News Corp Adopts Programmatic; Amazon's Marketing Strategy

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

Automating Sales

News Corp. platforms exec Cameron King tells AdNews in Australia that his company aims to “move programmatic into the mainstream sales effort.” King has sipped from the cup of programmatic Kool-Aid. AdNews says, “[King] would not hang a number around the organisation’s neck in terms of percentage of sales traded programmatically but said there was ‘an opportunity to automate a great deal of what we are doing.’” Read more.

Amazon

Amazon’s European director, Dan Wright, describes the company’s marketing strategy, claiming that innovation in not as paramount as customer trust and satisfaction. He pointed to Amazon’s ecommerce ads as an example, saying, “Customers want to see ratings and reviews before making a purchase, so we have added value by putting those in the ad. … Amazon’s vision is to be the earth’s most customer centric company. If we’re good at that then advertisers and marketers win too.” Marketing Week has the story.

Havas Unfazed

In his first public appearance to date, Havas CEO Yannick Bolloré admitted that while the Publicis and Omnicom merger came as a surprise, he remained optimistic. In fact, speaking at Advertising Week Europe, Bolloré suggested that the recent partnership could help boost Havas’ clientele. Commenting on a recently secured $150m Emirates account, Bolloré said, “I don’t want to be too optimistic but when I look at the recent wins, we are facing a good momentum.” Bolloré also alluded to the fact that the merger may funnel new talent Havas’ way as Publicis and Omnicom reassemble into one organization. Read more via The Drum.

Ad Network Secure

The WSJD team talks about how encryption and the recent explosion regarding NSA snooping is affecting Yahoo. The company says that it’s now using HTTPS in places, but the blog reports that “for large media companies that rely on lots of ad networks, that can take a lot of coordination ‘It’s a little harder than to just flip a switch,’” said Alex Stamos, Yahoo’s new chief information security officer. He added, “It’s just a bigger project than I expected.” Read it (subscription).

Non-Lethal Technology

After reviewing recent research from Forrester on how marketers don’t understand programmatic ad buying, angel investor Jerry Neumann weighs in on his Reaction Wheel blog. He writes, “It’s almost certainly true, as [ANA’s Bob] Liodice says, that confusion about programmatic is slowing its adoption. I believe this because it has also been true of every non-lethal technology in history. It takes time for new technologies to win the market, and different customer sets adopt them at different rates. Everett Rogers wrote about this back in 1962.” Read about Everett and more.