Global media and marketing services company ENGINE is diving even deeper into technology.
The company expanded its cookieless offering on Wednesday with Device Graph+, which adds more CTV solutions to its existing planning and buying capabilities across mobile, display and online video.
“We’re trying to solve for where the market is headed,” Michael Zacharski, CEO of ENGINE Media Exchange, the company’s programmatic solution. “It just so happened that the future happened a lot faster because of COVID and with everything going on with cookieless.”
The new tool builds on ENGINE's existing measurement solutions for CTV. ENGINE had already delivered premium direct CTV supply through the ENGINE Media Exchange SSP with data-driven insights, targeting and measurement. Besides powering CTV buying, ENGINE’s Device Graph+ is designed to be flexible and integrate clients’ first- and third-party data, as well as other ad buying platforms.
The tool combines proprietary data from ENGINE Media Exchange and ENGINE’s multiple data partners across automatic content recognition (ACR), cross-device data, location-based attribution partners and identity resolution providers.
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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 Gary Kibel, a partner in the digital media, technology and privacy practice group at Davis & Gilbert.
The ad tech ecosystem in the United States is largely based on the collection of persistent identifiers and personal information generally operating on an opt-out basis. However, in a troubling sign for the industry, a number of new and proposed laws are introducing consent requirements that may impact the scope and volume of data collected from consumers. While certain sensitive personal information has always been understood to require consent to collect, these new laws expand consent to cover more commonly collected and exploited data.
The most comprehensive privacy law in the United States, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mostly operates on an opt-out basis. The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA, AKA CCPA 2.0) also embraces this opt-out model. Virginia, which is poised to potentially become the second state in the United States, with a comprehensive privacy law, is also embracing the opt-out model. However, other laws are chipping away at this liberal approach to data collection and use.
North Dakota recently proposed a privacy law that would have required opt-in consent for any sales of a broad swath of data, such as location, browsing history, residential details and even interests. However, the bill failed to pass in the North Dakota House of Representatives earlier this month. Given that North Dakota has barely 2% of California’s population, the impact might not have been dramatic, but it may have contributed to the opt-in trend.
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This article is sponsored by LiveRamp.
After an unprecedented 2020, this year has already seen a series of announcements around the impending end of third-party cookies, restrictions on mobile IDs and potential solutions.
As the ad ecosystem evolves rapidly, it’s clear there is an immediate need for identity solutions that restore consumer trust, are durable and scalable – and perform better than the tools and solutions they will replace. It’s important to remember that as an industry, we’re in this situation because we lost the trust of the consumer and failed to explain the value exchange between the consumer and the publisher. We must do better. The open internet, modern digital marketing, publisher revenues, and a competitive ad tech industry depend on it.
Now isn’t the time for quick fixes or unsustainable identity solutions – though many have emerged this past year (think: fingerprinting or “universal” IDs). Ultimately, these “workarounds” have an expiration date too, as they are equally as flawed as the third-party cookie they intend to replace. They won’t restore consumer trust, they’re not secure and many aren’t even commercially available.
The good news is that there is emerging consensus, industry-wide, about what identity and addressability should look like in the future. Based on recent discussions with leading brands, agencies, platforms, and publishers, we’ve developed a “checklist” – five criteria to help you evaluate the strength of your identity approach in 2021 and beyond:
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Machine-generated creative from Pencil
Direct-to-consumer advertisers pumping tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars into their Facebook ads each month know the power of a good creative message.
The best ad creatives drive ROAS (return on ad spend) that can be orders of magnitude higher than a failed message.
But how can busy, short-staffed marketing departments test new creative messages constantly? Tweaking messages involves both inspiration and grunt work, which often prevents marketers from testing as often or as extensively as they want to.
Enter Pencil, which launched in November after two years of technical development and with $4 million in pre-Series A venture capital funding.
Pencil intelligently pairs up a brand’s taglines, images and videos to create dozens of new messages a marketer can choose to test. The AI involved can sometimes make strange choices, but just as often creates “aha” moments for brands looking for new ways to market their products.
Case in point: A toothpaste brand testing Pencil found that AI-formulated creative messages that focused on the mouth, instead of a white smile, ended up being its top-performing creatives. And a dog food brand found that ads mentioning the taste of its product – despite the fact that humans don’t eat it – were top performers.
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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 Mathieu Roche, CEO of ID5.
The post-cookie identity debate is often presented as follows: users who authenticate themselves and provide their email address can be identified over time and across sites; all others are anonymous.
The above explanation is grossly simplistic and unrealistic because it doesn’t take into account the preferences and needs of three key stakeholders: users, publishers and brands:
- Most users are not ready to provide an email when visiting a website, and will see this requirement as far more privacy-invasive than other types of requirements based on a simple consent
- Most publishers are reluctant to create barriers to access their content, and cannot justify the additional effort to establish this type of relationship with their audiences
- Most brands don’t want to limit their targeting strategies to users they already know and have an email for. What’s more, only certain types of brands have a direct enough relationship with their consumers to collect their email address
For all these stakeholders, is there no solution beyond the login? Are they forced to forgo the benefits of personalization and granular performance measurement? How do they deal with large (80%+) pools of totally anonymous (and therefore undervalued) users? Must they resort to suboptimal methods like cohorts or panel-based measurement or contextual targeting to optimize their marketing activities?
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Centro said on Wednesday that it’s acquiring search engine marketing platform QuanticMind with plans to integrate the technology into its automated ad management platform called Basis.
