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Forget About Ad Tech, The DOJ's Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Zeroes In On Search Google Grows Its Sellers.json File To 1.2 Million Publishers Prog.IO Digital: P&G’s Media Strategy, NYT Reconciles Subscriptions With Ads – And How To Build A CDP Amazon Is Primed To Set A Nearly $10 Billion Sales Record On Prime Day This Year House Report Calls For 'Structural Separation' Of Big Tech (It’s 449 Pages, So Here’s Your Much-Needed TL;DR) Snap Sales SVP Peter Naylor On Upstart Competition, Why Snap Avoids Exchanges And The Wide Release Of First Commercial Group Nine Offers Its First-Party Data To Power DR Ads On Instagram, Facebook Google, The Trade Desk, MediaMath, Amobee, Adobe and Adform Lead The Pack In Gartner’s 2020 Ad Tech Magic Quadrant Dovekey Privacy Sandbox Proposal Could Represent A Mini Detente Between Google And Ad Tech

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Driving Change: Creating A Diverse And Inclusive Media Company

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2020 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 Shona Pinnock, director of diversity and inclusion at Meredith Corp.

The horrific murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland (who died under extremely suspicious circumstances) and too many others have chilled me to the bone and left me emotionally exhausted. I’m numb, but I’ve got a job to do: driving meaningful change both inside my company and in the content delivered to our massive audiences.

I recommit to advancing those goals every day. The introspective reckoning that I see across the entire media industry gives me optimism. I believe that palpable energy can result in significant progress if we do the serious and substantive work on our systems and practices.

It’s an unquestionably divisive time, and achieving transformative change is not easy. To improve company culture and the workforce, I use my three-pronged mantra: recruitment, retention and education.

1. Recruitment

My first rule of thumb: Slow down.

ViacomCBS Reorgs Around Streaming; P&G Slays Its Earnings

by AdExchanger // Posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

Do The Streaming Shuffle

Another day, another streaming reorg. Just days after Disney announced a major reorganization centered on streaming, ViacomCBS is shaking up its business with a focus on digital. The biggest change, The Verge reports, comes with the promotion of Tom Ryan, head of ViacomCBS’ ad-supported streaming service Pluto TV, who will become CEO of ViacomCBS Streaming. But as Ryan rises, ViacomCBS chief digital officer Marc DeBevoise will step down. DeBevoise had helmed streaming and digital products for ViacomCBS since 2016 and oversaw the launch of CBS All Access. This is the second executive shuffle at ViacomCBS in less than a year. In 2019, the broadcaster shook up its creative executive ranks in preparation for the Viacom/CBS merger. Streaming is becoming a massive focus for broadcasters across the board. In addition to ViacomCBS and Disney, WarnerMedia and NBCU have both recently undergone their own games of executive musical chairs in the name of streaming.

P&G FTW

P&G had a great fiscal Q1, with net sales up 9% YoY to $19.1 billion. The CPG giant optimistically raised its sales growth guidance from 1% to 3% to between 3% and 4%, though with the pandemic still surging (and likely to surge even more), the caveat is that P&G, like everyone else, still faces a lot of unknowns. “Against this challenging backdrop, we’re still holding ourselves to an expectation of meaningful growth, top line and bottom line, and expect to be highly cash generative,” said CFO Jon Moeller during the call. Moeller also addressed the extent to which changing consumer habits will permanently impact the way P&G does business. “Consumer habits, once they’re established in our categories, are rarely reversed,” he said. “I’m sure there’ll be some level of reversion, but we do expect a permanent change at some level as well.” Also, P&G is also rolling along with ecommerce, where sales grew 50% in the quarter and now constitute about 11% to 12% of P&G’s total. And, finally, according to AdAge, P&G increased its marketing spend last quarter by “at least $100 million.”

Pinterest Is Having A Big Year

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 4:14 pm.

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Amid this year’s great reordering of fortunes, Pinterest has been one of the lucky ones. The platform’s monthly users grew more than 40% in the second quarter, to 415 million. The expansion is led by new international users (50% growth rate) and Gen Z users, who are joining the platform at twice the rate of people older than 25.

Speaking on the AdExchanger Talks podcast, Chief Revenue Officer Jon Kaplan says the spike has tracked closely with COVID-19.

“We saw different phases of user behavior,” he says. “When things first began in March and April, it was all about hunkering down in this new reality. It was cooking, kids’ activities, building out their home office and home fitness.”

Later, the platform became a repository for its users’ fantasies about the future. In May there were big increases in holiday gift pins, backyard weddings, summer road trips and home Halloween parties.

Naturally there’s a corresponding data opportunity associated with all that activity.

