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One week ago, social distancing was still at the top of our minds as we debated the steps needed to reopen.
But though America’s businesses haven’t emerged from hibernation, its citizens surely have – not in exhilaration but in a fury. Rage over police brutality against the black community exploded, all within the existing pressure cooker caused by the coronavirus lockdown.
This interview with Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan happened before the murder of George Floyd went viral and before the nationwide protests. In it, Guru reflects on – among other things – the importance of self-care when leading an organization. As he put it, if you’re not looking after yourself, then it’ll be difficult for you to look after others.
The US agency sector will lay off about 52,000 jobs over the next two years as media spend declines 23%, Forrester predicts. Agencies are projected to cut 35,167 jobs in 2020 and 16,578 in 2021.
The global picture is even starker, with the big six agency holding companies poised to eliminate an additional 49,695 global positions by 2021.
“It’s a dismal forecast,” said Jay Pattisall, analyst at Forrester and author of the report. “Layoffs are inevitable and already underway.”
To date, all of the major holding companies have announced layoffs, furloughs and voluntary pay cuts. This activity will only continue as large swaths of the economy remain shut down and categories such as travel and retail are dark.
“This set of circumstances is unprecedented,” Pattisall said. “The contraction of spending is across the board, and agencies as a service provider take the biggest hit.”
Advertising agencies, which have struggled to adopt technology and are experiencing a long-term financial decline, will be the hardest hit by layoffs.
Advertising agencies already account for more than 50% of layoffs across the sector, and they are currently laying off 15% of staff on average, compared to 7% at digital and media agencies. Digital and media agencies offer more relevant services to clients looking to embrace digital transformation and communications.
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Six months ago, South China Morning Post cut itself off from third-party data and switched to a first-party data platform dubbed Lighthouse.
“We wanted to give the whole business – commercial and editorial – access to quality first-party insights that they could use across the whole business,” said Ian Hocking, VP of digital at South China Morning Post.
The first-party data platform will allow South China Morning Post to achieve the next phase of growth. On the editorial side, that means turning its vast scale into a loyal readership. On the commercial side, that means giving advertisers more precise targeting capabilities.
South China Morning Post is part of a growing wave of publishers embracing first-party data. Hocking used to work at News UK, which built data platform News IQ. The New York Times recently announced that it would phase out third-party data, and publishers such as Vox Media, with Forte, are productizing their first-party data.
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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 Allison Schiff, senior editor at AdExchanger. It's part of a series of perspectives from AdExchanger's editorial team.
Mark Zuckerberg sees himself as a defender of free speech. His detractors consider him feckless at best, unscrupulous at worst.
Both can be true. By standing his ground, Zuckerberg is shirking his larger responsibility to ban or at least label speech that promotes violence.
As protests roil America in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Facebook and Twitter have taken very different approaches to handling moderation on their respective platforms.
Twitter decided to do something it’s never done before. It placed warning labels on tweets from public figures, including President Trump, that violate its policies.
An inflammatory tweet posted by Trump on Friday as the crisis deepened in Minnesota declaring that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” was almost immediately flagged for glorifying violence.
An identical message that was posted to Facebook on the same day remains untouched.
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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 Richard Eisert, partner at Davis & Gilbert.
The California attorney general just released a final version of the regulations implementing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and CCPA enforcement is still slated to begin on July 1. Before being finalized, the regulations were revised twice. The last round of revisions were adopted wholesale in the final regulations, which remain the only guidance provided by the attorney general on how the CCPA will be enforced.
Although it has received surprisingly little attention, the final regulations leave intact one of the most impactful changes for the ad tech ecosystem. This change – made when the draft regulations were revised earlier in the year – relates to how companies can “sell” personal information that they did not collect from consumers directly. The language in the final regulations is far from clear, and how the attorney general will answer this question will have major implications for the digital advertising landscape since it will determine how downstream participants who receive personal information from others can carry out media buys involving targeted ads.
In the now-final regulations, businesses that indirectly collect personal information from consumers may only “sell” onward that personal information without providing a pre-collection notice to consumers if they are registered as “data brokers” under California’s new data broker law. This highlights the rising importance of the data broker registry but creates new challenges for companies that have not yet registered as data brokers.
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American adults streamed almost 142 billion hours of content during the week of May 11, up roughly 43% from a year ago, according to Nielsen. And The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green predicted during the company’s Q1 earnings call that reach on CTV will “rival and even surpass” linear TV in the near future.
But agency executives argue the math isn’t that simple, because the definition of reach differs based on each advertisers’ audience, budget constraints and business objectives.
Many advertisers can’t accomplish their broad reach and awareness goals without linear TV simply because broadcast has higher penetration in US households, according to Gibbs Haljun, total investment lead at GroupM’s Mindshare.
“You can get broadcast television for free,” he said. “To access CTV, you need an internet-enabled device.”
As a result, Americans watch more hours of linear TV overall. In March, the average US household spent less than one-quarter of its time with TV on streaming platforms, with a majority of that on Netflix, according to Nielsen. So brands trying to reach massive audiences will struggle to meet their reach goals without some linear TV in their media mix.
