As the ad tech industry matures, vendor types historically focused on other markets are expanding to meet its needs.
Media and advertising, for example, is now Snowflake’s biggest business vertical, and payment solutions provider FastPay is helping publishers and ad tech companies manage reconciliation and accounting gaps between when ad campaigns are served and advertisers are paid in full.
But there’s another vendor working behind the scenes to service the ad tech market you might not have heard: real-time data processing and management company Aerospike.
Hitching my star
Aerospike works with server-based or cloud-based businesses, and the company’s main selling point is its ability to store persistent memory in Flash files, meaning that kagillions of cookies and other RTB data points, for instance, can be minimized and ingested without losing data continuity.
Aerospike’s first client in 2010 was AppNexus, followed by a string of other players in the space, including The Trade Desk, Integral Ad Science and Beeswax.
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When VideoAmp CEO and Founder Ross McCray first started reaching out to investors around seven years ago about his new company, they were less than impressed.
“People hated the space,” McCray says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “I would go and pitch our solution about the future and you’d have VCs saying … ‘Oh, oh, ad tech? How did you get this meeting? Get out of here.’”
But over the past couple of years, the conversation has “completely shifted,” McCray says, and that’s no coincidence.
Although streaming was already growing, the pandemic turbocharged consumption. Media companies could no longer ignore the fact that they needed a measurement approach to keep up with their burgeoning investments in connected TV.
But even before Nielsen’s dustup with the Video Advertising Bureau over underreporting local TV viewing during the pandemic, VideoAmp, which signed a deal with ViacomCBS in September, was already starting to run currency pilots with media owners.
“Recent news of legacy measurement systems and some companies being no longer MRC accredited really just accelerated this – but it was already happening,” McCray says. “The way that currency is done is not really meant for a streaming world … the more viewership that goes to streaming, the more strain it puts on the system.”
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"On TV & Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today's column is by Daniel Elad, chief strategy officer at TheViewPoint.
Operating systems have often been overlooked when discussing the fragmented ecosystem of connected TV.
But as the hunger for connected TVs grows among consumers, more and more gatekeepers of the CTV world explore new OS frontiers. Despite the existing variability in CTV software, there’s still no clear leader in the space.
Let’s shine a spotlight on the CTV operating system landscape – and how the race for CTV data could transform it.
A maturing space
Eighty-two percent of US TV households have at least one internet-connected device, research from the Leichtman Research Group reveals. The same report shows that over 40% of all American TVs have smart TV functionality.
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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 Corey Weiner, CEO of Jun Group.
As the ad tech industry shifted in the last five years toward more privacy-conscious advertising, first-party data became the golden child. The pitch was short and sweet: Why buy ugly, third-party data from a sketchy data aggregator when you can compile fresh, actionable data yourself?
First-party data buzz permeated the discourse in the last few years as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) cracked down on privacy violations in recent years, and the tech giants started walling up their gardens with the death of the third-party cookie and Apple’s Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA).
But in 2021, a new term has begun popping up all over the ad tech world: zero-party data, a form of data that describes an even more direct relationship between brand and consumer.
What is zero-party data?
Coined by Forrester research back in July 2020, zero-party data encompasses any data that a customer provides to a brand or company willingly and intentionally.
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Ads Are There For You
Publishers attempting to cut themselves a slice of the commerce pie are running into an unlikely – or maybe not so unlikely – competitor: Google. Seems like everywhere they turn, there’s Google with a new way to penalize them for experimenting with alternative revenue sources.
Take BuzzFeed, which has emphasized the growth potential of its commerce business in the lead-up to its impending IPO. But here’s the problem: BuzzFeed’s commerce revenue slowed to just 14% in Q3 from 80% in the first half, and all signs point to another shortfall in Q4.
What happened? Well, it’s no coincidence that earlier this year Google adjusted its search algorithm to diminish sites with affiliate-style links to outside merchant shops. Publishers with affiliate links saw traffic reductions of 20% to 30%, The Information reports.
