"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 Michael Ellgass, EVP for retail marketing solutions at IRI.
In a post-cookie world, retail media networks (RMNs) have the potential to be an important channel in a brand’s comprehensive advertising strategy.
An RMN is a connected set of media channels, including a retailer’s website, app, email distribution and offsite ads. The advantage? An RMN enables advertisers to reach shoppers across the purchase funnel down to the point of purchase. And because they deliver first-party, purchase-based data, RMNs also provide better opportunities to analyze attribution and ROI than cookies.
Sales within RMNs are projected to grow by 28% in 2021 and reach $30 billion by 2023. But to maximize their potential, brands need to determine which one is the right fit for their needs.
Continue reading »
A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem...
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Flix It
Public investor Bill Ackman scooped 3.1 million Netflix shares, a 0.68% stake in the company.
The bulk buy by Pershing Square, Ackman’s fund, was inspired by Netflix’s recent stock plunge, reports The Wall Street Journal. Netflix missed Q4 subscriber estimates by a couple of hundred thousand new users – it generated 8.3 million signups, rather than the 8.5 million projected – following a rough couple of months.
Netflix shares reached an all-time high of around $690 in November 2021. They closed at $386.70 on Thursday.
Investors are skittish about Netflix because competition for streaming viewers has increased and particularly because there are now free, ad-supported channels gaining traction.
Capricious Wall Street investors may soon turn back in Netflix’s favor, though. The AVOD narrative has gained strength, but new players haven’t pulled subscribers from Netflix or even narrowed the gap.
Netflix is peering in the rearview mirror as Disney+ and other major broadcast subscription services race to catch up. For now, though, Netflix remains the runaway category leader with 222 million paid subscribers – almost double Disney+’s 118 million accounts. And that number is being generous to Disney+, which has many one-year promotional deals and subscribers via a bundled discount with Hulu or ESPN+.
Continue reading »
There are three sides to the Google antitrust story. There’s the original 242-page state-led lawsuit stuffed with allegations of monopolistic behavior, there’s Google’s recent 52-page motion to dismiss the suit – and then there’s the truth.
In this week’s Big Story, we get at the truthiness of these allegations along with the nuances of which ones Google chose to contest in its motion to scrap the case. For example, there’s an interesting back-and-forth about launch of Unified Pricing, a decision that infuriated publishers when it was announced – and may or may not be grounds for an antitrust lawsuit.
If that’s not enough Google for you, Google made the news a second time in the past week when it sent FLoC to birdie heaven and unveiled the Topics API. Google plans to test the new and privacy-improved Topics API globally soon – including in Europe. (FLoC tests failed to take flight in Europe over GDPR concerns).
Continue reading »
The Privacy Sandbox is bursting with news this week.
On Thursday, Google shared a slightly more concrete testing timeline for its FLEDGE and Core Attribution reporting API. Two days before, on Tuesday, Google announced the Topics API, a new proposal for post-cookie interest-based advertising that now replaces FLoC.
Google, which teased earlier this week that more info about FLEDGE and measurement was shortly forthcoming, confirmed that it will open up FLEDGE testing for the first time during the first half of this year, and also begin the second phase of testing for its attribution reporting API.
FLEDGE was supposed to have begun testing during Q4 2021 but in October the program was pushed back to early this year.
Google already ran initial origin trials during Q1 2021 for its attribution reporting API, which measures when a user's actions, like an ad click or a view, leads to a conversion without using cross-site IDs.
You can stay up-to-date on the Privacy Sandbox testing timeline here.
Continue reading »
"On TV & Video" is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
Today's column is by Chris Maccaro, CEO of Beachfront.
“TV is dead. Streaming is the future.” Chances are you’ve heard these statements many times over the last 20 years – and neither of them is true.
Yes, linear cable TV subscribers are falling. But according to eMarketer, 70 million US households, or 54%, still pay for it. Boxes are going to be in homes for quite some time.
TV has incomparable reach; streaming has incredible targeting. Neither is a panacea. Advertisers will need to manage a presence in both mediums in order to achieve their objectives. Convergence, at its heart, is about becoming proficient and fluid across channels.
