Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
No Labels
Amazon is dropping a large portion of its private-label products: 27 of its 30 clothing lines will soon be gone, The Wall Street Journal reports.
On the one hand, who cares? It’s not like anybody notices the Amazon private labels. “Oh no, where will I find Lark & Ro, Daily Ritual and Rivet clothes now?”
For example, did you even notice that we listed Rivet as a clothing brand above? Well, it’s not. It’s an Amazon private-label furniture line (which is also being dropped).
But Amazon ditching private labels isn’t a setback.
It’s more expensive for Amazon to start and operate a brand of its own rather than offer ad tech and cloud services to other sellers. As Marketplace Pulse notes, Amazon’s retail services will eclipse its O&O retail business sometime in 2025.
But private labels served their purpose – and they did it well. As Amazon built up seller accounts for different verticals (clothes and furniture, for instance), the private labels set high baseline competition for those search terms.
Private labels also attracted name-brand companies to Amazon, begrudgingly, often as third-party sellers. They couldn’t not be there to try to compete against all the Amazon clones soaking up searches and intent for their products.
Beyond Verification
Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify were the original ad verification companies.
(Moat was also a contender, but it pretty much fell off the map after being acquired by Oracle in 2017.)
Getting back to the point: By referring to themselves as “ad verification” providers, this trio meant to establish baseline metrics for viewability and fraud. Did an ad serve properly? Was it viewable on the page? Was a view generated by a bot or invalid traffic?
But the idea of verification soon stretched to encompass contextual ad-targeting services, in-flight optimization, attention metrics and even ad serving. All that’s missing is a DSP, and these once pure-play verification startups would essentially operate as full-stack ad platforms.
And now, as DoubleVerify digests Scibids, which it just acquired for $125 million, Digiday argues that the company must figure out how to reconfigure the Scibids business model, which charges as a percent of media compared to DV’s cost-per-impression standard.
“We’re looking at how that model is going to change,” says DV CEO Mark Zagorski. “In the future, we’ll find what’s best for advertisers.”
Media Doesn’t Pay
It’s hard out there for media companies. There’s no silver bullet for monetization, and even seemingly can’t-miss marketing partnerships fail.
This week, Penn Entertainment sold Barstool Sports back to its founder, Dave Portnoy, ahead of Penn’s new sports-betting partnership with ESPN. It’s the latest sign that there’s no easy path to profitability in media, writes Brian Morrissey at The Rebooting.
Barstool brought a base of sports fans primed to become customers of Penn’s Barstool-branded sportsbook. But Penn couldn’t compete with the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel, and the Barstool brand, synonymous with misogyny and frat bros, is hardly aligned with Disney-owned ESPN’s vibe.
And then there’s BuzzFeed, which offers another variation on the new-media-darling-turned-cautionary-tale theme, as its revenue streams all but dry up.
Even billionaires can’t win in publishing: Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is expected to lose $100 million this year.
But what about The New York Times? Its thriving subscription business is encouraging. But for every successful subscription model there’s a surfeit of copycat newsletters doomed to fail. Plus, even the Times is struggling on ad revenue.
Independent publishers can thrive, but only with difficulty, Morrissey writes, citing his own self-run publication as an example.
But Wait, There’s More!
Indie agency Camelot will use iSpot.tv as its preferred measurement partner for video and TV buys. [Ad Age]
Amazon will offer sellers an AI tool to write product descriptions. [The Information]
News outlets demand (or at least really want) new rules for AI training data. [The Verge]
Case in point: Major publishing orgs, including the Associated Press, Getty, Gannett and the News Media Alliance, signed an open letter seeking copyright protections for content scraped by generative AI. [document]
How Mattress Firm used podcast ads to drive in-store sales. [Adweek]
You’re Hired!
Delphine Fabre-Hernoux, Wavemaker’s chief data and analytics officer, has been promoted to the same role at GroupM North America. [MediaPost]
Out-of-home agency Talon appoints Todd Palatnek as SVP of client development. [release]
