When the ad tech company Minute Media acquired the publication Players’ Tribune in 2019, the deal underscored how consolidation is creating unlikely portfolios.
“For years, we thought it would be difficult long term to be a standalone publisher, which was why we focused on being a standalone tech platform,” said Asaf Peled, CEO of Minute Media.
The Players’ Tribune changed his mind, and gave Minute Media its entry into a portfolio of sports brands. Founded by baseball star Derek Jeter, the sports site gives athletes a platform to write longform articles and speak directly to fans.
The acquisition also helped solve one of The Players’ Tribune’s problems: distribution. Peled recalled the mini-crisis publishers faced from 2018 to 2019. “Many great content brands were affected by the social networks, by Facebook, and it was difficult for them to grow their business on a standalone basis,” he said.
So Players’ Tribune brought powerful content by sports celebrities, and Minute Media provided its video player – a way to share that content without social media. Pushing that content to a broader audience was part of its post-acquisition plan.
Minute Media considers itself a technology company first. It provides a video player to publishers who want to run ads and content on their sites but don’t have their own content.
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Some media buyers report feeling a niggling sense of FOMO when they try to use Facebook Ads Manager to target their ads on Facebook and Instagram.
“Everyone I talk to has the sense that they’re missing out on something, that something feels … hidden,” said Ty Martin, a former iCrossing search and digital media executive and now CEO and founder of Ad Bacon, a startup that develops tools to help agencies boost their SEM and paid social performance.
If advertisers feel that they’re missing something in Ads Manager, perhaps it’s because they are.
Facebook’s default targeting options are “too broad and don’t help home in on who you’re looking for,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, VP of paid social at digital marketing firm Jellyfish.
“Pair that with the time it takes to find the right audience, [and] the exercise just becomes cumbersome and extremely time consuming,” Chowdhury said.
On Tuesday, Ad Bacon released a discovery tool called Audience Kitchen that helps advertisers identify a wider selection of Facebook audiences that don’t surface when searching via Facebook’s own UI.
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FLoC Fears
There’s no love lost for FLoC. In a blog post on Sunday entitled “Proposal: Treat FLoC As A Security Concern,” a WordPress developer called Carike suggested that users of the open source content management software block FLoC by default. If that happens, it would be a big deal. WordPress powers roughly 41% of sites on the web. Because of its vast scale, the blogger contends that the WordPress community “can help combat racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination and discrimination against those with mental illness with four lines of code.” There’s been a growing backlash against Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts API based on the fear that it could facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, “as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation made a similar argument in early March, claiming that FLoCs are both “the most ambitious – and potentially the most harmful” of the proposals in the Chrome Privacy Sandbox. Read on. In related news, privacy-focused web browser DuckDuckGo recently created a Chrome extension to prevent FLoC tracking.
Mixed Bag
Verification company Integral Ad Science has some good news and bad news on digital ad fraud: rates of ad fraud have declined, but brand risks are on the rise. Read the release. In its H2 2020 Media Quality Report released Monday, IAS found that as marketers adopt more sophisticated tools to measure and prevent fraud, global ad fraud rates improved overall and levels dropped across all devices and environments. Global fraud rates among optimized campaigns dropped between 0.3% and 0.8% worldwide. Brand risk, however, increased during a period of “unprecedented” news and events, including the United States presidential election. Adult content was the primary driver of increased brand risk across all formats globally, followed by hate speech, which more than tripled its share of brand risk for desktop video – in tandem with the election. While mobile web video remained the safest inventory when optimized against ad fraud, holding steady at 0.3%, it was the highest for global brand risk at 8.6%. Check out the report.
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In 2016, Heineken USA embarked on a customer data strategy to understand more about its consumers and to help drive brand awareness.
Since that time, privacy regulations in Europe, California, Virginia and elsewhere have rolled out, and Apple will soon make IDFA opt-in, likely limiting its use for advertisers.
The world’s second-largest beer maker was looking for ways to “future proof” its data strategy around identity, privacy and consent, and use data across its brands — Heineken also owns Dos Equis and Tecate — to ensure it can segment and target across channels.
Initially, the company relied on a data management platform (DMP).
But because DMPs are built on cookies and aggregate third-party marketing data, Heineken was limited by using DMP segmentation and needed a more sustainable solution, especially after Google announced that it would block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser by 2022 and wouldn’t support alternative IDs.
As a result, there is a sense of urgency among brands to shift away from third-party data, Rebekah Kennedy, Heineken’s director of consumer insights, told AdExchanger.
“An issue we had with DMP-based segments historically was that we lacked a lot of insight,” Kennedy said. “DMPs are built on those more anonymous identifiers, and that will become a lot harder to use once these browser changes come. We needed to really look to replace the anonymous identifiers with a more sustainable solution that was built on identity, which we think is used more consistently across channels.”
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Rumors are flying that Apple will finally (finally!) rip off the IDFA band-aid and release iOS 14.5 in tandem with its “Spring Loaded” product event scheduled for tomorrow.
Always buttoned up, Apple didn’t announce an agenda, of course.
The consensus is that the event will be mainly a showcase for flashy new hardware, like iPads with an upgraded camera, a redesigned iMac and the third generation of Apple Pencil.
But ad industry watchers are placing their bets on whether Tuesday will also be the day that Apple starts enforcing its AppTrackingTransparency framework, which requires an opt-in for IDFA use. Apple has said that ATT enforcement will begin with the official rollout of iOS 14.5.
If Apple releases iOS hardware, like a new iPad, as anticipated, that could come along with a final release of iOS 14.5, said Diego Meller, co-CEO and co-founder of mobile DSP Jampp.
