This is the fourth in AdExchanger’s “Meet the CDPs” series. Read previous interviews with mParticle, Acquia-owned AgilOne and Amperity.
One silver lining of working from home is being able to see everyone’s kids on Zoom, said Peter Reinhardt, CEO and co-founder of customer data platform Segment.
The parenting channel on Segment’s Slack is particularly active right now as employees attempt to manage the “work” and “home” components of their new WFH lives.
Customers also have questions about adjusting to the new normal.
“They’re definitely doing some gut checking,” Reinhardt said. “We’re getting questions like, do you have a business continuity plan in place? Do you have a clear understanding about how all of this impacts my specific business? Do you have a healthy cash balance? Thankfully we can answer them in the affirmative.”
Segment’s customer base includes B2B, B2C, DTC, Fortune 500 companies; basically any company that’s trying to scale their digital efforts, Reinhardt said.
Clients include Instacart, HotelTonight, Fox, Gap, Meredith, Peloton, IBM and Google. Segment’s headcount is just under 600 people spread across seven global offices. Roughly 30% are engineers.
Reinhardt spoke with AdExchanger from his home office.
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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 Kacie McKee, head of ecommerce at Wavemaker US.
Marketers may have missed the new features Amazon added to their site around the end of 2019 to help boost brands more organically. The latest push feels like an effort to combat competition from social commerce platforms and prove that it can be a discovery site as well as a shopping site.
While the new announcements are a departure from the purely transactional feel of Amazon, it forces brands to consider how the changes may affect the algorithm and flywheel effect they were just getting used to.
For many brands, the need to produce online content that is relevant, fresh and scalable continues to weigh heavily on P&Ls. While upper-funnel activities have always demanded thoughtful creative, the scale and size of the online ecosystem potentially triples creative and production costs for brands. This reality creates a content conundrum: To produce content that is all things to all channels is costly, but so too is failing to identify content-priority areas.
At the start, Amazon’s product pages, whether it was above-the-fold basic content or the more recently added A+ enhanced below-the-fold content, were designed to have a critical effect on a brand’s organic product ranking and sales. For the first time, traditional manufacturers had to consider how to take offline content and pivot to deliver the right content online – or possibly lose both sales and visibility.
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Coronavirus shelter-in-place orders have been in place for less than a month nationally, but consumer media habits are already massively changing.
Streaming is the clear winner of social distancing. From March 9 to March 16, total streaming time grew to 156.1 billion minutes per day in the United States, compared to 127.6 billion minutes during the last week of February, per Nielsen. In March, streaming accounted for 23% of consumer TV viewing time, up from 21% in February and 14% a year ago.
Meanwhile, live TV viewing grew between 1% and 3% during the last week of March across all demos, while streaming increased up to 8% during the same time period. NBCU saw an 80% spike in viewership across its digital assets in March compared to a 20% increase in linear TV viewing.
Homebound people are streaming more TV during the daytime. Streaming between 10 am to 5 pm grew 39% during the week of March 17 to 23, compared to the previous week, Conviva found. Meanwhile, prime-time viewing declined by as much as 5% between 8 pm and 11 pm.
“Prime time is starting nine hours earlier than normal,” said Conviva CEO Bill Demas. “Even if people are working from home and kids are distance-learning, streaming accelerates at 10 am and goes throughout the day.”
In APAC, where people are slowly getting back to work, streaming hours decreased 10% between March 17 and 23, according to Conviva. That dip offers a preview of what may happen in other regions as lockdown restrictions ease.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
The Buck Stops Here
Brands are delaying agency payments as they manage cash crunches due to the coronavirus pandemic. The trend “threatens the collapse of the entire supply chain,” Ad Age reports. Hard-hit brands are asking to extend payment terms, which can already run up to 120 days. Equinox, for example, said it will halt all vendor payments until further notice. Some agencies are OK delaying payments for clients with reasonable terms, but won’t budge on accounts with terms of 90 days or more. Others are offering to reduce fees instead. But agencies also have to pay their vendors, which have to pay sell-side vendors and so on down the supply chain. "It's not that we don't have empathy," a senior agency exec said. "But we are a business, too."
Profits Of Woe
This was going to be the year that star digital media startups flipped to profitability. Business Insider, Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed and Politico were among the publishers that became profitable last year or expected to be profitable in 2020. But that was way, way back in January. Now investors are “triaging sick companies in their portfolios” with checks for the startups most likely to weather the crisis, said Jeff Richards, managing partner at the VC firm GGV Capital. Even with traffic growing, advertising demand has dropped like a rock. Survival for some of the best-known digital brands will depend on relationships with investors, The Wall Street Journal reports. And that could mean raising money at very disadvantageous terms for the news startups, which will soon be short on cash.
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Small advertisers stick with what they know during a recession – and what they know is Facebook.
As of January, Facebook had more than 8 million active advertisers on its platform, of which multiple millions are no doubt small and medium-sized businesses. Facebook doesn’t break out how many SMBs there are in its overall advertiser base but, in 2017, Sheryl Sandberg did share in passing that more than 4 million SMBs advertise on Facebook. That number can only have gone up.
And SMBs are in a world of pain right now. Small businesses are typically hit the hardest during an economic downturn.
