“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
After this exclusive look for subscribers, today's column by Jason Fairchild, CEO and co-founder of tvScientific, will appear on AdExchanger.com on Monday.
Since the 1950s, marketers have instinctively bought into the power of TV advertising, despite the fact that we have never been able to effectively measure its impact.
This somewhat inconvenient truth, coupled with the high cost of TV advertising, has made TV the private playground of an elite group of national advertisers who can afford to spend big on awareness and image marketing. More than 60% of the $74 billion TV ad industry is driven by only 200 advertisers.
But the rise of connected TV (CTV) is changing all of this with huge implications for the entire media ecosystem, from consumers to marketers to broadcasters. The ability to measure CTV in the same way and with the same analytical rigor as search and social channels is for the first time opening up TV advertising to the 9 million advertisers that are active in search and social media marketing today.
Call it the Second TV Revolution.
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Party Like It’s 95
Google Chrome 95, the latest browser version, was released from beta on Wednesday. It won’t make marketers quake in their boots, but this is the first version of Chrome that will allow people to opt in to a reduced user-agent string, which is the data passed to a site operator regarding each user. The reduced UA string would only pass along a few parameters, including the browser type, operating system and whether someone is using a desktop or mobile device. The UA string reduction is part of Google’s efforts to curtail fingerprinting, which is why it strips any user-level insights OS and device. Apple’s iOS 14 privacy update caught the industry off-guard because it was a closely kept secret until the release date, just like new iPhone features. But Google’s march toward Apple-esque privacy protections is more of a quiet drip-drip of small changes. In July, Google zeroed out its Android Advertising ID, switching to an Analytics ID so data cannot be used for user-level ad targeting. And earlier this week the company introduced a data privacy console for Google Play that gives app developers a way to demonstrate how and why they collect data in more detail and using more natural language (with the hope of collecting more opt-ins).
Pindow Shopping
PayPal is considering a deal to buy Pinterest, the social net for sharing images and ideas (clothes, recipes, interior design, etc.), Bloomberg reports. PayPal discussed a valuation of $70 per share, approximately $45 billion for the company. Pinterest stock jumped from $55 per share to the low $60s during the day based on the news. PayPal is in acquisition mode. Already this year, it’s bought the crypto startup Curv and ecommerce logistics company Happy Returns. In 2019, PayPal acquired the ecommerce and consumer promotions tool Honey for $4 billion. But Pinterest would be the crown jewel by greatly expanding PayPal’s addressable reach and giving PayPal a window into trends and content related to online shopping. Pinterest users, dubbed “Pinners,” use the platform as a discovery hub for pre-purchase ideas. Social commerce ambitions are propelling many big shopping companies. A PayPal-Pinterest hookup would be a differentiator from Shopify, for instance, which has social platform integrations, but not its own content fortress. In other Pinterest news, the platform is ponying up a $20M creator fund and plans to expand creator monetization tools. Ad Age has more.
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One year after acquiring the customer data platform Segment, cloud communications API platform Twilio is making its first foray into mar tech.
On Wednesday, Twilio launched Twilio Engage, a next-gen marketing cloud of sorts that aims to take on traditional marketing clouds by taking the pipes Segment built to process, query and segment data and merging them with all of Twilio’s communication channels.
Twilio Engage focuses on behavioral and clickstream data rather than demographic data.
“Legacy marketing clouds are not set up to do anything with behavioral data, but if you want to get to the level of personalization you see from Amazon, Facebook or Google, it all comes back to behavioral data,” said Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Twilio Segment, the post-acquisition name for the Segment CDP, which he co-founded in 2011.
Although the Twilio Engage UI is the same sort of shtick marketers are used to with their cloud partners, what happens “under the covers” is a different story, Reinhardt said.
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It’s a post-ATT world, and Facebook is still figuring out how to live in it.
On Wednesday, Facebook shared an update about what it’s doing to triage its data signal losses due to Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework, including the release of several new measurement-focused products.
Facebook needs to make moves like these pronto.
Formerly immutable truths – Facebook’s ability to drive ad performance and precisely measure results, for example – are no longer so immutable following Apple’s iOS 14 privacy update earlier this year.
