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Oracle’s Moat Launches Outcomes API For CPG Sales, With StackAdapt As Initial DSP Partner Why Non-Advertising Businesses Are Going Into Ads Oracle Fuses Together A CDP And CRM For A Lead-Gen Tool Gap’s CMO: “Content Has To Evolve As You Move Through The Funnel” How Online Grocery Seller Hungryroot Benefits From Not Launching An Ad Platform TransUnion Acquires Neustar In $3.1 Billion Deal With An Eye On Identity Meet System1, The Billion-Dollar Ad Tech Biz IPOing Later This Year Why Spectrum Brands Is Bringing Its Amazon Advertising Approach To The Web Mediaocean Switches Private Equity Owners, As It Evolves For An Internet-Delivered Age

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Cookieless Is Top Of Mind As Teads Bides Its Time Before Another Run At An IPO

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 11:07 am.

Teads might not have its stock ticker yet – the company decided to postpone a planned IPO this summer – but there are lots of other items on the immediate agenda, says Pierre Chappaz, the company’s founder and executive chairman.

The programmatic video platform, which is best known for originating the outstream ad unit, has its eye on conquering cookieless by striking data partnerships, like the recent one with Acxiom in September to make the latter’s data available through the Teads Ad Manager. And it’s evaluating potential M&A with the backing of its parent company, French telco Altice.

But Teads is also profitable today and growing organically, Chappaz said. During the 12 months ending in June, Teads saw its revenue increase 36% to $645 million.

Of course, if Teads was publicly traded and its stock price popped, it’d have a lot more money to do those deals. Just ask Magnite.

“That is one of the benefits of being a public company,” Chappaz said. “But we also have an existing shareholder in Altice with great M&A experience that’s been supportive of our ambitions. They’re with us for the long term.”

Chappaz spoke with AdExchanger.

App Targeting Isn’t Good Enough For Modern CTV Buying

by AdExchanger Content Studio // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 9:05 am.

Alex Chatfield, VP, Marketplace Development, Xandr

Once upon a time, desktop display advertising was the central way for brands to reach digital audiences. It was a simple process: “I want to appear in The New York Times. I will target nytimes.com. My ad is live on nytimes.com.” While desktop display still plays a prominent role in digital campaigns today, the video and CTV space is growing as brands’ strategic buying format of choice.

In 2020, US CTV spending was up more than 40% with no signs of slowing soon, making it a competitive area with potential for savvy buyers. Unfortunately, the premium video marketplace is more complicated than yesteryear’s desktop display world and requires new tools. The rapid shift to premium video has resulted in an education gap with many desktop display buyers on a steep learning curve and applying legacy techniques to this new channel.

App lists and site lists are blunt instruments in a nuanced market

Premium video content is largely consumed today via applications, downloaded either on a consumer’s CTV or mobile device. Unlike the web, where a site has a single address that you can target, applications have a unique address, or app bundle ID, for each app store that a consumer might use to download it. For buyers, this represents a challenge, as they have to gather and maintain a list of every app bundle ID in order to fully target a single app like Discovery GO.

How Rakuten Rewards Is Adapting To A New Affiliate Model – The First-Party Ad Platform

by James Hercher // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 12:05 am.

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

Rakuten Rewards, formerly Ebates, is an 800-pound gorilla in the affiliate marketing business.

But what’s the point of being biggest if nobody wants to be in the affiliate business?

Since its acquisition by the Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten and the rebranding from Ebates, Rakuten Rewards has set its sights beyond the affiliate category.

“We're busting out of the affiliate marketplace, because we can target using our own first-party data,” said Rakuten Rewards President Kristen Gall.

By combining its owned-and-operated content and logged-in audiences for targeting, Rakuten Rewards built a first-party media platform.

AdExchanger caught up with Gall about Rakuten Rewards’ first-party ad platform strategy, and how its value has evolved to meet changes made by the walled gardens Amazon, Google and Apple.

AdExchanger: What’s new for Rakuten Rewards since the rebrand in 2019?

KRISTEN GALL: Understanding how people navigate the ecommerce ecosystem is incredibly valuable. Over the past couple years, we’ve realized the wealth of first-party data we're sitting on.