But as commerce falters, advertising is there to pick up the slack. BuzzFeed is still on track to meet its overall revenue goals for 2021, largely on the strength of its ad business. Vice is in a similar boat. As it prepares for its own IPO, Vice has increased its focus on video content and branding – and yet 35% of Vice’s revenue still comes from advertising, Insider reports.
Guess publishers will have to keep on leaning into ad revenue to support themselves – although competitors lurk there, too. (We’re looking at you, Google.)
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Roast turkey wasn’t the only thing to gorge on this Thanksgiving weekend.
On Friday, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s top antitrust regulator, published a 125-page document outlining the next phase of its ongoing antitrust investigation into Google’s Privacy Sandbox. (You can read the whole shebang here.)
The document contains an updated set of commitments from Google designed to prevent the company from developing its Privacy Sandbox proposals in ways that impede competition.
The CMA announced its investigation of the Privacy Sandbox in January after receiving complaints that Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome will give it an unfair advantage in the digital ad market over anyone that isn’t Google.
The CMA will consult on the new commitments – and receive public feedback – until December 17. If the CMA accepts its changes, Google said in a blog post that it will apply them globally.
Take one
But let’s take a step back.
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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 George Ivie, CEO and executive director at Media Rating Council.
Most transactions are predicated on a good-faith promise. Parties agree to exchange goods, services or funds of agreed-upon value with the explicit understanding that they will not only be delivered, but also accurately reflect the value that was assigned to them.
Mechanisms of accountability make such agreements work. One party accepts the other’s promise of delivery of stated value, with safeguards in place that the receipt of value will be verified. This is what enables agreements to be confidently entered into. In the absence of some framework of accountability, it would be difficult for transaction agreements to be executed, especially at scale.
That is certainly the case for advertising, where the verification mechanism is primarily one of measurement.
In light of this, it’s puzzling to me why there is sometimes resistance to the concept of standards and determinations of compliance with standards. Standards, especially as they relate to measurement, are the foundation of trust and accountability.
They provide an agreed-upon benchmark as to how verification should be approached and assessed, and the verification itself is as critical as the standards.
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Subscription Conniptions
We live in a “subscription economy” now, writes Nieman Labs. You don’t buy the Aladdin DVD; you subscribe to Disney+ “until you die or your card expires.”
But as subscriptions become more important business metrics, particularly in news and entertainment, it’s important to be honest about what companies mean when they report subscriber numbers.
The Information, for example, which charges $400 a year for full access, recently reported more than 225,000 subscribers – but that counts people who subscribe to a free newsletter. There’s a big difference between a free email and $400 per year.
Fluffing up subscriber numbers is a common practice among publishers, and subscriber disclosures will only become more convoluted as publishers like The Information, The New York Times and The Atlantic experiment with newsletter subscription bundles and create rosters of newsletter writers (à la Substack).
Connected TV is also rife with subscription inflation. Some streaming services report subscribers similarly to how apps report their user numbers, as in without disclosing paid versus free accounts. Disney bundles Hulu, ESPN and Disney+ apps, but users retain individual accounts.
Streaming services and publishers also dish out huge discounts and freebie sign-ups via partnerships with mobile providers or other subscription players, such as Spotify or Amazon Music. And, that’s right, they count those subs with the same weight as full-paying, reauthorized subscribers.
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A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
Many of the shopping behaviors that developed over the past couple of years due to COVID-19 have solidified and appear here to stay.
The majority of consumers (56%) say they plan to shop primarily or exclusively online this holiday season, and more than three-quarters say they’ll use in-store pickup services this year as much or more than last year, according to recent research from performance marketing agency Tinuiti.
But many shoppers aren’t just going to show up without confirming that what they want is in stock.
Forrester found that nearly one-third of US online holiday shoppers will check online first to see whether an item is available before heading to a physical store.
That means retailers should expect and prepare themselves for a sizable wave of in-store shoppers, an uptick in curbside pickup and a high volume of requests coming in from online shoppers looking to secure limited stock items, said Phil Melson, a retail client partner at data analytics provider Fractal Analytics.
“The mental math done by individual shoppers choosing to rush to a store to buy something off the shelf versus securing online and picking up later will be case by case and interesting to see,” he said.
But retailers have their own mental math to do.
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