“I’d say there is a 50% chance it will happen,” he said.
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"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Adam Gaynor, VP of Network Partnerships and Head of Addressable at VIZIO.
While we’ve been talking for years about using addressable to build a bridge between linear and connected TV, the seismic events of 2020 have given marketers and networks the motivation to finally get it done. Marketers will soon be able to better understand and connect with Hispanic America, an audience that is not one singular group but one made up of people from different countries, cultures and backgrounds.
I’m calling it now: 2021 will be the Year of Addressable transcends audiences and language.
Recently, Univision joined the Open Addressable Ready (OAR) consortium –a VIZIO-led initiative – where it will be a member of the Steering Committee, helping to establish a single addressable standard for the entire TV ecosystem. Univision is the first Spanish-language media company to sign on, marking a real commitment to serving its audience with relevant creative and expanding addressable TV advertising beyond just English-speaking Americans.
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Audit Demanded
Remember when the TV networks and Nielsen got into a pretty big fight because Nielsen didn’t do such a great job of measuring TV audiences during the pandemic? Well, CBS, ABC, NBC and other TV networks are now calling for an audit of Nielsen — a name synonymous with TV ratings — to convey their “profound” dissatisfaction and concerns with Nielsen’s handling of TV usage and measurement data. According to Variety, the VAB, an industry group that represents the TV networks, is demanding that Nielsen submit to a third-party audit from Ernst & Young. The networks claim Nielsen let its system — the bedrock of advertising deals for TV programs — degrade as the nation went into lockdown, and undercounted TV viewership by as much as 10% in 2020. Nielsen supposedly even undercounted streaming activity. The independent auditor would be tasked with verifying the accuracy of Nielsen’s metric reporting during the March 2020-21 time period and make recommendations that could include numerical adjustments. Meanwhile, Nielsen has said it maintains “full confidence” in the way it tabulates TV ratings.
Mass Action
Facebook is reportedly going to be hit with a “mass action” suit in Europe over a major leak of user data that dates back to 2019. The data breach was only recently discovered after it was learned that information on 533 million accounts — including Facebook IDs, location, mobile phone numbers, email address, relationship status and employer — was found posted for free download on a hacker forum. TechCrunch reports that Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) is commencing the suit alleging that the Facebook breach violated personal data protections outlined by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Oh, and Facebook’s European headquarters is based in Ireland, which makes Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) the lead regulator there. Article 82 of the GDPR provides for a “right to compensation and liability” for those affected by violations of the law. That it could be years before the DPC decides on the 2019 Facebook leak likely explains why the DRI chose a class-action style lawsuit in parallel to the regulatory investigation.
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Hey kids, are you trying to read the blacked-out redactions on a PDF? Simply copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word, and then read everyone’s legal secrets. It’s the digital hack to reading invisible ink.
Google learned that lesson the hard way recently when, in responding to the Texas-led antitrust suit, it accidentally revealed the existence of its secret program Project Bernanke, where it used learnings from publisher ad servers to strengthen its own ad buying technologies.
Sounds straightforward, right? Not really. As with all things ad tech, the devil has entwined itself in the details. In this episode of The Big Story, the AdExchanger team does its damndest to untangle that serpent.
There is a lot we still don’t know about Project Bernanke, including how exactly it worked and at whose expense. In corresponding with Senior Editor Sarah Sluis, Google indicated it tried to help advertisers, which makes sense given that advertisers are the ones with the money.
So as you listen to this week’s episode, please pardon our dust. Typically, we try to work things out before the podcast, but sometimes, we’ve got to figure out what’s going on in real time.
Subscribe to AdExchanger Talks on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Within the retargeting category, Criteo has been the most successful player by a wide margin. It built a global retargeting empire from its home base in France, conquering the US market and many others too. It was a neat trick.
Now the company is trying to pull off two more. First, it’s working to save the lucrative retargeting business by developing a single sign-on (SSO) solution for consumers that will run across publisher websites. Second, it’s pivoting toward ecommerce to make itself less reliant on retargeting.
This week on the AdExchanger Talks podcast, Chief Product Officer Todd Parsons shares an inside view of the SSO skunkworks project. And he explains why Criteo assumed responsibility for this effort – which may be key to the eventual success of the industry-wide Unified ID 2.0 initiative.
“Without retargeting we really wouldn’t have a shot at stitching together first party data on any identity framework,” he says. “It just wouldn’t happen.”
The Gist co-founder Ellen Hyslop believes women care about sports news – they just don’t care for the way it’s presented.
When Hyslop captivated her friends with her account of the Toronto Maple Leafs making it to the NHL playoffs, they all realized they had stumbled onto a winning idea. More women deserved to hear about sports in a way that resonated with them. So in 2018, they founded The Gist.
The Gist speaks to its audience like “their witty, sports-obsessed best friend,” Hyslop said.
If traditional sports news is dominated by men writing about mens’ sports, The Gist’s all-female writing staff populates its thrice-weekly newsletter with news about male and female sports. In a chatty tone peppered with emojis and GIFs, The Gist also tracks equality and inclusiveness in sports closely – because its readers care about those issues.
Like Morning Brew, The Gist writes ad copy for advertisers that appear in its newsletter.
Hyslop also reads the ads in The Gist’s podcast, which she hosts.
Email newsletters originally appealed to Hyslop because the barrier to entry was so low, they could test their idea. They promoted the site by spray-painting their Instagram handles on the streets of Toronto and calling local spin studios asking them to offer free classes to people who referred friends to the newsletter.
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