We used to be a one-size-fits-all resource, where you [as a merchant] upload your cash-back rate on our site. And that worked. But what we've been able to launch over the last year and a half is a program called Personalized Rewards, with granular one-on-one audience targeting for merchant partners. It's more akin to how they use Facebook or Google to define an audience to reach for acquisition, retention, retargeting, etc. We use cash back as the lever along with media.

Comic: 2021 Bingo Card

by Nate Neal // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 12:04 am.

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

IMDb TV A Golden Goose For Amazon; Criteo Finds Google FLoC Lacks Scale

by AdExchanger // Posted on Friday, September 24th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

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

AVOD FTW

When people think of Amazon video assets, it’s Amazon Prime, Twitch and Fire TV. But IMDb TV, formerly Freedive, has quietly become an important piece of Amazon’s video strategy, and may even be a golden goose of its own someday, VideoWeek reports. As a free, ad-supported content library, IMDb TV can grow CTV supply without signing new users in the hyper-competitive subscription streaming market (where Amazon’s champion is Prime). IMDb TV also connects directly to Amazon shopping, with purchase or ad-to-cart features through Fire TV sticks or Alexa-enabled devices, and with closed-loop sales attribution. That makes IMDb TV a natural extension for Amazon-based sellers, many of whom create product demos and other videos for their Amazon store pages but aren’t TV or CTV advertisers. Ecommerce media agencies are enthusiastic about IMDb TV for just that reason. They work with shopper marketers, not national brand marketers that buy TV ads. But extending product videos to an Amazon CTV app is within their wheelhouse. AdExchanger has more.

What’s In A Cohort? Seriously.

Criteo published the third post in a four-part series examining Google’s FLoC Original Trials. The consistent thread is that FLoC lacks the scale necessary to draw significant conclusions. Since there are relatively few publishers testing FLoC, a site like Weather.com sees users from about 4,000 cohorts per week, while the median site only picks up two cohorts per week. FLoCs are also unintuitive, because they don’t target people; they target “a cluster of browsing activity,” in Google’s words. A cohort of “cooking enthusiasts” will include people who visited recipe and kitchen supply sites. But the overall browsing patterns of that group fluctuate week to week, because the tech is making random connections across thousands of users’ browsing histories. A Google academic paper showed how FLoC-based campaigns could achieve 95% of the performance advertising effectiveness of third-party cookies. And Criteo reproduced the methodology, which it could do because it works with Expedia as a site owner and many travel-booking marketers, so it could algorithmically track the similarity of users in a travel cohort. But the opacity and low volume of FLoC IDs on programmatic exchanges is a blocker to in-depth examination of Google’s claims.

Oracle’s Moat Launches Outcomes API For CPG Sales, With StackAdapt As Initial DSP Partner

by James Hercher // Posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021 at 12:02 pm.

The results are in.

Oracle’s Moat Outcomes API, a product that attributes digital ad impressions to in-store product sales, announced its first DSP integration with StackAdapt on Thursday.

The product is specific for CPG and retail vertical clients, with Moat licensing data from retail membership and loyalty programs to connect those customers to online identity data.

Moat’s roots are as an ad verification tool to support real-time programmatic. That’s an important differentiator for the Moat Outcomes API, said Michael Shang, StackAdapt’s VP of partnerships and business solutions. Other retail attribution services, such as IRI and NCS, operate on a longer time frame, he said.

A CPG campaign running from January through March typically might get an in-store sales lift report in May, Shang said. But with Moat and its RTB-native product, campaigns only run for 10 days before an advertiser starts to see daily attribution and optimization data.

The media agency Vue Digital, a pilot ad partner for the Outcomes API, is looking for products that “transform our client conversations from hypothetical to tangible results,” said paid media manager Kelly Weber.

Focusing on outcomes is especially important if a brand has parallel campaigns running via walled garden platforms, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. These platform self-attribute sales with a black box model, which means the programmatic agencies don’t have visibility into the actual conversions.

The Outcomes API will help advertisers transition to campaigns graded by results rather than loose proxies, Weber said. Today, CPG-retail campaigns typically use engaged site visits – i.e., did someone visit a product purchase page or take another action on the brand’s site? – as an indicator of someone’s intention to buy. But that’s just a correlation, she said, not the actual result.

But the Moat Outcomes API isn’t necessarily the right choice for every CPG brand, Weber said.

