Edgemesh Server, a commerce-based site and server operator, launched its first solution targeted at the ad industry this month to help commerce companies identify and root out bots and automated traffic that trigger valueless ad clicks.
Edgemesh is one of several new cloud and mar tech solutions that see programmatic advertising and commerce as a growth opportunity, but aren’t wading into ad tech themselves.
The company works primarily with online merchants and retailers, as well as some media companies, including Hearst, said Co-Founder and CEO Jacob Loveless.
AdExchanger caught up with Loveless.
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Even the experts at companies whose future depends on explaining the value exchange of personalized advertising to consumers struggle to make a convincing argument.
“It’s amazing that an industry that creates messaging to sell things to people has done such a poor job communicating this very basic value exchange,” said Ana Milicevic, principal and co-founder of digital consultancy Sparrow Advisers, speaking at LUMA’s Digital Media Summit earlier this week.
Part of the problem is that the ad industry’s MO has been to “overcomplicate” matters, said Lauren Wetzel, chief operating officer at InfoSum.
For evidence, just look at the overly crowded identity vendor landscape.
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“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today’s column is by Chris Keune, Kargo VP of data science and product.
Netflix has suffered from flat subscriber growth in recent quarters, tanking the stock price and internal morale. Now, without a diversified revenue model, the company has announced that it will open up its content to nonpaying subscribers in an ad-supported model.
But a move to sell ads doesn’t have to be a fall from grace. If done right, Netflix can set the standard for modern media companies. It can offer a model where content, commerce and commercials combine into a single, seamless experience.
There are a number of huge opportunities that no streaming content provider has captured yet, from livestreaming retail to immersive content-as-advertising. Netflix can be the company to make it happen.
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The Vibe Wars
TikTok has launched an ad product called Branded Mission, which identifies potential influencers and puts paid media behind content even if it isn’t part of a campaign.
“Turn top-performing videos into ads,” is how TikTok puts it in a release. In a nutshell, that means giving the TikTok community a “creative hand” in the ads that are part of a brand campaign and also helps brands discover emerging creators broadly across TikTok. It’s a two-way street.
This TikTok news is part of a cold war being waged between the social platforms to secure their creative dominance.
Snapchat, for instance, reshaped ad creative with the shift to vertical video. The Pixy, Snap’s new drone that captures pictures while hovering around you (it’s basically an automated selfie stick married to a drone), is yet another example of a content creation play. Pixy-filmed media has an unmistakable Snapchat vibe, even if it’s later pushed to other platforms.
Facebookagram has tightened up its ad platform this year, too, by requiring creative to be made within its system. Meta is tired of advertisers repurposing TikTok posts, just without the watermark. It’s a moral blow for Instagram when ads and viral content were originally (and quite obviously) made by and for TikTokers.
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Although the gaming audience is a lot more diverse than many marketers give it credit for, games are still extremely popular with young people, particularly young men.
Which is why advertisers looking to reach this often-elusive demo are turning to in-game ads.
Video games are a valuable connection to these audiences at a time when they’re highly engaged.
Independent record label EMPIRE is well aware of the crossover appeal between video games and certain subgenres of music, including rap, said Peter Kadin, SVP of marketing at EMPIRE.
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Retracing the customer journey from impression to transaction is the holy grail of marketing attribution.
But consumer behavior is messy. In today’s hybrid retail environment, customers can window shop in person or comparison shop online before completing their purchase in a store or on the internet. Or they partake in “buy online, pick up in store” (BOPIS).
The need to capture the customer’s journey between online and offline behavior was the seed for Foursquare’s new Closed Loop feature, the location data platform’s latest addition to its attribution product, said James Kung, Foursquare’s senior director of product management.
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Children’s toys are simple. But advertising them? Not so simple.
WowWee is a large-scale, family-owned children’s toy manufacturer with clients including Walmart and Target. The company also advertises through multiple video channels – linear TV, streaming (e.g., YouTube or Hulu) and social platforms like TikTok and Meta.
On Wednesday, WowWee shared the results of an initial test campaign with contextual video company Precise TV. The campaign ran in the fall of last year and targeted co-viewing parents on YouTube – meaning an adult is presumably watching with a child – across 2.3 million households. The contextual data helped to quadruple the ROAS compared with the same ad budget for a previous campaign.
The results are reassuring because, for the children’s vertical in particular, all these media channels have one thing in common: strict limitations on data-driven advertising.
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“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
Today’s column is written by Keith Petri, CEO and founder of lockr.
If you don’t have the email address of the person you’re targeting, your digital ad isn’t working as hard as it should. Period.
It’s no secret that if an ad isn’t associated with a persistent ID of any type (cookie, device ID or hashed email), it loses more than half its value. Regardless of whether you’re a publisher, a brand or a marketer, as cookies and device IDs continue to disappear, this problem will continue to worsen. As a result, publishers and retailers are desperate for the one identifier that is not going away: email addresses.
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The Four-Minute Mile
Details of the new Disney+ ad-supported tier are leaking as Disney lays the groundwork for its upfronts sales pitch.
For one thing, Disney+ will carry about four minutes of commercials per hour, with zero ads for preschooler-aged accounts, The Wall Street Journal reports.
HBO Max also benchmarked its new ad-supported tier at four minutes per hour; Peacock sits at about five minutes, Hulu more like eight. Linear commercials soak more than 18 minutes per hour.
Disney+ ads are expensive, as one might expect. But the company won’t let advertisers purchase ads for specific programs, which they can do on linear TV. The new Disney ads will have the vibe of a lucky dip (“Ooh, we got a Marvel and some Star Wars!”).
Disney will also prohibit alcohol brands, political ads and rival streaming services or entertainment studios, Variety reports. No poaching on Mickey’s preserves.
Although, the conquesting policy isn’t new. YouTube TV can’t advertise on Hulu and hasn’t been able to for years. Netflix already can’t air ads on Disney-owned networks. TV nets wouldn’t take Amazon Prime trailers during NFL games, so Amazon went over their heads and became an NFL sponsor (and now has exclusive distribution rights for Thursday Night Football).
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When Google announced the Android Privacy Sandbox in February – and subtly heralded the coming end of the Google ad ID – Google gave developers loads of lead time to prepare.
Google is putting out proposals over the course of this year with a beta release scheduled for sometime in Q4.
Makes sense. Advertising is Google’s main business.
But advertising is not Apple’s main business, which was evident in its somewhat careless rollout of its AppTrackingTransparency framework last year.
When, in June 2020, Apple first teased plans to start requiring an opt-in for the IDFA starting with iOS 14.5, mobile ad tech companies were left scrounging for details in ambiguous documentation.
But these days Apple is a bit more open, says Omer Kaplan, CRO and co-founder of ironSource, which offers monetization, user acquisition and mediation solutions for app developers.
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