take a more data-driven approach, taking in footfall and video-tracking data to create metrics for brands they carry. A product that’s often added to a cart first (it’s the item they’re there to buy) and is then part of larger transactions might get favorable shelf space, instead of defaulting to “category captains” such as Kellogg’s, Kraft Heinz and General Mills. A brand with a fraction of the sales of a category captain could also unseat the incumbent brand if it’s growing faster. “It used to be more of a personal relationship,” one Kroger exec said about retail trade marketing deals. “It’s become cold, hard facts that make decisions.” More.

Apple Opener?

Apple may allow third-party web browsers and mail apps to be set as iPhone defaults instead of Apple’s own Safari and Mail apps, Bloomberg reports. The discussion is in the early stages and may not move forward, according to the story, but if Apple did let users replace the browser and email app, it would mark an important change for the iOS ecosystem. Even if someone uses Chrome and Gmail on an iPhone, when they click a link from an email or text, they’re taken to Safari. If someone taps an email address, it opens a new message in Apple Mail, with no option to default to a different app. The big winner in this scenario would probably be Google. More.

Brand Velocity Partners Combines PE Investments With … An Ad Agency

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 at 3:11 pm.

Brand Velocity Partners (BVP), a private equity firm founded in 2019, is creating a new business model as both a marketing services provider and as an owner of small brands.

BVP’s first deal was in January for Original Footwear, which makes gear for police departments and military groups. Last week, it acquired Magma Products, a grill and cookware manufacturer for boats.

The firm targets niche companies with earnings between $2 million and $30 million per year, and works to expand their customer base with consumer branding expertise, said founding partner Drew Sheinman.

For example, Original Footwear launched its first line of consumer shoes this month. Sheinman, the former president of mall operator Simon Property Group, said BVP brings retail connections with footwear stores or chains like Dick’s Sporting Goods, which already sell camo and swat-style shoes.

“Most PE firms, by the nature of the business, come in and cut costs to create savings and flip the company,” Sheinman said. “Our model is we find the right companies, typically small or middle-market that don’t have the capacity or expertise in consumer branding and we drive value through marketing.”

Part of BVP’s pitch is that its investment also comes with a 50-person marketing agency, the New Jersey-based Source, as an “outsourced CMO” to support consumer expansion, he said. Source CEO Larry Rothstein is another BVP founding partner.

The Big Story: Michael Bloomberg’s Money Bomb

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 at 9:34 am.

Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s wealth couldn’t buy him a great debate Wednesday night.

This week on The Big Story, the team looks at how his money has affected the paid media space. As our own James Hercher points out: “The ROI only shows up when people turn out to vote.” And, despite vaulting into second place thanks to his unstoppable ad spending, Bloomberg, unprotected from the warm embrace of paid media on Wednesday, showed massive vulnerabilities.

Up to this point, though, Bloomberg has certainly disrupted all of the Democratic candidates by dropping pallets of cash into the electoral field. But there’s a little more to that narrative. Bloomberg’s money actually gives the campaign leeway to experiment and to innovate – at least within the context of political campaigns, which tend to be more conservative strategically.

The Bloomberg campaign has also been able to buy staffers and employees who might ordinarily not support him. While the Bernie Sanders campaign is staffed with true believers, Bloomberg’s has a lot of people attracted to the big payout.

Moving away – far away – from politics, the team looks at retailers and tech companies without legacy media selling roots getting into media sales. Roku, for example, has high hopes for its paid media business in 2020, and TV manufacturer Vizio, despite being a late mover, is angling to capture some of that thunder for itself.

How Programmatic Advertising Must Adapt To A 5G Future

by AdExchanger // Posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 at 12:05 am.

"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 Jake Moskowitz, head of Emodo Institute and host of FIVE – The 5G Podcast for Marketers.

With the spectrum of exciting 5G claims and promises, it’s easy to understand why early 5G users expect blazing fast connections. The transition from 4G to 5G is being promoted as a monumental leap in speed and user experience.

That said, if you visit a popular webpage on your phone today, it can take anywhere from four to nine seconds (or longer) for the page to load and its ads to render. Consumers have come to expect that type of latency delay on their current mobile networks. But, here’s the rub: Even with all of the promise of high-speed, low-latency connectivity, 5G won’t do much to improve those load times.

The factors that cause most of the latency in ad serving are located at distant points beyond the cell tower – points referred to as backhaul and the cloud. To work at 5G speeds, the ad industry will need to update beyond the cell tower to meet consumer expectations.