“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 Hugo Loirot, partner and managing director at fifty-five.
What do people remember about Einstein’s work? E=mc2. Thousands of pages of Descartes writings? Cogito, ergo sum. The Eagles’ thirty singles? Hotel California.
What can the industry know about Google’s Privacy Sandbox? Probably FLoC all.
Summarizing complex works with one formula, one title or one acronym is simpler, but not necessarily accurate. This might not be a problem when you are trying to remember old high school lessons, but can become problematic when the work is supposed to become the backbone of digital marketing in a year or two.
FLoC’s fame in the Sandbox
The Privacy Sandbox intends to establish a new framework to replace most use cases for third-party cookies. Each use case is covered by a specific initiative (and often, a new acronym), with a defined roadmap and addressing specific limitations. The list of these various initiatives is available and regularly updated on the Chromium website.
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If addressability and cross-platform are the two most important TV buzzwords today, FreeWheel’s latest pilot is killing two birds with one stone.
Comcast and Charter are using FreeWheel tech to chop up linear TV ad spots to make it “audience addressable,” across both linear and digital. Instead of the same ad being shown to all households, different ads will serve depending on who is seeing the ad. With one campaign, advertisers can buy both “audience addressable” on linear TV and addressable digital ad impressions.
“An advertiser can have a single budget with unified targeting that can deliver across platforms in a scalable and optimized way,” said Sara Wallace, FreeWheel senior director of product management.
Comcast and Charter started testing unified campaigns across digital and linear in December with media and entertainment clients. FreeWheel will open its test to other multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) later this year, Wallace said. Content owners could also potentially use this tech.
Being able to buy across linear and digital in a single campaign confers a number of benefits.
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Privacy Sandbox may have just hit a serious snag.
In a document published last week, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG), a prominent working group within the World Wide Web Consortium, referred to the first-party sets (FPS) proposal within the Privacy Sandbox as “harmful to the web in its current form.”
TAG also cast doubt on the viability of the Privacy Sandbox itself:
The “Privacy Sandbox” initiative proposes (among other things) to restrict "third-party cookies", which would align with other browsers and with general industry trends. However, this proposal seeks to redefine what it means to be a third-party cookie. In that context, the efficacy of the "Privacy Sandbox" initiative is thrown into question.
In other words, you can’t profess to be playing by the rules, then turn around and change the rules of the game.
You’re (not) it
TAG’s role is to review proposed changes to the web so as to determine the broader implications. The group helps document and build consensus around principles of web architecture.
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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 Robin Caller, CEO and founder of Overmore Group.
Fair warning, this essay is a bit of a rant. I mean no harm to any promoter of ad tech, martech, clean rooms or other digital advertising technology.
I’m sure they’re very nice people who love their families and dogs and recycling.
But that doesn’t change the fact that language matters. It is a trap that can lead to mass delusion. The language we use to describe data in our ecosystem demeans the consumer and strips them of their rights. A rant, in this case, is warranted.
First-party data … second-class citizens
GDPR, CCPA, CPRA and nearly every other privacy-related regulation is the product of consumer backlash.
You can almost hear the chorus: “Stop collecting and selling our data so that marketers can deploy it against us in algorithms.”
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Roku said Tuesday it added six new ad tech companies to its Measurement Partner Program to help retail, CPG, pharma, auto and other advertisers better measure ad campaign performance — such as mobile app downloads — as marketers shift their spending to streaming.
Adjust, Affinity Solutions, Branch, IRI, Kochava, and Veeva Crossix have joined Roku’s partner program — launched in 2018 to help the industry measure the impact of ads in streaming TV — a roster that now includes more than 20 partners.
Adding the six new partners lets marketers measure metrics they couldn’t before, including upper-funnel brand metrics and performance outcomes such as mobile app downloads, store visits, and product sales for retail, pharmaceutical, CPG, and auto advertisers.
These measurement partners can be accessed through Roku’s OneView ad buying platform, the dataxu DSP it rebranded in 2020.
“The promise of CTV is of course, that you can measure impressions on a 40- or 55-inch TV screen as you would a digital impression,” Gaurav Shirole, Roku’s director of ad measurement, told AdExchanger. “A lot of the newer partnerships we announced are basically allowing our marketers to go down the funnel to add more behavioral outcomes, whether it's CRM, sales lift or app downloads and installations or location visits or healthcare outcomes.”
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TikTocking Dollars
TikTok wants in on the ecommerce action that has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's introducing new ad formats designed for purchase conversions on the platform. Business Insider reports that the Chinese video app plans to roll out new tools l that allow brands to show their products, retarget interested users, and highlight sales and promotions. TikTok has been testing several new formats including collection ads and dynamic product ads. Collection ads allow brands to combine product catalogs and branded videos to lead consumers to product landing pages. Dynamic product ads automatically retarget people with products according to their online behaviors. The tech giant plans to release these new features in the first half of 2021. Read on.
