Music video hosting service Vevo has graduated from the smartphone to the living room.
At the start of the pandemic, just 4% of its business came from connected TV.
Today, nearly 50% of Vevo’s business comes courtesy of CTV, mainly through numerous distribution partnerships with the likes of Samsung, Pluto TV, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Amazon’s Echo Show, Xumo, Comcast and Vizio.
Vevo’s focus on CTV started several years ago, but it was only last year when the ad dollars really started to flow, said Jesse Judelman, SVP of sales for the Americas at Vevo. Historically most consumption had come via YouTube.
“As a premium video platform, we could always theoretically compete with the broadcast networks and other big video players,” he said. “But it’s the shift in viewership to TV screens that’s really helped expand the type of advertisers we typically work with.”
Vevo has 150 million monthly active users in the US.
Judelman spoke with AdExchanger.
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Court Date
Dun, dun! Cue the “Law & Order” sound effect because the IAB Tech Lab is being taken to court in Germany by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) over what the advocacy group considers an ongoing breach of personal privacy by RTB-based online ad platforms (i.e. ad tech and the walled gardens). The person driving the suit is Johnny Ryan, former head of ecosystem at PageFair, an ad tech company that made publisher solutions to counteract ad blockers. He served a stint at Brave, a privacy-focused browser, where he tried to force regulatory action against RTB tech companies – EU data protection authorities have opened investigations, but not taken action on Ryan’s issues. Now a senior fellow at the ICCL, Ryan is pursuing the case himself. He has his work cut out: the ICCL must prove its standing in a German court – they’re suing there because the IAB Tech Lab has a German consultancy that represents them in Europe, which the group considers grounds to litigate there, TechCrunch reports. Then he has to make the case. “This may very well end up at the ECJ [European Court of Justice]. And that would take a few years but long before this ends up at the ECJ I think it’ll be clear to the industry now that it’s time to reform,” Ryan said.
Crowded Clubhouse
Spotify launched a Clubhouse rival called Greenroom on Wednesday. The new service is meant to give musicians and content creators a way to connect with their audience via live audio. Spotify also announced plans for a creator fund that would pay Greenroom standouts for their work. Per Variety, Greenroom is the audio chat app formerly known as Locker Room that was developed by the startup Betty Labs, which Spotify acquired in March. Greenroom is now available on iOS and Android in more than 135 markets around the world, and Spotify said it’s optimizing the app for “interactivity and deep connections between participants in live rooms.” Spotify isn’t the only company challenging (or mimicking) Clubhouse: on Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hosted the first public test of a Clubhouse clone called Live Audio Rooms. Twitter launched its version of Clubhouse, called Spaces, in April, and followed with a tip jar feature for hosts in May.
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Two years ago, Amazon announced a programmatic Fire TV program with The Trade Desk and dataxu as inaugural DSP partners.
“This agreement is an important indicator of where the industry is going, and will become just one of many, over time,” The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green told employees at the time.
But the dream of an open programmatic Fire TV platform was short-lived. A few months later, dataxu was acquired by Roku. Amazon ejected the DSP from the Fire TV program, rather than empower its main OTT rival with advertising ID data.
A year after that, The Trade Desk was quietly phased out, and now only the Amazon DSP can buy Amazon’s Fire TV inventory.
Green was correct when he said that the Fire TV programmatic partner program was an indicator of where the market was going. But his prediction that an open programmatic Fire TV would entice other big tech platforms to open up proved a pipe dream.
The Fire TV partner program turned out, in the end, to be yet another example of the ruthless hoarding of ad tech and media into walled gardens.
Amazon needed outside DSPs to bring more bidders and fresh creative to Fire TV. But once Fire TV reached a critical mass of advertiser demand, Amazon would let no third parties benefit from its flywheel.
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Podcast discovery can be as challenging for advertisers as it is for consumers.
“It’s a mass reach vehicle, but the targeting and anti-targeting that advertisers can do in podcasts has been very manual in nature,” said Claire Fanning, VP of ad innovation strategy at SXM Media, the newly launched unified sales team that combines Pandora, Stitcher and SiriusXM.
To help advertisers to get more scale and make it easier for them to find brand safe, appropriate content, SXM Media is testing speech-to-text technology that automatically transcribes and categorizes podcast episodes.
The tool, called PodScribe Contextual Targeting, entered beta on Wednesday and is powered by Adswizz, SXM’s digital audio exchange. Virginia Lottery is the first brand in the testing program, which SXM will limit to about 10 advertisers.
PodScribe uses machine learning to convert podcast audio to text and then analyze the transcriptions with what SXM claims to be 95% accuracy.
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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 Brian Bowman, CEO and founder of Consumer Acquisition.
Apple killed the IDFA and Armageddon was upon us – or so we thought. IOS 14.5 was a landmark update that included Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) framework, which was supposed to have an asteroid-like impact on the mobile app industry.
And yet the rollout of iOS 14.5 has been super slow and Facebook CPMs are up.
On Monday, May 24 of this year, iOS 14.6 was released. As Eric Seufert asks in a post at MobileDevMemo, “Why did Apple slow-roll the adoption of variants of iOS 14.5, which unveiled (arguably) the feature that most impacts the mobile app economy since the launch of the App Store?”