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Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Going Dark
If you noticed your Instagram feed flooded with black squares, it was because of Blackout Tuesday, a collective protest against racism and police brutality. Started by the music industry, major retailers and brands such as Nordstrom and Madewell soon got involved, reports Business Insider. But should brands try to contribute to this movement? As The Drum reports, brands risk being seen as shallow or opportunistic, as happened with L’Oréal. This is less of an issue for advertisers with a history of allyship with the black community, such as Ben & Jerry’s and American Express, according to Sabrina Clarke-Okwubanego, co-founder of Niche On Demand. “Simply put, they have a relationship with the black community. Their activist voice contributes to real change because they have acknowledged there is a problem, called it by its name openly and accept the costs.” But marketing strategy aside, should brands have posted a black square to their Instagram feed – or would it have been more helpful to post nothing at all and let individual voices take over for a day?
The Shamrock Shake
Adweek changed hands on Tuesday, when Beringer Capital announced it had sold the publishing and events business to Shamrock Capital for an undisclosed sum. Adweek has had at least 10 owners, counting Shamrock, in its 41 years, MediaPost reports. It would be a very different matter with, say, Ad Age, which has been owned by the family-controlled Crain Communications for its entire 90-year history. Shamrock owns media and ad tech businesses, including Ad Results Media, a podcast and radio ad network, OOH media company Branded Cities and the mobile game and app studio Maple Media. “Shamrock’s portfolio of holdings and expertise in the media space makes them an ideal partner for our next phase of growth,” said Adweek CEO Jeffrey Litvack.
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The Weather Channel and AMC Networks said Tuesday they have joined OpenAP, where national broadcasters can provide targetable audiences for advertisers.
Both broadcasters will make their entire slate of national linear and OTT inventory available through OpenAP. Media buyers negotiate with the networks directly and activate through OpenAP, which normalizes audience definitions, day parts and targeting across member networks.
OpenAP’s ranks also include NBCUniversal, Fox, Viacom and Univision. The company, which launched in 2017 as a consortium between Turner, Fox, and Viacom, is now opening up its platform to smaller networks as it shifts its business model. The company previously used to charge networks a membership fee but now charges a transaction fee for demand facilitated through its platform, said CEO David Levy.
“What benefits the buy side is sophisticated, scaled and centralized products,” he said. “The membership model doesn't scale to accommodate a variety of publishers.”
AMC Networks, which is expanding its content distribution this year across multiple streaming and OTT platforms, saw OpenAP as an opportunity to let ad buyers reach its viewers wherever they watch AMC content, said Evan Adlman, SVP of advanced advertising and digital partnerships.
“Everyone in today’s world is purchasing media in different ways,” he said. “It’s our goal to build out as many connections with platforms as we can to allow marketers to choose how they want to buy our content.”
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Welcome to Ad Tech Madness, a no-holds-barred Twitter tournament where David finally has a fighting chance against Goliath.
Born as a content marketing stunt by Beeswax CEO Ari Paparo, Ad Tech Madness pits ad tech players against each other in daylong races for votes, and has captured pent-up desire for live competition and for elimination bracketology, without March Madness, the U.S. Open or the Olympic Games.
Day eight of competition on Monday saw the third major upset of the Ad Tech Madness tournament, when under-seeded Adobe eliminated The Trade Desk in the first round of the Buy-Side bracket. That followed the elimination of the Amazon DSP at the hands of AdRoll, and Branch.io knocking off Google’s AdMob.
For those who haven’t tracked the tournament, we’re a week in and starting the round of 32.
“As with everything in ad tech, nobody gives a shit except other people in ad tech, who take it very seriously,” said Antonio García Martínez, a product exec at mobile analytics company Branch.io.
The Rules
The tournament began with 64 teams, representing 61 different companies. Google started with three no. 1 seeds, with AdMob, Display & Video 360 (DV360) and Google Ad Manager (GAM).
Four match-ups per day test eight companies’ ability to turn out voters for a Twitter poll published by Paparo. The bracket’s four quadrants are organized into Buy-Side, Sell-Side, Data and Mobile companies, each with seeds ranked one to 16.
As befits an ad tech tourney, the rules are: Do whatever it takes to achieve a meaningless KPI (in this case, votes for a Twitter poll), while accepting arbitrary rules and the vicissitudes of the internet.
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The world is on lockdown (and fire), but the march toward enforcement of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is proceeding apace.
On Monday, the California attorney general’s office submitted the final proposed implementation regulations for the CCPA to the California Office of Administrative Law (OAL).
There appear to be no major changes made between this version and the previous one released in February. Click here to read the full text.
“All the regulations match broadly with the expected drafting and recent guidance,” said Cillian Kieran, CEO of privacy compliance startup Ethyca. “But given the pandemic, not only are businesses struggling with the current economic pressure of a major pandemic, they have to comply with a far-reaching set of business process-changing regulations.”
Businesses are required to provide a clear notice at or before the point of collection of personal information. Consumers have the right to know about and delete any personal information that is collected, disclosed or sold. And businesses have to honor the consumer’s right to opt out of the sale of personal information.
The OAL now has 30 working days to review the regs (plus an additional 60 calendar days under an executive order related to the COVID-19 pandemic). That’s 90 days total – and CCPA enforcement is still slated to begin on July 1.
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