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Google Cruises On Digital Ad Resurgence And Retail Client Gains Sponsored Product Ads Have Taken Over Amazon Search – And They Won’t Stop There Taboola Targets Ecommerce And Affiliate With $800M Deal For Connexity Ad Agency Holding Companies Celebrate Return Of Ad Revenue And Regained Confidence Advertiser Perceptions Cookieless Future Report Captures A “Snapshot” Of Industry Evolution Anthony Katsur On Leading The IAB Tech Lab – One Of The Toughest Gigs In Ad Tech Cloud Data Company Snowflake Gives Ad Tech A Boost By Joining UID2 Adelaide Raises $2 Million From Angel Backers To Develop Its Attention-Based Ad Metric RevenueCat’s Barnard On The Simmering Apple-Developer Feud

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Google Cruises On Digital Ad Resurgence And Retail Client Gains

by James Hercher // Posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2021 at 12:20 am.

Alphabet reported total revenue of almost $61.9 billion in Q2 2021, a 62% year-over-year increase. The company’s Q2 profit jumped from $7 billion in 2020 to $18.5 billion this year.

The eye-popping growth rate is misleading. Q2 last year was a disaster; The first time Alphabet (or Google before that) ever reported a yearly revenue decline. On top of the pandemic gutting last year’s revenue, Google unexpectedly recorded nearly $1 billion in savings when its server equipment outpaced expectations in terms of its usable lifespan, according to CFO Ruth Porat.

She cautioned against forecasting growth rates based on the strong return of digital ad revenue in the first half of this year, considering rising coronavirus case rates could dent that recovery and the increase in advertising may not continue at this pace.

Even with that grain of salt, though, it was a big quarter for Google.

One investor noted that even looking at two-year growth rates, Google Search hasn’t seen this level of growth in many years.

“Our strong second quarter reflects elevated consumer online activity and broad-based strength in advertiser spend,” Pichai said.

Why We Cannot Miss The Mark On Ad Frequency Capping In The Post-Cookie Era

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2021 at 12:05 am.

"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 Arnaud Blanchard, Product Director, Criteo.

As a marketer, would you rather show two identical ads to the same consumer or the same ad one time each to two different consumers?

The answer to that question depends not only on your campaign goals but on several underlying factors: who the specific consumers are, what their interests are, time of day and location. Even if you change two to 10 in this hypothetical scenario, the answer will still likely change depending on these details. You eventually might start to wonder whether increasing your reach is more important than driving a conversion.

But let’s face it: Consumers don’t want to see the same ad during every commercial break of their favorite show, especially not to the point where they can memorize the script of the ad. The same goes for ads online. Marketers today already face significant challenges, particularly as it relates to improving consumers’ attitudes toward advertising; poor frequency capping only exacerbates these challenges.

Frequency capping is the most basic, universal control for digital advertising. It is essential to improving user experience, ad quality, brand safety and advertising effectiveness. So why are we engaging in this dialogue now?

Strategic Commissioning Lets Marketers Tap Into Newfound Publisher Power

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2021 at 12:05 am.

"The Sell Sider" is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.

Today's column is written by Anthony Capano, North American Managing Director, Rakuten Advertising.

For far too long, publishers have gone unrewarded for their influence on consumer behavior. From driving awareness and attracting new-to-file customers to influencing conversion and inspiring long-term loyalty, publishers deliver on a diverse mix of KPIs for their brand partners. Yet publishers are too often only rewarded when their content is the last click before a purchase, leaving an increasingly prominent constituency of upper-funnel contributors, like content publishers and influencers, uncredited with the work they do in the customer journey.

Historically, the control over publisher attribution has laid solely in the hands of advertisers, who are nursing concerns over proving ROI and incrementality. But today, with the end of third-party cookies looming, we’re seeing a shift in the publishers’ favor that, if acted on, can put publishers in an advantageous position to negotiate more recognition of their cross-funnel contributions. It’s a shift toward better advertiser/publisher collaboration that is long overdue.