A candy brand’s Halloween campaign that runs for a month, for example, may not be worth the added cost and complexity of optimization. Since the API does attribute based on individual-level connections as opposed to a general store sales lift metric, it requires a committed campaign that will run for months, or at least six weeks, to build up a statistically significant conversion data set and allow time for optimization.

Even so, it’s a valuable way to get small and medium-sized product brands to test and attribute based on store sales, which they haven’t been able to do in programmatic before, Weber said.

The Big Story: Everyone’s Launching An Ads Business

by Sarah Sluis // Posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021 at 11:55 am.

From Instacart to Uber, a wide variety of digital businesses are realizing that they can spin up advertising businesses.

Their inspiration? Amazon’s “other” revenue category. Composed mostly of advertising revenue, it’s proven to a slew of digital companies that they can gain profitability by pursuing the sky-high margins in advertising.

On this week’s Big Story, we talk about why such a wide variety of companies – including “buy now, pay later” companies like Affirm – are spinning up ad businesses now, and what’s in it for marketers. We also discuss the evolving nature of retail media.

There’s another thing many of these companies have in common, too: closed-loop attribution, since they’re oh so close to a consumer’s grocery store checkout, for example.

Also in this week’s episode: Roku and Shopify paired up to give smaller, direct-to-consumer brands access to connected TV inventory. The connection is one of many TV ad sellers are forging with SMBs.

NBCU Highlights Three Measurement Providers As Alternatives To Nielsen

by Tony Rifilato // Posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021 at 9:06 am.

NBCUniversal highlighted three streaming-oriented companies it is considering – Conviva, Dumbstruck and Truthset – to create a framework for alternative currencies as it prepares to move away from legacy TV ratings giant Nielsen as the industry’s single currency provider.

Kelly Abcarian, NBCU’s EVP of ad measurement and impact, again called for “measurement independence” and for the industry to move away from relying solely on Nielsen at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience X Science event on Monday.

Though she didn’t specifically call out Nielsen, Abcarian gave a keynote speech challenging the industry to focus on opportunities with multiple measurement providers who use advanced data and analytics, saying that the traditional panel-based surveys the measurement giant is known for are not equipped for connected TV.

“Measurement independence won't happen overnight, especially if our industry continues to focus on our collective deficits, rather than our collective opportunity,” Abcarian said. “Part of the problem is that we all spend way too much time … focused on addressing the current system’s failures.”

The Opera Browser’s $80 Million Ad Business Is Adding A Self-Serve Option

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021 at 12:35 am.

Opera Ads, the online ad platform launched by Norwegian browser maker Opera in 2019, is serving up some self-serve.

On Wednesday, Opera launched Opera Ad Manager, a self-serve ad platform to buy inventory on Opera News (not to be confused with a publication of the same name about the actual opera) that doesn’t use third-party cookies.

The Opera browser accounts for 2% of browser market share, according to Statcounter. On a monthly basis, the Opera browser and news apps reach more than 300 million active users, as in people who actively choose to use Opera products rather than the ones that appear by default on their devices, according to Per Wetterdal, EVP of commercial at Opera.

Opera News feed inventory appears in multiple Opera apps, including the Opera Mini browser app for Android and the stand-alone Opera News mobile app, which aggregates news from international, US and local sources and personalizes the feed based on trending topics, language and categories of interest.

But users only see ads when they’re engaging with the news content feed and not when they’re browsing the web, Wetterdal said.

Advertisers could already buy ads on the Opera News feed as a managed service.

Performance CTV Provides A One-Stop Shop For DTC Brands

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2021 at 12:04 am.

"On TV & Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today's column is by Dan Fairclough, Sr. Director, Agency and Brand Relations, Magnite.

In my many years working with DTC brands, I saw firsthand how companies hustled to grow their brand visibility from the ground up using search and social.

Then, eventually, they would hit a wall. In order to further scale as a brand and ensure they were driving sales within their acquisition benchmarks, they needed a better way to get in front of the right audience – across a landscape where viewership is more fragmented than ever.

For direct-to-consumer brands, every dollar spent on media needs to tie back to sales. They truly need dollar investment to convert to results; they relied on performance marketing before it became a buzzword. They also need a way to optimize campaigns in real time without making dozens of phone calls and be able to track outcomes in a consolidated manner.