Google To Let EU Android Users Choose Their Search Engine; Ad Loads Actually Increase On TV

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

Spoiled For Choice

Vestager strikes again. Starting next year, Google will show a new “choice screen” to Android smartphone owners in Europe that prompts them to choose a default search service from a set of four companies – initially Google, Yahoo, Qwant, a French search engine that doesn’t track users, and the German search engine Ecosia, which is based on Bing. Starting the year after, Google will determine three other search providers on a country-by-country basis, based on annual first-price sealed-bid auctions. Read the blog post. Whichever service a person chooses will be downloaded from the Play Store and deliver searches from the home screen. In April, Google changed its Play Store launch process so that European users are presented with five options each for browsers and search apps. These changes are part of Google’s compliance with the European Commission’s antitrust decision from July last year that found Google had illegally leveraged its Android market share dominance to support Google search and browser apps.

A Load Of Trouble

Major broadcasters have talked a big game when it comes to reducing commercial load times, but the results tell a different story. Last quarter, commercial time actually rose 1%, according to data from market research firm MoffettNathanson. The volume of commercials has gone up every quarter since 2017. The only major cable network to reduce ad load in that time was Fox, which cut its ad load by 2%, Bloomberg reports. For years, TV networks have been asking advertisers for price increases despite subscription losses – and they’re starting to hit a ceiling in terms of rate increases. If networks did cut a meaningful chunk of commercial time, the rate increases from the scarcity of supply wouldn’t make up for the losses. On the other hand, MoffettNathanson data shows that “the No. 1 reason people like Netflix is because it’s commercial-free.” More.

Thanks For The Lift

NCS launched an in-flight sales lift metric last week that connects programmatic campaigns to in-store purchases. NCS is a joint venture between Nielsen and Catalina, a retail receipt printer manufacturer that’s pivoted into retail data. Its data has been used primarily for media-mix modeling, market research reports or digital attribution. “Programmatic traders can also now optimize their buys using the same currency that their campaigns will be measured against – incremental sales.” Read the release. Proving incrementality has been a long-time headache for Bayer, one of the sales lift product’s pilot brand customers. “Historically, as an industry, we have been limited to using top-of-funnel KPIs (viewability, reach, etc.) to optimize our media in-flight,” Paul Gelb, head of programmatic and social media at Bayer, told AdExchanger in an email. “That left us always asking, ‘Which metric is most correlated with incremental sales?’”

But Wait, There’s More