A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is written by Jed Hartman, Chief Commercial Officer, Channel Factory
The 30-second spot has been the undisputed ruler of advertising units since the birth of broadcast TV. The storytelling, the emotion, the impact and the ROI have all helped this resilient format retain its position as the lynchpin of commercial messaging in TV in a changing world. Agencies and brands still plan their ad investments around it, while media owners owe their atmospheric stock prices to it.
But with the rise of TikTok (and other mobile video platforms), the acceleration of OTT and the proliferation of skip buttons on digital videos, we’ve entered a new age of ad avoidance. Will the king of ad formats be unseated? Yes and no. The winning creative ad plans of the future will still contain 30-second spots (along with other units), but the creative execution of these longer ads will change dramatically.
Mobile creativity
Video ads have been changing for a while, even as the 30-second spot has extended its epic run. Many advertisers are already comfortable with six-second bumper ads, which are commonplace in mobile experiences. The key statistic here is that 70% of YouTube traffic is on mobile, where attention spans are shorter and access to the skip button instantaneous.
Shorter ads and ads with uniquely mobile features – such as swipe-up and vertical orientation – perform better on platforms including TikTok and Snapchat that center on transient, bite-sized content. Consumer lifestyles no longer match well to 30-second ads, and this is especially true on mobile.
But this hasn’t stopped brands from trying. Many ad buyers still shoehorn 30-second ads onto YouTube in a bid to extend reach, without editing creative. Consumers predictably drop out before the brand is first mentioned, perhaps seven or 10 seconds in, and the impression is wasted. (A video ‘view’ as defined by MRC is two seconds in view, meaning advertisers can and frequently do pay for a viewable video with no brand recall.)
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Too bad there isn’t a Black Friday deal on Facebook inventory – because it’s getting pricey.
Following a massive 38% spike in CPMs on Facebook between September and the week before the election, prices dipped back to more normal levels during the first week in November before climbing back up again, according to digital agency Aisle Rocket.
Coming into Thanksgiving week, Facebook CPMs were up by 30%, and Aisle Rocket expects to see the highest CPMs in history on the platform during the last two weeks of November. Prices will likely remain elevated until roughly Dec. 20 before coming back down to earth.
There are three primary reasons for the trend, said Noah Freeman, head of product at Aisle Rocket.
One, Facebook always sets a new record for most expensive CPMs every December. Two, the election triggered higher-than-normal pricing during the start of the holiday season. And, three, the pandemic is causing a massive uptick in online shopping.
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The first half of 2020 was pretty lean. This year is on track to be the slowest since 2015 in terms of deal activity, according to LUMA Partners.
But set the table and get out the gravy boat, because strategic M&A started to pick back up in Q3 and the momentum has continued into the fourth quarter.
Just last week, Norwegian telco Telenor sold Tapad to Experian, location data company Near bought fellow location data company Teemo and HuffPo finally found a new home with BuzzFeed.
Perhaps “the forces of M&A and consolidation have finally turned the page on what was certainly a gloomy string of fire sales [and] bankruptcies … that brought an end to some very storied ad tech companies,” says executive editor Zach Rodgers, pointing to Videology, Rocket Fuel and [x+1], Sizmek, AudienceScience and Collective.
But what about potential privacy issues loitering with intent in the background of some of these deals? Although Experian, for example, no doubt did its due diligence on Tapad, it’s a mighty interesting time to be buying a cross-device tracking (ahem, sorry, ID resolution) company considering that privacy regulations are coming into effect in the United States and around the world.
Also in this episode: What can brands and agencies do to take a more active role and make more responsible, positive choices about companies they work with and the environments that their media dollars support?
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Matt Prohaska, principal and CEO at Prohaska Consulting.
The quote in the headline, echoed by numerous political pundits, typifies the overreaction during and after the United States’ Election Day. Like many watching election results on that Tuesday night, I thought how badly the pollsters got it wrong, again.
Yes, presidential election polling has flaws – just read here, here, here and 25 other places for all the critiques and fun handwringing.
But remember, polling is near-impossible to be perfect, since under 100% of those surveyed tell the truth, or make themselves available to pollsters, or do exactly what they said they were going to do. These discrepancies make an accurate representation of what is likely to happen very difficult, which is partially why there are margin of error footnotes.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Amazon’s CTV Boom
Amazon may be a little late to the CTV advertising game, but it’s catching up quick thanks to its troves of shopper data and the built-in base of brands already selling on its platform, The Drum reports. Most of Amazon’s CTV ad inventory comes from content on Amazon’s Fire TV device and through its IMDB TV platform (rather than Prime Video), and industry watchers predict that advertiser interest in it is only going to grow. Amazon’s purview into the shopping world means that it knows, and in an identifiable way, what specific shows and products people and households are watching and buying. These factors are “especially compelling” to advertisers that are already selling on Amazon, and these are the buyers have have already leaned into Amazon’s CTV product, says Will Margaritis, senior VP of ecommerce at IPG’s Reprise Digital, who notes that packaged goods, electronics and DTC brands, in particular, are all pretty keen to buy Amazon CTV ads. [Related in AdExchanger: “Amazon Advertising Surges, And Plans Upgrades Around Twitch, Video And Platform Usability.”]