Last month, Facebook estimated that it’s been underreporting ad performance on iOS 14 Apple devices by roughly 15%, because it’s no longer able to attribute installs as accurately as in days of yore (ahem, last year).
Here’s a rundown of what’s new and what’s coming as Facebook overhauls its attribution capabilities. (Click here to read the full blog post by Graham Mudd, Facebook’s VP of product marketing for ads.)
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By Mathieu Roche, co-founder and CEO of ID5
This article is sponsored by ID5.
Identity is making lots of headlines. What used to be a niche topic is getting a lot of attention now that the means to it are at risk. The good news is that, as the cookie panic subsides, it’s giving way to an open-mindedness toward the future of identity across the advertising industry. All of a sudden, there’s a willingness to understand how user identification will work when traditional identification methods are no longer available.
While we’re almost in that future, it’s held back by the present perceived complexity of identity – and a number of factors are making it harder to crack:
- Fragmentation and lack of unity. Ad tech platforms use different methods to identify users in different environments: a combination of cookies (on the web), MAIDs (in mobile applications) and IP addresses (on CTV).
- Privacy expectations. Digital advertising has to comply with growing regulations related to the collection and processing of user data. Some of the old practices that we have deployed to identify users will no longer be compliant with privacy requirements (or already aren’t, depending on the region).
- Too many players on the board. The deprecation of cookies and MAIDs has pushed many media and data platforms to create their own identity offerings. But often their methods don’t have an overarching approach to identity and tend to serve specific use cases that are closer to their business and clients. This proliferation is creating more confusion and further unnecessary fragmentation.
If the industry wants to transition to a future-proofed identification infrastructure, we need to simplify today’s system and align with some common principles.
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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 Adam Schenkel, Senior Vice President, Global Commercial Development at GumGum.
We’ve all been there: We’re reading a fascinating article or blog on the web when a glistening ad appears. However, the catchy ad disappears before you can click on it, and another appears in its place. It can be a frustrating moment for a consumer who was eager to click on that ad.
But imagine being the advertiser who paid for his/her ad to appear on that slot, only to see another ad appear in its place. The advertiser may not have known his/her ad would be replaced with another ad – sometimes a competitor’s ad – within seconds. Imagine that level of frustration.
The revolving door of ads in one slot on a web page is known as ad refreshing or ad reloading. The common practice of ad refreshing isn’t new, nor is it a problem. What is a problem is the lack of transparency some publishers provide to advertisers prior to selling the ad space.
In the age where transparency has proven to be of utmost value to the public, it’s time to set an industry-wide bar on ad refreshing standards. It’s time for publishers to be transparent with their advertisers.
There are plenty of publishers who are fully candid with their clients and users about how they practice ad refreshing.
But the same isn’t true across the industry.
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Wait, Wait … Addressable Linear?
AMC Networks announced a partnership with The Trade Desk and Magnite to run addressable ads on linear TV. “This is a huge development, for us and for the entire industry, unlocking the value of linear inventory,” said Evan Adlman, SVP of advanced advertising and digital partnerships at AMC Networks. AMC is committed to making 100% of its linear reach available to addressable channels, Variety reports – although, it must be noted, that’s not the same as selling all of AMC Network’s inventory via addressable buys. Even if AMC is committed, it still needs players across the industry to enable addressability. These ad buys rely on clean room data onboarding services (such as Blockgraph or LiveRamp) that match IDs between the programmer and the advertiser, with platforms to execute the deal (The Trade Desk and Magnite in this case). The campaigns require identifying a logged-in, authenticated viewer recognized by both the advertiser and AMC Networks, and typically there needs to be an integration directly with the smart TV operating system. If not, an addressable ad can only get to TV feeds via set-top box video-on-demand or satellite services that can sell a portion of inventory. “We believe in the enhanced efficiency and automation of programmatic buying,” Adlman said. Which is a pretty amazing statement in and of itself, considering broadcasters have long abhorred the P-word.