AdTheorent Goes The SPAC Route; Facebook Stops Targeting Those Under 18

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

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SPAC Theory

Ad tech is on fire. AdTheorent is the latest company to join the SPAC craze, following a string of public offerings, such as Innovid and Taboola, in the past two months alone. The SPAC merger in this case will value AdTheorent at $1 billion – that’s the plan, at least. Read the release. AdTheorent will trade on the Nasdaq, and the public listing is expected to net the company $121.5 million in funding to help fuel its expansion, including potential M&A. The New York-based company said it’s on track to take in $150 million in revenue this year, according to The Wall Street Journal. “The demand for digital content is increasing at a crazy rate. We’re benefiting from that,” AdTheorent CEO Jim Lawson said.

No Kidding

Facebook will no longer allow advertisers to target people under 18 years old based on their interests and activity on other sites. The company is trying to placate youth advocates, who argue that kids may not be equipped to make decisions about targeting, Reuters reports. Instagram also announced it is working on an “experience for tweens” with more transparency to parents and privacy and messaging controls. Facebook’s announcement should be taken with a grain of salt. Or perhaps a boulder. Advertisers will still be able to target under-18s based on location, gender or age. Facebook is already losing much of its capability to target based on cross-app or cross-site activity. Facebook consolidated its own attribution products because it no longer has the scale to attribute conversions across apps and the web and tie the results to targeted Facebook audiences. All the other popular ways to target are still allowed.

Big Upfront Deals Could Squeeze Programmatic Inventory

by Tony Rifilato // Posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2021 at 10:25 am.

After an upfront season where buyers snapped up CTV inventory, programmatic buyers are concerned that there won’t be much left.

This spike in digital video deals, along with a post-pandemic decrease in viewership, could make it difficult for advertisers to access programmatic inventory in the fourth quarter of 2021 and beyond, according to agency and ad tech executives who spoke to AdExchanger.

During this year’s upfront, buyers increased CTV ad spend by nearly 50% from last year to $4.5 billion, according to eMarketer. CTV sellers like Disney, Roku and NBCUniversal touted record commitments this year, fueled by digital video and a slew of new ad products to entice marketers to their respective streaming platforms.

While there’s been a rise of ad-supported streaming platforms over the past year – such as Peacock, Paramount Plus and HBO Max – these streaming platforms are also vying to attract users and advertisers with their low ad loads. Platforms such as HBO Max and Fox’s Tubi pledged to deliver the lowest ad loads in streaming.

“I think Q4 is going to be wild,” Kelly Metz, managing director of linear activation at Omnicom Media Group, told AdExchanger. Since most programmatic buys are made via private marketplace [PMP] deals, “you needed to be really savvy about using your upfront dollars as a point of leverage to gain access to PMP deals programmatically with all of the key premium content providers.”

We Have To Completely Relearn Marketing Measurement — And That’s A Good Thing

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2021 at 12:05 am.

"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 Ionut Ciobotaru, Chief Product Officer at Verve Group.

The past has finally caught up to the marketing industry. We can’t pretend we didn’t know it would. As an industry, we perverted identifiers and cookies, we failed to proactively address concerns raised by regulators and platforms, and now – like children who failed to heed the first dozen warnings from their parents – our much-abused toys are being taken away.

Although Google’s decision to delay final cookie deprecation until 2023 prompted a sigh of relief in many circles, the writing is still on the wall: The way we attribute ad performance, particularly omnichannel measurement, needs to fundamentally change — and soon.

Good. We had it all wrong anyway.

Cookies decay quickly and fail to aid advertisers in making cross-channel and multi-touch connections. Plus, third-party cookies are already irrelevant in Safari and Firefox. Reliance on this dated technology is resulting in increasingly skewed and inaccurate audience understandings.

It’s time to stop taking comfort in meaningless metrics. We now have the opportunity to take a step back and rebuild our approach to metrics – properly this time.