Spending Freefall
So much for a rebound. With the United States currently being rocked by a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, advertising and marketing spending will fall 7.1% this year to $494.23 billion, according to a new forecast released today by market researcher PQ Media. That’s a steeper rate of decline than the 6.8% downward spiral that global advertising and marketing spend is projected to sustain, MediaPost reports. But wait, what’s that? There’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. “While the economic damage wrought by the pandemic,” says PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn, “will squelch a decade-long expansion of the media economy this year,” don’t forget about the emergence of new advertising and marketing opportunities. There’s streaming video, audio, mobile gaming and apps, social media and influencer marketing, digital product placement, content marketing and virtual events – all of which are expected to hasten the industry’s recovery going forward. Even so, PQ Media projects that the global advertising and marketing economy will fall to $1.278 trillion this year, its lowest volume since 2017.
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Wyclef Jean has seen up close the devastation that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on Black-owned businesses.
The three-time Grammy Award–winning musician and founding member of acclaimed hip-hop group the Fugees said that his friends, Medjine and John “Jube” Altino, struggled to keep their business, Vibez Juice & Vegan Cafe in Jersey City, NJ afloat.
“[The business] started off real well and then COVID-19 hit and they were not prepared,” he told AdExchanger. “The first thing they did, like everyone else, was you shut down and figure out how you’re going to slowly open back up, and during that process the business started to go under.”
Luckily, Vibez locked in some help from angel investors and worked on a strategy to slowly reopen, a plan that included curbside and online services.
Still, Jean said he wants to see the business survive, and he thought of the many other Black-owned businesses – particularly friends who own music venues – that are also struggling or were forced to shut down all together. This holiday season, he said, will be critical to their survival.
“I was like, what about the companies that are not as fortunate,” he said. “You have to multiply that times how many people are actually losing their businesses, because a lot of these businesses – besides the online shopping – a lot of these people that I know with Black-owned businesses, they depend on a lot of that foot traffic too. That was a heavy part of their business.”
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The more the merrier.
App attribution company AppsFlyer has a late breaking addition to its $210 million investment round, which closed in January: Salesforce Ventures.
Although Salesforce is only taking a small percentage of AppsFlyer as part of the round extension – less than 1% of the company, according to AppsFlyer CEO and co-founder Oren Kaniel – the investment is strategic.
“Shifts in the marketplace create challenges, but they also create opportunities,” Kaniel said. “And we – and Salesforce – see a lot of opportunity right now.”
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and Apple’s forthcoming IDFA changes as part of iOS 14, which Kaniel facetiously refers to as “COVID 14,” both happening at the same time has created an existential crisis for app developers and for the mobile measurement industry.
But this is a case where rather than souring investors on the mobile attribution space, uncertainty is leading them to make bets on which companies will end up being the resilient ones.
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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 Alison Levin, VP of global marketing solutions at Roku.
Black Friday has traditionally been the kick-off of the holiday season for the retail industry, but this year, like many other things in 2020, normal is no longer normal. As a result of the pandemic, three-quarters of consumers report they will not be setting foot inside a physical store on Black Friday this year, according to a Harris Poll survey. At the same time, that survey found that 40% of consumers plan to shop online for Black Friday deals and that nearly two-thirds of Americans will be well underway with their holiday shopping before Thanksgiving.
This is not necessarily bad news for marketers who are prepared to adapt to the “normal of now.” Despite all of the COVID-19 impacts, Deloitte predicts that holiday shopping will actually increase this year, topping $1 trillion in sales between November and January.
The evolving shopping patterns that are shifting when and where and how consumers make purchases has created an expanded playing field for brand marketers. What used to be three separate moments over the course of late November/early December – Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday – will now be combined and expanded over the course of the entire month of November and into December.
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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 Jason Bier, chief privacy officer at Adstra Data.
The DOJ’s antitrust suit, together with 11 state’s attorneys general, contains surprising revelations about the extent of Google’s alleged illegal search Monopoly.
In less than a page of writing, page 49, paragraphs 154-159 detail allegations that Google, Apple and Mozilla conspired to drive traffic to Google's search business, with Apple and Mozilla receiving a 40% cut of browser-based search revenues through the agreement. These allegations, if proven true, outline a brazen scheme to control the advertising industry. One must go back to the railway barons of the (last) Gilded Age to find an adequate comparison to a monopoly of such scope and severity.
The outcome of the DOJ’s suit is uncertain, and Google’s future also depends on lots of factors, including anticipated actions from other states and from countries around the world, such as Australia, Italy, China and the United Kingdom – all preparing antitrust actions against Google.
But the damage to Google is more significant than it may appear.
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