This isn’t a typical economic downturn, though – it’s a health crisis attendant with massive uncertainty. Small businesses are being forced to close their doors and rapidly transition their services online – if they can. Advertising is likely low on the list of priorities right now.
But Facebook, despite its exposure to the SMB market, is uniquely positioned to weather this unprecedented storm, said Jasmine Engberg, a senior analyst at eMarketer.
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Social distancing has been so isolating, Alison Levin is already wishing she was back in a crowded Las Vegas hotel lobby.
“I will never, ever complain again about CES being too crowded, too crazy, too overwhelming,” she said. “I actually miss CES, if you can believe that.”
As VP of ad sales at Roku, Alison is used to working with remote teams globally, although she is checking in with people more often these days. She’s also fielding questions from clients about how streaming is changing during the pandemic and how brands can get involved, while negotiating upfront deals over video chat.
Alison calls in from her backyard in Long Island, NY, (you can hear the odd bird chirping) to avoid waking her toddler Joni from her afternoon nap.
Also in this episode: Alison discusses at-home workouts (she’s running and using the Peloton app) and catching up on old TV shows – that is, when she’s not watching “Finding Nemo” with Joni on repeat.
“I’ve never been more thankful for anything than I am for Disney Plus,” she says.
This article is sponsored by Tatari.
OTT viewing is on the rise. Once considered a supplementary source of TV content, streaming now accounts for nearly 30% of viewing – and growing.
As publishers continue to move more of their content libraries to the advertising video on demand (AVOD) ecosystem, streaming ad impressions will become a powerful opportunity for marketers to reach new audiences at scale with more specificity than ever before.
The move to streaming does bring its own new set of challenges. In particular, delivery and measurement capabilities are not uniform from publisher to publisher – which can make it difficult to accurately assess campaign performance.
“It’s truly the Wild West of TV advertising,” said Philip Inghelbrecht, CEO at Tatari. “There are still a lot of missing pieces to figure out – not just the lack of measurement best practices, but also limitations around how streaming impressions are delivered.”
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Some CEOs have a home office. Others, such as LiveRamp chief Scott Howe, have a 1956 Airstream Bubble trailer.
Today on “Social Distancing With Friends,” Scott steps away from his family of five (plus two cats and a white Lab) and checks in from his “perfect escape pod.”
The backstory, in Scott’s words:
I spent 15 years looking for a 1955 to 1961 California-built Airstream Bubble trailer. When I would go to client meetings, I would always check the classifieds in any city I visited and sometimes even drag clients along to inspect anything that sounded intriguing. (Not many of these model Airstreams were ever made). I finally found a beat-up junker, and then spent some time between Microsoft and Acxiom refurbing it. It’s actually far more comfortable than my office – it now has Lyptus hardwood floors, Douglas fir cabinets, a bathroom, microwave, television, refrigerator, kitchen table and bed, all in a 16-foot aluminum can.
Besides the Airstream, Scott shares his thoughts on the future of linear TV after the pandemic; the similarities he sees between the current economic downturn and the dot com bubble crash; and the verticals that have the best chance to transform their businesses when the crisis ends.
Also, we get a peek into LiveRamp’s disaster playbook, stemming from its Acxiom heritage. “We have a three-ring binder on absolutely everything that could ever happen, and we’ve war planned those things, like a tornado or a horrible winter storm,” Scott says. “We actually had a plan for a pandemic.”
It’s been a big week for location data-related deals.
PlaceIQ acquired location data and measurement company Freckle IoT on Tuesday.
And a day before, Foursquare said it would merge with Factual. Together, Foursquare and Factual have more than $150 million in combined revenue, data derived from over 500 million devices worldwide and 400+ employees. The combined company will continue to use the Foursquare brand.
“We’re making some large bets right now in terms of the future of location,” said Foursquare CEO David Shim. Foursquare bought Shim’s startup, Placed, from Snap in May. He joined as president and was later elevated to the chief exec role after former Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck left at the end of last year.
AdExchanger caught up with Shim and former Factual CEO Gil Elbaz, who is joining Foursquare’s board and executive team as part of the transaction.
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Quantcast laid off just under 5% of its staff and implemented tiered pay cuts due to the economic impact of coronavirus.
The salary cuts are tiered according to compensation level, with some employees taking 5% cuts and the highest-paid employees taking 30% cuts. Its global staff numbers more than 600 employees, according to Quantcast.
CEO Konrad Feldman, who co-founded the company 14 years ago, took a 100% pay cut.
“In response to the economic impact of COVID-19, we have made a number of changes to our business including the difficult decision to eliminate a number of roles,” Feldman told AdExchanger in a statement. “While these decisions are hard, these are extraordinary times and these changes are necessary to achieve our long-term goals. Saying goodbye to colleagues is never easy, and we’re working diligently to support our team through this challenging time.”
Quantcast runs two businesses: a managed DSP for advertisers and a smaller data and insights business for publishers, including Q for Publishers and a budding consent management platform.
Even before the layoffs, Quantcast had been trying to transition its managed DSP business to one that’s more self-serve. The transition is notoriously tricky, since companies must move to a lower-margin business and risk cannibalizing their more profitable business in the transition.
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