The problem for marketers is that the sell side is not built to help manage convergence. The entire infrastructure of TV and streaming media is still very siloed across ad sales teams, agency buying teams and measurement practices. Sellers need help building this infrastructure to make it easier for buyers.
Continue reading »
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Let’s See, LG
Smart TV manufacturer LG is on board with the outcomes-based buying trend, but with a twist – advertisers that don’t hit performance goals don’t have to pay.
On Wednesday, LG Ads Solutions launched Guaranteed Outcomes, which promises brands they’ll only pay when their CTV or native campaigns hit certain KPIs. LG is guaranteeing metrics, including frequency, reach and video completion rates across CTV and LG TVs for programmatic web, mobile and retargeting campaigns.
But who gets to attribute these metrics?
Well, LG Ads Solutions announced a deal last month with iSpot.tv, a cross-screen measurement provider with licensed data from over 50 million TVs. iSpot is one of several third-party measurement companies that will verify campaign KPIs running on LG smart TVs.
Guaranteed outcomes has been the missing puzzle piece for CTV, Keith Camoosa, Dentsu’s chief addressability officer, tells Digiday.
LG Ads Solutions says conversion metrics like tune-in, site visits and physical visits will become available in the coming months.
“We are only in the first quarter,” LG Ads President Serge Matta tells AdExchanger. “So we have a long way to go.”
Continue reading »
Cookieless tech is coming out of the woodwork.
With third-party cookies on the road to nowhere, data management platform Audigent has been working to develop its own cookieless identifier, which it’s calling the Hadron ID. Audigent hopes the new identifier will keep the company competitive in a world where DMPs are being supplanted by customer data platforms.
The Hadron ID relies on a mix of first-party data (code on the page and direct publisher integrations), deterministic identifiers (consented mobile ad IDs, IP addresses and data from Audigent’s own device graph), probabilistic identifiers (pulled from historical and real-time publisher data and census data), content-based IDs (coming from direct integrations with a publisher’s CMS) and contextual data (via direct integrations and page-level metadata).
It’s interoperable, which means it can be used across a variety of different ad buying and sell-side platforms and encrypted to make it privacy safe, said Audigent CEO Drew Stein.
“We built a framework or a container that takes different kinds of identifiers – audience-based, contextual, deterministic and probabilistic – and creates an encrypted, encoded and compressed shorthand,” Stein said.
Audigent recently completed an alpha test of the Hadron ID with one of its close publisher partners, Warner Music Group-owned entertainment and pop culture news site UPROXX.
Continue reading »
Google has been penning tetchy blog posts ever since Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with a group of more than a dozen other state AGs, filed the first version of their antitrust lawsuit in December 2020 chock-full of anticompetition grievances related to Google’s advertising business.
Late last week, though, Google made its first legal move to try and get the state-led case tossed before it hits a courtroom. Last Friday, Google asked a federal judge in New York to dismiss most of the counts in the Texas suit on the grounds that the AG’s allegations are incorrect or don’t constitute anticompetitive behavior.
In its motion to dismiss, Google makes numerous arguments as to why the court should reject the Texas AG’s suit, and they can be summed up thusly: If you didn’t like it, you should have said something earlier, but we didn’t do anything wrong anyway.
You can read the full motion at your leisure, but here’s a taste: “US antitrust laws encourage, reward and protect … success – success earned through relentless innovation, early and extensive investment in research and development, vigorous competition and hard work – even if the Texas Attorney General and his allies do not.”
Well, guess that’s up to a judge to decide. But here are Google’s arguments in a nutshell.
Continue reading »
Advertising can be cheap. But acquiring new users is almost always expensive.
Which is why the Instacart ads team is focused on creating new advertising opportunities to reach the customers it already has.
On Wednesday, the company introduced its first display ad units, as well as branded pages that serve as the hub for CPG and food brands on Instacart.
The new brand pages are free and designed to help brands do more, well, branding. In the aisles of a physical retail store, brands can rely on packaging, shelf placement and the product itself to stand out. Food brands with a shorter shelf life, like fruit and vegetables, bank on the look and feel of fresh products to catch a shopper’s eye.
Consider Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry seller, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to genetically modify berries to look delicious – in person. The juiciness of real-life berries doesn’t translate to a JPEG, especially when trying to compete with other berry brands on Instacart.
Continue reading »
