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...
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#Hurting
If TikTok were to be banned for two months, as many as half of its users in the United States might never come back. If the ban continued for six months, around 90% of its US users would be gone forever. That’s according to Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s interim global head. She shared these glum predictions as part of an emergency injunction filed by TikTok in the hopes of blocking the Trump administration’s executive order calling for a ban of the app as of Sept. 27, NPR reports. Pappas also laid bare what all the recent Sturm und Drang swirling around TikTok has meant for the app’s ad revenue. A dozen brands have canceled or delayed advertising on the app, costing TikTok $10 million in revenue in August alone. Hiring has also become more difficult with a target on its back in DC. More than 50 candidates have declined offers to work at TikTok due to Trump's ongoing attacks.
Fair Play
A gang of Apple’s most vocal critics, including Epic Games, Spotify and Basecamp, have joined forces to create an advocacy group that’ll work to “create a level playing field for app businesses and give people freedom of choice on their devices,” The Verge reports. The group, called the Coalition for App Fairness, will help developers with gripes against Apple to better coordinate their efforts in protest of App Store rules and policies. The coalition is particularly peeved about three main issues: Apple’s 30% cut of any payments through its store, the lack of any other competitive option for app distribution on iOS and the allegation that Apple uses its control over iOS to favor its own services. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple acknowledges the group. Apple isn’t known for caving to outside pressure … although it did extend the deadline for its IDFA changes in iOS 14, so who knows.
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In these uncertain times …
Sorry, scratch that and let’s start again. With the ongoing pandemic, the third-party cookie debate and Apple’s IDFA changes on the horizon, it’s easy to forget that there are actually other things happening in the advertising world right now.
And this week on The Big Story we dig into them with special guest Ana Milicevic, co-founder of digital consultancy Sparrow Advisers. On the agenda is everything from antitrust in the headlines and third-party data quality issues to the challenge of algorithmic bias and what brands and publishers must do to bring some uniqueness to the sameness of the ad sales process.
Here’s a taste. Regarding the Justice Department’s imminent antitrust lawsuit against Google, Ana notes that there is an “increasing amount of ire” toward large tech platforms, mainly stemming from their stranglehold on an ever-growing amount of ad spend.
But it’s no surprise to the digital ad industry that Google was in a position to dominate.
In a recent New York Times article, a former FTC commissioner who gave his blessing to the DoubleClick merger back in the day is quoted as saying, “If I knew in 2007 what I know now, I would have voted to challenge.”
His comment struck a chord with Ana: “Maybe you didn’t know, but there were so many people in the industry who not only saw this coming, but we were even ringing the alarm bells back then, and continue to do so … maybe you’re just having the wrong advisers advise you on these issues.”
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Reddit has introduced tiered inventory categories – standard, expanded and limited – so that advertisers can choose the level of brand safety they’re comfortable with.
Brand safety has become a newly hot topic this year given the ongoing pandemic, upcoming election and general societal strife.
“It’s certainly been an interesting year,” said Jen Wong, Reddit’s COO.
But the focus on brand safety isn't anything new. Advertisers have always cared about brand safety and suitability, she said. The current environment is just heightening their concern and desire for control and flexibility.
Dealing with ad adjacency on platforms with a lot of user-generated, social content poses a unique brand safety challenge. UGC (user generated content) is fast-moving and difficult to moderate. Reddit, which has more than 130,000 active communities and sees more than 8,000 interactions on its platform every minute, is well aware of this.
“UGC is a space that moves very quickly,” Wong said.
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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 James Rosewell, founder and CEO at 51Degrees.
The web was built on the vision that it would be free to the world as a public good and basic right for all.
While in many ways, the web has lived up to this vision, it has become a challenge to keep it open.
But this challenge we face – driven largely by trillion-dollar market cap oligopolies looking to enclose the “open web” to advance their own commercial objectives – is nothing new.
In a 1968 paper "The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin described the fate of a common pasture that was poorly managed and overconsumed from people acting in their own self interests. He portrayed the collective action that spoiled this shared resource as a tragedy, but the real tragedy is the notion that shared resources must be privatized to be sustainable.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
In Search Of
The Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google could come as soon as this week or next – but sources tell The New York Times that ad tech will likely not be the focus. The DOJ is planning to brief officials from state attorney general offices on its planned suit, which is the next step to filing its case against the big kahuna. The suit is expected to zero in on whether Google has used its dominant position in search to block rivals and harm consumers, according to people speaking under anonymity. Although the DOJ’s suit might include a few allegations touching on the online advertising market, that part of the investigation “hasn’t been as fully developed as the case on search,” the NYT reports. This could result in some state AGs bringing a flurry of their own cases against Google with more of an ad tech bent rather than throwing in with the Justice Department’s case. Some state AGs feel that the DOJ’s imminent suit is rushed and premature. The state investigations remain open.
<3 TikTok
In non-Trump TikTok-related news (!!), consumers prefer viewing ads on TikTok over any other media platform. According to research from Kantar, users find TikTok ads to be fun, entertaining and innovative, and they’re less likely to think that TikTok contains too much advertising. Gamified media formats, such as hashtag challenges, are helping drive the positive sentiment. “This currently makes the platform an appealing advertising environment,” Kantar notes. “Of course, the challenge for TikTok will be to maintain these perceptions as they ramp up monetization.” But that isn’t TikTok’s only challenge by a long shot. Although the Trump administration seems to be placated for the moment by the slapdash Oracle/Walmart partnership, it’s not gonna be smooth sailing for TikTok over the next few months. TikTok parent company ByteDance has said it won’t transfer its algorithms to Oracle, and Beijing is unlikely to approve the deal. Related in AdExchanger: “What Trump's TikTok Ban Could Mean For Advertisers.”
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Google is rolling out ad products geared to local businesses struggling to adapt to new customer behaviors that have developed since the world went screwy in mid-March.
It’s become a theme of the pandemic: the biggest of big tech platforms releasing advertising and commerce tools aimed at the smallest of small advertisers.
“We recognize the role that digital tools have played as a lifeline to many businesses and consumers,” said Jason Spero, Google’s VP of performance media. “[And] automation can help you dynamically respond to rapid changes in the market.”
Investing in automation
First, Google will soon add in-store sales measurement to smart bidding, which is Google’s suite of automated bidding solutions that use machine learning to optimize bids based on specific conversion KPIs.
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