Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Visionary, Vision Is Scary
CMO tenures are shrinking.
Confidence in CMO decision-making is down. Yet the demands on the CMO are expanding and growing more difficult.
“To add insult to injury, we’ve seen an overall lack of … competence, perhaps?” writes Chris Gadek, VP of growth at the digital out-of-home ad tech company AdQuick, in a Fast Company column.
It’s also a self-perpetuating cycle, he writes. Ambitious marketers internalize that short CMO tenures are perhaps desirable or practically unavoidable. CEOs tend not to trust their CMO, because it’s hard to trust someone if you think they’re starting a job with one foot out the door. Chief executives also have unrealistic expectations and, unable to meet them, the CMO is soon gone.
Rinse and repeat – but, actually, don’t.
Lost is the idea of a visionary CMO, according to Gadek. Someone who understands where customers and technology are going and places their bets on what’s to come.
A visionary CMO isn’t a turnaround artist or project manager. In fact, they may be closer to a unicorn because … they mostly don’t exist, he writes. And if CEOs and CMOs don’t both learn to abandon their “short-termism,” they never will.
The Search Goes On
The quest to improve linear TV ad targeting continues.
Sky Media, the ad sales arm of one of Europe’s broadcasting giants, rolled out a tool this week that lets advertisers target audiences by their online searches through a partnership with search data company Captify.
“This helps TV advertisers specify the audience they’re after,” Dan Cohen, Sky Media’s director of TV advertising, product and innovation, tells AdExchanger.
Captify’s data comes from onsite searches since most publishers and merchants have websites with their own search bar. Site owners can also license their search keyword data to Captify like they might license audience data to LiveRamp.
Cohen says Sky Media uses this search data to sort audiences by interest based on what they search for online. People who search for travel content or travel-related products, for instance, are attractive to British Airways even if they aren’t watching a travel program.
And since Sky Media has its own strong first-party data set (payment info, household info, phone numbers and probably a whole bunch of other identity anchors), it can match Captify segments to its audience for addressable targeting (anonymously, of course).
IP Addressing The Problem
The IP address may go the way of the dodo.
“It’s going to be a massive shift,” Beachfront CEO Chris Maccaro told Mike Shields in Cannes in June, not even hedging his bets.
But there’s no reason to get blindsided.
“If companies focus on the topic, which many are starting to do, collectively we can design solutions that are able to reflect the realities of where state and federal regulators may go,” says James Rooke, president of Comcast Advertising.
The IP address is what makes targeted streaming ads and addressable linear possible. No need for pesky cookies, pixels or device IDs.
But Google and Apple are marching toward a future without IP address data – which will rein in IP data collection quite a bit, especially the use of IP addresses to fingerprint mobile users.
Yet IP addresses aren’t so easily stamped out.
Broadcasters and smart TV manufacturers – which also often play the role of internet service provider – can see that data for themselves and they’re not likely to stop using it.
But Wait, There’s More!
How wedding giant The Knot pulled the veil over its advertisers’ eyes. [Forbes]
Andre Swanston, co-founder and former CEO of Tru Optik, which sold to TransUnion, announces a new fund. [MediaPost]
How SEO agencies are adapting their tactics to prepare for new AI-based search responses. [Adweek]
GroupM widens access to its retail media platform, Fusion. [B+C]
You’re Hired!
Alison Weissbrot, former AdExchanger senior editor and longtime anchor tenant of this newsletter, is now the editor-in-chief of Campaign US. [post]
Channel Factory names ad tech vet Bill Schild as its new GM for the Americas. [release]
Goodby Silverstein & Partners hires Cory Berger as its first-ever chief growth officer. [Ad Age]
