By AdExchanger Guest Columnist
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is by Michael Wolk, Senior Director of Business Development at Goodway Group.
Connected TV (CTV) is booming. Yet, many midsize advertisers and agencies are hesitant to participate. Some of them think CTV CPMs are too high and their budgets aren’t big enough to make an impact. Others believe there’s a shortage of premium inventory available and they must settle for longtail CTV inventory. Or they think they must make CTV a low-funnel acquisition channel to justify the spend.
But here is where they are wrong.
Unlike traditional TV advertising, where big brands have historically had a massive advantage, CTV has closed the gap between large and small brands. That is if technology and data are used correctly.
Here are three misconceptions midsize advertisers should stop believing today.
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By AdExchanger
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Hungry For More
The movie “Minions: The Rise of Gru” would be a box office hit even without swarms of TikTok-obsessed users – aka “Gentleminions” – showing up to screenings dressed in suits. That’s organic.
But the Minions marketing team is also going to town with an absolutely ridiculous comarketing spree. Some examples include a branded banana cream Olipop soda, a Hippeas snack line, HelloFresh meal kits, packaged salads, vegan muffins … There are too many examples, so check out these two TikTok roundups.
Food and beverage brands really do love their co-branding deals.
But Minions isn’t the only example from this week. On Monday, Taco Bell announced that a product launch with the Kellogg’s-owned snack brand Cheez-Its had run out of supplies after a few days. Sorry to those who wanted but didn’t get their mitts on a giant novelty Cheez-It cracker.
Major studios have a long history of co-marketing deals, although the new Minions flick takes the cake. Speaking of, you can now get co-branded Minions banana pancakes from IHOP. But co-branded snack partnerships are also major data-gathering opportunities.
The Taco Bell Cheez-It Crunchwrap Supreme was only available to customers who ordered directly through the website or app. Yummy first-party data.
Last year, Mondelez told investors that a line of co-branded Pokemon Oreos was the company’s most successful launch ever – and they launched exclusively to ecommerce shoppers.
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What happens when your main monetization partner starts flagging your content as spam?
Just ask Freecycle.
The Freecycle Network is an online community that helps people donate still-usable items to keep refuse out of landfills. Users post listings of the things they want to give away, which makes Freecycle a publisher of sorts.
Although Freecycle is a nonprofit, it relies on advertising for between 30% and 50% of its annual operating budget, and its entire ad business is programmatic, said Deron Beal, Freecycle’s founder and executive director.
The company only has one full-time engineer on staff who handles backend web development as well as overseeing the site’s digital ad business.
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We might be in the “baby boom” of ad-supported streaming services.
Fun fact: Did you know Chicken Soup for the Soul pivoted out of books and now earns its keep primarily from manufacturing food, pet food and … streaming video?
That also means Chicken Soup is partaking in the grail quest for cross-device CTV measurement solutions.
Crackle Plus, formerly just Crackle, has been working with iSpot on measurement services since Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment acquired the streamer from Sony in 2019. On Wednesday, Crackle announced a three-year extension of that partnership.
“ISpot effectively helps us measure the audience we’re reaching and quantify incremental reach and efficiency to [our] brand advertisers,” said Darren Olive, EVP of national advertising sales and strategy at Crackle Plus. “We hope our relationship with iSpot will [make us] ready for that ‘next step’ as the media marketplace looks at alternate currencies.”
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By AdExchanger Guest Columnist
Omri ArgamanChief Growth OfficerZoomd “The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Omri Argaman, chief growth officer at Zoomd.
For years now, the digital advertising industry has been talking about the premature death of the ad network.
And it’s not surprising. Ad networks have been around for so long they predate the three-letter acronym naming trend: RTB, DSP and SSP.
Some have even said ad networks are the same as Demand Side Platforms (DSPs).
So how have ad networks, relics of the dot.com era, survived and even thrived in the 2020s? There are five main reasons.
1. Facilitating growth in gaming
Gaming is a growth engine for leading ad networks: Unity, AppLovin and ironSource.These ad networks have made their offering well-suited for games by enabling them to monetize through in-app ads in their games to generate revenue.
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By AdExchanger
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Out Of The Blocs
The European Parliament has voted decisively to sign two pieces of landmark legislation into law. The Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) both regulate online platform businesses much more aggressively.
The DMA targets gatekeeper platforms (namely Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta), while the DSA broadly applies to digital businesses, social media and online marketplaces. For example, tech companies with recommendation services must disclose to users why certain content shows up in their feed and also crack open the black box on how their algorithms work.
The DMA applies to businesses with an annual turnover of 7.5 billion euros and/or that have a market cap of 75 billion euros – meaning pretty much every large platform you know. And the fines are a doozie. The DMA calls for a maximum fine of up to 10% of global platform revenue. GDPR raised eyebrows with a 4% cap.
Andreas Schwab, a European Parliament member from Germany and backer of the legislation, hinted to reporters that Google or Meta will likely be the DMA’s first targets, TechCrunch reports. “But the key question – or the more difficult question will be – what core platform service will they choose first from one of these companies?” Schwab says. “That’s, I think, a very open question.”
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A podcast interview withJohn SnyderCo-FounderGrapeshot
Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying.
For a brand to use global keyword blocklists without considering the specific domain or campaign parameters is “most inappropriate,” says contextual advertising pioneer John Snyder on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Snyder is the former CEO of Grapeshot, one of the earliest contextual targeting companies on the programmatic scene.
He founded Grapeshot in 2006 with Dr. Martin Porter, a researcher and mathematician at Cambridge University. Oracle bought Grapeshot in 2018, and the technology was later integrated into the Oracle Data Cloud along with ad verification service Moat, which Oracle had acquired the year before.
But back to blocklists, “I mean, why not curate your words per campaign?” Snyder asks.
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Verve Group, the ad tech subsidiary of German ad software holding company MGI, has struck again with the acquisition of mobile DSP Dataseat.
The companies declined to share a price for the deal, which was announced on Tuesday, but all 25 of Dataseat’s employees, including co-founders David Philippson and Paul Hayton, will join Verve Group, which hired around 100 people during the first half of this year. Its total headcount now stands at more than 450.
The rationale behind the acquisition is simple, said Ionut Ciobotaru, co-CEO of Verve Group. It’s a privacy thing.
“We’ve been investing in privacy for a while now, from ATOM to Beemray,” Ciobotaru said, referring first to Verve Group’s homegrown “Anonymous Targeting on Mobile” solution, which uses on-device data to create cohorts rather than relying on identity-based targeting. Beemray is a contextual targeting company Verve Group acquired last year.
“The future is less about identity and more about group measurement,” Ciobotaru said.
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The words “video game advertising” conjure images of digital billboards in virtual worlds, but that doesn’t capture the full breadth of advertising opportunities video games have to offer.
Games can support intrinsic or native in-game ads, as well as ads that are delivered alongside gameplay but exist outside the game itself, like pause-menu display ads and rewarded video.
Marketers can also sponsor and advertise on channels related to gaming, such as at esports events and across online streaming platforms, particularly Twitch and YouTube.
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