Although Shawn Riegsecker, Centro’s CEO and founder, declined to say how much Centro paid, he did share that QuanticMind reached $10 million in yearly revenue at its pinnacle and that the deal price is a multiple of that amount.
QuanticMind raised just over $30 million since 2015 when the company was founded as a search engine marketing platform.
But unlike other players in the SEM space, which are primarily workflow tools for keyword management, QuanticMind uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to connect and analyze the data that powers its optimization offering for paid search advertising and retail sites. QuanticMind can automatically adjust bids on numerous keywords.
“They’re able to handle tens of thousands of SKUs,” Riegsecker said.
And that’s something that was missing in Centro’s Basis ad management platform, which has its own DSP but no way to natively power search and social buying.
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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 Eric Picard, chief product officer at Yieldmo.
There’s a revolution happening in digital media, primarily driven by a new focus on privacy. Major players at the core of the digital ecosystem have decided that privacy is a core value, and have made fundamental changes that block many standard practices. This change is going to upend the industry as we know it, and offers huge opportunities for anyone in the right position to take advantage of it.
Let’s work our way from where we’ve been to where we are, and then talk about where we’re going.
Wave 1: In the beginning (1996-1998)
The first wave of ad tech was about establishing scalable ways to operate the digital advertising business. Someone had to figure out how to sell ads in advance of the campaign running, how to implement and operate campaigns, how to track delivery and how to bill customers. We saw the rise of ad servers, the creation of sales and ad operations tools and workflows and the invention of buy-side ad serving. And we saw significant growth.
Wave 2: Formats, Targeting, Tracking, Attribution 1.0 (1999-2001)
After the basics got sorted, we saw innovative work in rich media ad formats (things like interactive ads, video, audio, visual effects, over-the-page, expanding ads, etc.). My first startup, Bluestreak, developed many of these formats. Across the industry we saw significant innovation in targeting of ads. (User behavior was tracked and turned into audience segments, which could be sold.) And a new attribution discipline emerged to measure what happened after a person saw or clicked on an ad.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Platform check
Australians started seeing links from news publishers on Facebook again after the platform gained some concessions from the Australian government over legislation that will require platforms to pay media organizations. During the dark period, social traffic from Facebook flatlined for many publishers, sites with urgent health and weather information were blocked by Facebook and misinformation filled the void. Now, Facebook will have time to strike its own deals with publishers. But is platforms paying publishers the solution? Such deals will hurt small, long tail publishers who greatly benefit from Facebook driving them traffic, but are unlikely to see Facebook pay them directly, the newsletter A Media Operator argues.
Come Together
You know it, we know it. There’s some crazy consolidation out there. Magnite buys SpotX. Flashtalking buys Protected Media. LiveRamp grabs Datafleets. Those are just a few. But why is it happening? Essentially, writes Digiday’s Seb Joseph, everyone is striking while the iron is hot. “Valuations for ad tech companies are at all-time highs with renewed interest in ad tech among both strategic and private equity investors,” he writes. “What’s more, capital is cheap.” Case in point, Magnite’s magnificent stock performance enabled it to shell out over $1 billion for SpotX. And identity-related headwinds might also be driving consolidation. “Companies that were once built to prosper from a fragmented landscape are having to do the opposite,” Joseph writes. “They’re trying to cater to both the buy and sell sides of the programmatic market just like the ad networks that drove ad tech’s early successes.”
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PubMatic, in its first earnings call since going public, reported Q4 revenue of $56.2 million, a 64% increase from the year before. The company was also profitable, with a 72% gross margin.
The exchange’s stock rose 10% in after-hours trading.
Despite the pandemic, PubMatic grew revenue 31% for the full year, totaling $148.7 million. That revenue doesn’t reflect media spend, but rather the fees that PubMatic collects for all the advertising dollars flowing through its exchange.
“The COVID impact has made the internet advertising opportunity significantly bigger than we anticipated pre-COVID,” said CEO Rajeev Goel. “People were spending their time on the internet and doing things like car shopping and fitness classes online. We executed against that opportunity to grow our revenue and market share.”
One factor behind PubMatic’s growth has been its deepening relationship with the buy side. PubMatic has made supply path optimization (SPO) deals with marketers, such as P&G and Bayer. Those deals now account for 25% of PubMatic’s revenue, up from 10% the year before.
“When you have an unwieldy supply chain, and too many partners you’re spending on, it’s very hard to innovate,” Goel said.
PubMatic is striking more of these deals as buyers seek transparency into their supply chain. Buyers also want to make their marketing more efficient during the pandemic and consolidate with scaled players, Goel said. PubMatic has increased its agency sales force in order to have more conversations with marketers and agencies.
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Snap wants investors to know that monetization is and will continue to be a top priority.
At the company’s first investor day event on Tuesday, executives emphasized Snap’s focus on investing in its ad stack, expanding into new international markets and growing its advertiser base, including small and local businesses.
After revamping its self-serve ad platform over the past couple of years, Snap is now in a position to drive multiple years of more than 50% revenue growth, said Peter Sellis, the exec in charge of developing and growing Snapchat’s suite of ad products.
Snap’s stock popped on the news.
But it’s been a long journey to get to this point, Sellis said.
When Snap first started monetizing, advertisers mostly saw it as an experimental buy that required custom creative, like vertical video and expensive one-off lenses and filters.
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