Google Revises Its Privacy Sandbox Timeline; Salesforce Nixes Audience Studio DMP

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

Deadlines, Give Or Take

Google Chrome has updated the timeline for its Privacy Sandbox proposals, its developer test kit for identity and measurement products meant to replace the purposes served by third-party cookies. The deadlines are quarterly benchmarks, not set dates à la GDPR. For example, the FLoC proposal, which governs cohort-based advertising IDs and campaign measurement, and the FLEDGE proposal, a potential way for sites to retarget users without third-party intermediaries, have concluded trial runs and are in discussion now. FLoC and FLEDGE should be in testing from Q4 this year until Q3 2022, when they shift to adoption mode. Core Attribution, a proposal for attributing ad views and clicks without cross-site IDs, is in initial tests, as is a first-party data proposal for publishers that own many domains and want to consolidate their identity data across URLs. Mostly, the timeline is a reminder of how much remains to be accomplished – or even tested. By Q4 next year, the entire Privacy Sandbox should be ready for a “Transition Period.” That lasts until Q3 2023, when a final three-month stint will see Chrome forever phase out third-party cookies. Maybe.

The Krux Of The Matter

Salesforce officially pulled the plug on Audience Studio DMP, the artist formerly known as Krux. The early DMP standouts, Krux and Lotame, were hit hard a few years ago, as publishers in particular shifted away from third-party data aggregation to first-party data management. But Salesforce sunsetting Audience Studio doesn’t reflect on other companies with DMP footprints: namely, Adobe and Oracle, as well as smaller players like Lotame. For one thing, Salesforce has always been a step further removed from ad tech than those companies. Or perhaps it had already made its next bet with the acquisition of the CDP Datorama in 2018. Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and Lotame have all since practically rebranded as CDPs. Regardless of the reason, Salesforce allowed the former Krux audience builder business to languish. “I don't think this is the start of an extinction event," Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller told TechTarget. "More like a slow-rolling evolution.”

3 Ways Marketers Can Future-Proof Their Media Strategies In The Cookieless Landscape

by AdExchanger Guest Columnist // Posted on Monday, July 26th, 2021 at 12:05 am.

"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 Nancy Smith, President and CEO of Analytic Partners.

While Google’s delayed plan to end the third-party cookie gives advertisers a sense of relief, data deprecation will still continue. The Google delay shouldn’t be considered a time to breathe a sigh of relief, but rather an opportunity to take advantage of the most valuable resource: time.

Marketers are still wrapping their heads around alternatives for tracking, targeting and measuring ads. Now is the time to prepare for major changes by adapting new metrics and measurement frameworks, implementing first-party data strategies and exploring alternative ways to connect with consumers.

Here are a few ways marketers can take advantage of Google's extended timeline and learn to adapt in the eventual data-deprecated, cookieless world.

Assess your dependencies

With the loss of cookies, advertisers will not be able to connect their campaigns to conversion events like registrations and purchases at scale. This means that real-time user-level data will be incomplete and have limited connection to key outcomes.

Brands should assess their dependencies on third-party cookies to understand the magnitude of the impact of data deprecation on their business.

Comcast Weaving In Olympics Footage; Startups Are Attracting Athletes

by Tony Rifilato // Posted on Monday, July 26th, 2021 at 12:03 am.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.

The Olympic Edge

During the Olympic Games, Comcast will interrupt its own commercials with near-live highlights and coverage, Variety reports, taking advantage of the fact it owns NBCUniversal and Olympic broadcast rights. “This makes the viewer feel like, ‘How did that just happen? I literally just watched that,’” said Todd Arata, Comcast’s SVP of brand marketing. For instance, Comcast has seven ads lined up featuring different sponsored athletes, and it will spice up those commercials with footage from the games. Another tactic will be more, shall we say ... contextual. One ad slated for primetime Saturday has a theme of sportsmanship, and the Comcast team tasked with incorporating shots from the Olympics will be on the lookout for relevant moments.

Rock’em Sock’em

The sock and clothing startup Bombas recently raised $150 million, and 45 athletes were among the investors, Sportico reports. To bring in investments from athletes, companies use athlete investment firms to connect sports stars to promising companies. “The private equity funds see us as an attractive group to help win a deal or add value strategically post-close,” said Matt Siegel, partner at one such athlete investment business. “It’s not like an influencer or marketing deal. These guys are treated as investors.” There are no endorsement requirements attached to the deals. But the appeal is clear. “We are big believers in the power of brand advocates,” said Bombas CEO David Heath.