Big Money
A month after filing an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, DoubleVerify set the terms of its IPO. The New York-based ad verification company could bring home a $4.2 billion valuation. According to MarketWatch, the IPO is expected to price between $24 and $27 a share. The company is offering 8.63 million shares to raise up to $232.9 million, while selling shareholders are offering an additional 4.71 million shares. Twelve banks, led by Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, are underwriting the deal. According to its S-1 filing, DoubleVerify experienced strong, but slowing, revenue growth last year. The company joins a growing list of recent ad tech IPOs that include Pubmatic and Viant. DoubleVerify brought in $244 million gross revenue in 2020, a 34% increase from 2019. Its net income increased dramatically — from $3 million in 2018 to $23.3 million in 2019 – though it dipped to $20.4 million in 2020 due to a jump in expenses. Still, the company is looking to go public at a time of tempered investor demand for IPOs. [Related in AdExchanger: DoubleVerify Reveals Financials As Company Files S-1]
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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 Shiv Gupta, founder at U of Digital.
Marketers eventually get tired of being fed BS by their partners, and start to BS back.
Time and time again, vendors have been caught with their pants down (figuratively, usually), partaking in nefarious activity that abuses their partnerships with marketers. That has left marketers fearful that ad tech vendors will use their information to benefit competitors, game metrics, and/or gain the upper hand in negotiations, among other concerns.
But they respond to these fears by dishing out BS of their own. We can all agree that this isn’t a great way to do business. Partnerships built on trust and transparency usually ensure that all sides benefit.
Marketers should be more self-aware about cutting down the BS where it’s not needed. But the onus is also on sellers to help them overcome their trust issues. Here are some situations where marketers may BS, and how to navigate them!
Falsifying partner mix, pricing, or business goals
It’s not uncommon for marketers to mislead about the size of their budgets, give artificially aggressive (and unrealistic) performance targets, and/or price points. Sometimes, they conveniently forget to mention to a vendor that they’re also working with its biggest competitors.
Marketers may feel that these misdirection tactics put them in a better negotiating position, but if sellers know exactly what and who they’re up against, they theoretically can better help marketers understand how they will add value.
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Google’s lack of transparency has long frustrated publishers and independent ad tech companies, and its clandestine program “Project Bernanke” has only confirmed their suspicions that Google uses learnings from its auction to benefit itself.
Ad tech insiders met the allegations that Google secretly fed publisher ad server data into its buying systems to gain market share and keep prices low with resignation. These claims were revealed in a mistakenly unredacted court filing obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
“This shouldn't be surprising – walled gardens have access and full control over vast amounts of ecosystem data,” said Ana Milicevic, co-founder and principal of Sparrow Advisers. “The surprising part would be if they didn't use it in this way to their commercial advantage.”
But publishers still didn’t know the specifics around Google’s advantaged position – for instance, how the tech giant netted $230 million in 2013 thanks to Project Bernanke.
“We have not heard of this practice, but it is the type of news that we typically point to when we talk about lack of auction transparency creating erosion of trust,” said Nicole Lesko, SVP of data, ad platforms and monetization at Meredith.
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This article is sponsored by Xandr.
To an outsider, advertising can often be perceived as glorified and theatrical. While at times true, in reality advertising is the means to an end for a particular business goal.
The goals vary across industries. In healthcare, for example, it might be educating communities about COVID vaccinations, while in sports and entertainment, the objective may be to increase viewership for the big game or sell out concert stadiums.
For the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, the goal has long been to achieve widespread brand awareness and, perhaps most importantly, brand loyalty.
Take brand-name pain relievers. Many consumers buy some sort of over-the-counter painkiller, but there’s a reason why they are willing to pay more for a brand name than they are for the generic drugstore offering. CPG brands have long relied on top-of-the-funnel marketing because that brand awareness and affinity is what drives purchasing decisions and removes price sensitivity, ultimately leading to increased sales, revenue and, of course, bottom-line business goals.
CPG companies have traditionally achieved their brand-focused goals with linear TV, long the most efficient and cost-effective way to reach a mass audience. Demo guarantees have been highly effective for years, but advertiser needs have changed. They are now accustomed to digital’s more precise targeting and ability to directly connect ad spend to conversions ranging from click-throughs on websites, signups to email lists or checkouts from shopping carts.
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Swaarm, a Berlin-based startup that helps advertisers, agencies and ad networks track their performance marketing, hadn’t yet launched in June 2020 when Apple first announced its plans to limit IDFA use.
The timing was fortuitous. Rather than having to pivot like a legacy mobile measurement provider, Swaarm’s co-founders (who had been developing the technology for the past few years) adapted to the changes in time for the company’s October launch.
But Apple’s announcement wasn’t a huge surprise. The bell was already tolling for tracking on iOS – and not even all that faintly – before Apple made its IDFA plans official last year.
“We always had an idea that Apple would deprecate the IDFA – they’ve been saying as much for a long time,” said Yogeeta Chainani, Swaarm’s co-founder and chief product officer. “We’d already been taking steps in that direction with our solution.”
One of those solutions is what Swaarm calls its privacy-enabled attribution (PEA) chain, which came out of beta on Tuesday.
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