“The foundation of the data set is the combination of those 416 million people organizing 240 billion plus pins onto over 5 billion boards,” Kaplan says. “That is our corpus. That’s what we have to mine for people’s interest and their intent. That’s a really powerful signal because we can also look at what you’re likely to be interested in based on what other people who have saved that content or topic are interested in themselves.”

Forget About Ad Tech, The DOJ's Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google Zeroes In On Search

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 3:09 pm.

Do a word search of the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, filed on Tuesday, and you won’t find … a single reference to DoubleClick, YouTube or DV360.

As expected, the focus of the DOJ’s long-awaited filing, the result of an investigation that began well over a year ago, is squarely on Google’s alleged (gotta say that) dominance in the search market. (Read the full suit here.)

Although DOJ investigators had been asking potential witnesses detailed questions about Google’s ad tech operations as part of the probe, it was previously reported that the search part of the DOJ’s case was far more developed than evidence gathered on the ad tech side.

And, the fact is, a search-centered case is a far easier bite, said Ari Paparo, CEO and co-founder of Beeswax.

“It’s a lot less difficult to explain to a jury than the ad tech stuff, which isn’t only more complicated, but doesn’t have a direct or obvious consumer effect,” Paparo said.

But it’s a retrograde approach, said Lotame COO Mike Woosley.

“The DOJ has a tremendous track record of solving last century’s problem – this action is no exception,” Woosley said. “In the digital media industry, Google has set itself up superbly to dominate not only the vertical ad tech chain, but also to dominate ownership of consumer identity.”

Programmatic IO Monday Recap: Commerce, Identity And Investment Trends

by Zach Rodgers // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 10:28 am.

AdExchanger’s Programmatic IO Virtual conference entered the final stretch on Monday with sessions focused on ecommerce, identity and investment trends. Below are some highlights. The final day of proceedings will kick off this Wed. Oct 21 at 1:05 pm ET. Click here for the agenda.

Consumers’ mad dash to ecommerce has forced a parallel scramble by brands, publishers and technology companies whose fortunes depend on reaching them.

“Trade marketing is huge, trillions of dollars,” Criteo CEO Megan Clarken said during a fireside interview.

Yet only 20% of those budgets are spent in digital, she added: The rest go to things such as cardboard cutouts and privileged placement on grocery shelves.

That’s going to change, she says, and companies that can connect offline to online will benefit. Criteo wants to be one by leveraging its historic place as the reigning monarch of retargeting to push into other areas.

“What’s been important is to transform the company from yesterday to its future. I’ve talked about becoming more of a full stack DSP,” Clarken pointed out, but that doesn’t mean going after The Trade Desk on its own turf. “I look more toward an Amazon than I do toward a Trade Desk. We’re all in this together though. There’s plenty of room and a lot to do for advertisers.”

Money flows

The strength of tech valuations, including Criteo and – especially – The Trade Desk, is a big reason why the stock market is so out of whack with the United States’ still-faltering economy. That’s unlikely to last, according to Elgin Thompson, managing director of technology investment banking at JMP Securities.

Here’s How Moves By Google And Apple Will Impact The Relevance Of Marketers’ Creative

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 12:54 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 Malik Roberts, technical solution lead at Ad-Lib.

As consumers, our data is becoming more private and less accessible. We’re becoming more difficult to track as we move around the internet, consume content and flick between devices.

These changes make it more challenging for marketers to address consumers in a contextually relevant and privacy compliant way. As a result, marketers must think more seriously about how they acquire and leverage the data available to them. In short, it’s putting them in the relevancy hot seat.

Before the roll-out of policies such as GDPR in the EU, Apple’s deprecation of mobile identifiers and Google’s looming depreciation of third party cookies, advertisers were able to cherry-pick technologies and find a way to make them work with no real concern for whether or not passing data between platforms would be a blocker.

For example, third party DCO vendors could take their tag and add it to Google's demand-side platform in place of a creative asset. This way, when the buying platform is ready to show a creative it makes a call to the third party server to fetch the creative asset. This sort of “piggybacking”, whilst historically commonplace, has become increasingly problematic as the demand for stringent governance around the control and processing of data has grown. When the buying platform communicates with the third party DCO platform, it is likely passing user-level data in order to achieve scale or streamline workflows. There is also the issue of user consent which becomes difficult to manage when your owned server or buying platform has no visibility on the cookie being dropped (and is therefore unable to block it!)

Ghostery And Google: When Your Destiny Depends On Another Platform’s Whims

by Allison Schiff // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 12:35 am.

As an anti-tracking company and the creator of a privacy extension for the web, you’d think Ghostery would be all about the elimination of third-party cookies.

But Jeremy Tillman, president of Ghostery, is wary of Google’s motivation for phasing out third-party tracking in Chrome.