So, what’s really going on here?
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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 Ian Trider, VP of RTB platform operations at Centro.
If there are at least 80 companies purporting to offer identity solutions, surely the ad tech industry is set, right? Nope. I would argue that most of these companies will fail for technical, business, or policy reasons.
The prospects of identity solutions can be evaluated on the presence or absence of the following three key elements. If these elements are present, it is at least possible for these technology providers to succeed.
Without them, it’s just another exercise in wasted time for advertisers and publishers.
Element #1: A Compliant Method To Create and Store IDs
Browsers and device makers have made their stance very clear: any means of tracking users must use approved methods. Google, Apple, and Mozilla have stated that any tracking that does not use approved methods will be considered covert tracking/policy circumvention and they will seek to stop it.
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Deep Dive
Big Tech is really under the microscope these days, in the US and across the pond in the EU and UK, over alleged anticompetitive practices. So, what’s the latest beef? The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) watchdog group said it will take a deep-dive look into Apple and Google’s dominance of the mobile ecosystem. TechCrunch reports that the CMA is launching a wide-ranging market study to examine the pair’s respective iOS and Android smartphone platforms, as well as the App Store and Play Store, and web browsers Safari and Chrome. Why? The CMA is concerned about the nested gateways that are created as a result of the pair’s dominance of the mobile ecosystem. As intermediaries, they are gatekeepers to consumers’ access to a variety of products, content and services such as music, TV and streaming, as well as fitness tracking, shopping and banking. The CMA has been busy: On Friday, Google agreed that it won’t drop third-party cookies from Chrome without getting the go-ahead from the organization first.
Big Critic Confirmed
Big Tech critic Lina Khan was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday to the Federal Trade Commission, at a time when the agency is looking to regulate companies such as Amazon Apple, and Facebook. Her appointment comes two months after she had raised strong concerns over competition in the tech industry during her confirmation hearing. The Senate voted 69-28 to confirm Khan, a 32-year-old law professor and a former staffer at the F.T.C. who was nominated to the agency by President Biden. Khan has warned of the cascading power of tech companies that has allowed them to easily expand their reach across markets, The New York Times reports. She will play a central role at the agency. The FTC is already investigating Amazon and filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook last year.
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By Aaron Jackson, Chief Growth Officer at Eyeota
This article is sponsored by Eyeota.
The United States stands alone when it comes to its insistence on a predominantly deterministic approach to data-driven marketing. Because of that, the ongoing shifts in the privacy landscape – from Apple’s IDFA deprecation to Google’s third-party cookie shutdown and beyond – are putting an undue amount of stress on US marketers’ go-forward strategic plans.
It’s time for marketers to pivot to a global mentality when it comes to the balance of deterministic vs. probabilistic data that powers their campaigns. While deterministic data is a powerful and pragmatic tool in many cases, it’s hardly sufficient when it comes to crafting a well-rounded program that values both retention and acquisition. Furthermore, as previously relied upon streams of deterministic data are turned off in the coming months and years, US marketers will have to come to terms with a reality that’s been well-established – and well-accommodated – among global and international brands for years.
Let’s look at where deterministic data falls short as a foundation for cookieless media, and how marketers – including those with limited first-party data – can leverage this moment in time to get their data-driven strategies to where they should have been all along.
The deterministic reality
Let’s be clear: When it comes to deterministic vs. probabilistic data, it’s not that one is necessarily better than the other. Rather, they work best when leveraged in combination for a fully rounded marketing program that balances retention and personalization with robust new customer acquisition efforts.
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IP addresses – internet protocol, for the uninitiated – have been used as a mechanism for location targeting and cross-device measurement almost since the day digital advertising was born.
But it’s always been a dicey proposition from a privacy perspective – and now the writing’s on the wall with Apple’s plans to remove IP addresses from Safari and hide them in Mail by default.
Apple will automatically mask IP addresses in its browser via Intelligent Tracking Prevention, and people who subscribe to Apple’s new iCloud Plus service will also be able to doubly obfuscate their traffic through a feature called Private Relay.
The overall impact of Apple’s moves will likely be minimal at first, because they only apply to Apple’s universe.
But even so, it “definitely signals that IP-based geotargeting may not be available for much longer,” said Nishant Desai, director of technology and partnerships at Xaxis.
IP addresses have already been subjected to regulatory scrutiny.
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Vungle reached into its bag of Blackstone cash on Tuesday and announced its intent to acquire programmatic influencer marketing platform JetFuel – its fourth acquisition in less than a year.
Jeremy Bondy, Vungle’s CEO, declined to share a purchase price, but did say that it’s the largest deal the company has done so far.
Vungle, which was itself acquired by private equity firm Blackstone in 2019 for $750 million, bought app performance marketing provider AlgoLift in October, gaming analytics startup GameRefinery in March and playable ad creation platform TreSensa in May.
JetFuel, which was founded in 2018 by two former Facebook engineers, automates influencer campaign management and execution. It also runs a network of roughly 15,000 verified creators that collectively reaches 4 billion Instagram followers and 1.5 billion TikTokers, and generates 100 million Snapchat views a day.
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