Pixel Passes Pack A Peck Of Packaged Products
Apple’s new iPhone and MacBook models start at a cool $1,000 and $2,000, respectively. Twenty-four hours after the MacBook release, Google unveiled its new Pixel smartphone, starting at $599 – a $100 discount from the previous model. Google is borrowing one Apple strategy, though, by releasing its first major bundle of cloud data, media and services tied to a monthly installment plan for the smartphone. The Google Pixel Pass, as it’s called, includes 200GB of Google One cloud storage, YouTube Premium, YouTube Music Premium and Google Play Pass (a gaming subscription), The Verge reports. It’s a good discount for customers who subscribe to one or more of Google’s ad-free services or those who would be happy to drop a competitor’s version to save money. But Google is enforcing tough rules to keep customers from dining and dashing, so to speak. Anyone who cancels the Pixel Pass pays off the remainder of a two-year contract at a “non-discounted price” – and loses access to each of the bundled services.
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Snowflake, the cloud data services company, launched a Media Cloud on Tuesday, bringing together customers and businesses with specific needs related to media and advertising.
The new Media Cloud is a suite of data products and integrations for services such as measurement and attribution, identity resolution, profile enrichment and advertising activations.
Experian’s identity data and onboarding, for instance, will be natively integrated with the Media Cloud. Other early partners include VideoAmp for measurement and Comscore and Merkle for data enrichment.
Any Snowflake account holder was already able to share data with any other Snowflake customer. But by using the Media Cloud, data isn’t sent back and forth by API as formerly was the case for data sharing or collaborations between different Snowflake customers, said Bill Stratton, Snowflake’s head of media, advertising and entertainment verticals.
In the past, Experian would have to pull a company’s first-party data from Snowflake via API, resolve customer IDs between itself and the company and then port the final data back into Snowflake. Now, Experian can resolve IDs within the Media Cloud without any data leaving the system, Stratton said.
In addition to the time savings and more efficient resource management, companies inevitably lose data and match rates suffer when large data sets are passed from company to company by API.
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Lou Paskalis is on a mission to “save marketing from itself.”
“It has to go from what it is today, which is something I sort of endure to get things done, to something I love because it enables me to do things,” Paskalis says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Paskalis is a recognizable figure for many observers and executives in the digital media supply chain. As a long-time top media executive at Bank of America, Paskalis was vocal about issues facing the advertising industry, from brand safety to the acute need for more transparency.
Now, as president and COO of MMA Global, a job he took earlier this month, Paskalis is in a stronger position to effect broad change. Rather than blazing one trail as a marketer, he helms a marketing trade organization with more than 800 member companies representing marketers, martech and publishers.
“If you’re just an advertiser sitting with a bunch of other advertisers, you want a certain thing a certain way and you don’t care about the rest of the ecosystem,” Paskalis says. “But these conversations we’ve had around the MMA board table and other venues have allowed us to walk a mile in the shoes of our publisher partners, our tech partners and our agency partners – and recognize that we win together.”
Also in this episode: The role of quality journalism, the future of email-based identifiers, redefining the customer experience and who Paskalis would choose to have around the table if he could host a dinner party and invite any four people, alive or dead.
"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 Erin Madorsky, Managing Director, MiQ
By its very nature, the ad-tech industry has always put a premium on innovation, newness and progress. Modernizing and advancing technological solutions are inherently part of our DNA. Automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence are widely applauded developments born of a desire for more speed, more scale and more effectiveness.
But amid this push for progress, has the emphasis and value placed on tech come at the expense of the talent actually managing it? Have we deprioritized human capital so much that they’re now opting out of the equation altogether? And have historical associations with “managed services” played a role in this conundrum?
When programmatic technology first emerged, it offered an enticing self-service option for ownership over one’s media transactions. It began to displace ad networks, which were sometimes bogged down by bad actors, fraudulent tactics and inappropriate ad adjacencies.
As the need for transparency and quality control intensified, self-service innovation became the answer. This trend caused managed-service networks to be viewed as comparatively antiquated and slow, providing questionable quality and a lack of transparency.
Flash forward 20 years, and while much of today’s advertising industry leverages both programmatic tech and some form of managed service, an unfair stigma remains for the latter. Perceiving managed service with the decades-old characterization as “low tech” couldn’t be further from the truth, just as it would be inaccurate to associate all aspects of self-service with high quality and transparency.
In addition, pressure to maximize return on digital investments has put managed service at further risk. Can the industry prevail with such low regard for service? I don’t think it can.
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