“You have to think about the second-order effects of these types of changes,” Tillman said. “What is better for privacy and the user experience from one perspective, can be not so good for competition and the free market from another.”

Ghostery’s research has found that tracking scripts from Google are present on just more than 80% of all page loads. Facebook follows at 27.1%.

“It’s been a big advantage for them for a long time,” Tillman said. “And now, as companies need to depend more on first-party relationships, here’s Google and others positioning themselves as the solution to do that.”

AdExchanger caught up with Tillman for a few hot takes on R&D in an age of uncertainty, potential antitrust action and why it’s getting harder to build extensions for the Chrome browser.

SiriusXM Completes Stitcher Acquisition; Group Nine Media Diversifies Its Revenue ... With Pet Insurance

by AdExchanger // Posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2020 at 12:03 am.

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

Done Deal

SiriusXM completed its $300 million purchase of Stitcher on Monday, its latest move to build the satellite radio company into a podcasting empire. The Stitcher app gives listeners access to podcasts from the likes of Freakonomics Radio, the Oprah Winfrey Network and Conan O'Brien on an ad-free or ad-supported basis. It also offers ad inventory from hundreds of podcast shows. The deal follows SiriusXM’s $3.5 billion purchase of Pandora in 2018, and its summer acquisitions of podcast management platform Simplecast and AdsWizz, which will be the company's new ad tech arm and power Pandora’s advertising efforts. "With Stitcher and its varied assets, we are now a one-stop shop able to meet the needs of podcast creators, publishers and advertisers, while also providing listeners with access to great shows, series and programming," SiriusXM CEO Jim Meyer said in a statement. TechCrunch has more.

Heavy Petting

So here’s a new publisher revenue stream we didn’t expect: pet insurance. Group Nine Media-owned pub The Dodo is getting into pet insurance, thanks to Group Nine’s minority stake in pet insurer Petplan, which will be renamed “Fetch by the Dodo” in May 2021. “For digital media, I think we all have the challenge of needing to be good at multiple things at once,” Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer said. The Wall Street Journal points out that Petplan already has 250,000 paying subscribers, 50,000 of which are new members since May 2019. The deal between Group Nine and Petplan also includes brand licensing and marketing services deals whereby The Dodo will promote Petplan’s products and services for a fee. Other Group Nine non-ad revenues include selling TV shows, licencing its properties for children's books and – prior to the pandemic, of course – live events.

NBCU And Innovid Collaborate On Ad Quality Controls For Peacock

by Ryan Joe // Posted on Monday, October 19th, 2020 at 11:00 am.

Bringing online buying practices to OTT isn’t as simple as plugging in a buying platform and revving it up.

If a display ad doesn’t load or an online video buffers on a browser, it’s annoying. If an ad on the big glass doesn’t show properly, it breaks the user experience.

NBCU knows these quality control issues could undermine its recently launched streaming service, Peacock. To contend with the challenge, the broadcaster said Monday that it’s devised a solution with TV ad tech company Innovid that will help ensure a smooth user experience for its streamers.

When Peacock first launched, it was forced to reject about 40% of the creative it got from advertisers because so many of the tags were faulty. Accepting creative with bad tags disrupts the viewer experience with black screens or jittering or pixelated ads.

“What Innovid has done is created new ad tech quality control infrastructure that has gotten the acceptance rate up to 95%,” said Ryan McConville, NBCU’s EVP of ad platforms.

CTV Measurement Is Doomed Unless Google, Roku, Apple And Amazon Collaborate

by AdExchanger // Posted on Monday, October 19th, 2020 at 12:47 am.

"On TV And Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.

Today’s column is written by Rob Aksman, chief strategy officer at BrightLine.

Unlike in the tech-inhibited world of pre-connected TV, CTV has the power to unlock precise measurement and targeting at scale.

In most US households today, TV content is consumed over IP, running through high powered devices, each with their own unique identifiers. And a cadre of technology companies, industry groups and open forums are more than capable of together delivering on the promise of data-driven TV.

But for all that promise, nothing has happened that’s meaningfully scalable.

The root of the problem is that four companies – Google, Roku, Apple and Amazon – control the fate of whether we free up the downstream value of CTV for brands. Moreover, they haven’t shown the incentive or desire to participate in the industry forums!

There is no shortage of opportunities for them to contribute. The content owners have tried to address the issue of measurement and targeting with numerous committees, initiatives, councils, and panels, put on by the IAB, independent trade groups, or standards groups. But the big four never seem to be in the room where the conversations happen (or the room where nothing happens as is the case).

These four companies power the devices where most CTV streaming takes place, and as the developer and owner of those operating systems and standards, the downstream destiny of so many others starts and ends with them.