Amazon May Sell OTT Ads Outside Its Platform; Ad Spend Insights From Casper's S1

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

Fuel On The Fire

Amazon Publisher Services (APS), the company’s supply-side advertising technology unit, is in talks with broadcast and streaming app publishers about Amazon taking over inventory sales on other OTT platforms, including Android TV, PlayStation, Xbox and Apple TV, The Wall Street Journal reports. It would be the first time the Amazon advertising business sold ads for outside OTT media, and the group is reportedly telling programmers it can generate $40 CPMs (or higher). Read on. It’s not hard for APS to bring TV networks and OTT apps like Pluto and Tubi to the table, since they already have distribution and inventory deals on Amazon’s Fire TV platform. Even with large direct sales teams, these publishers don’t fill all their supply (or even close to it), and new CTV ad networks have popped up to aggregate supply and seize the high CPMs. Amazon may be next.

DTC IPO

The mattress company Casper filed its pre-IPO S1 document on Friday. The long-awaited filing is a big one for the DTC and ecommerce economy, since Casper was the first of many startups in the DTC mattress category and among the first brands to demonstrate the power of the Facebook/Instagram performance marketing engine. Casper’s sales and marketing expenses (which consist mainly of ad budgets and marketing promotions) totaled $114 million for the first nine months of 2019, a 23% increase from $92.7 million the year before. Marketing expenses as a percentage of sales ticked up from 35.7% to 36.5% in that time. Read the full filing.

Honey And Vinegar

Amazon has begun alerting site visitors who have downloaded the ecommerce browser tool Honey, which searches for discounts and manages online purchases, that the tech is a “security risk” and should be uninstalled immediately. Honey has been working in the background for Amazon shoppers for years, so it’s probably not a coincidence that the new warnings came a few weeks after the company was acquired by PayPal for $4 billion, Wired reports. “Honey tracks your private shopping behavior, collects data like your order history and items saved, and can read or change any of your data on any website you visit,” according to the new Amazon pop-up alert displayed for Honey users. Though, Amazon does all those things as well. More.

PubCommerce

Groupe Nine-owned PopSugar launched an ecommerce ad unit called Sparkle Ads that allows brands to build product pages with shoppable ads on its site. Campbell’s was one of the first brands to test the ads, linking from PopSugar back to retailers such as Amazon, Walmart and Shopify. Group Nine plans to extend the ad unit, which advertisers can purchase on a CPM, to its own brands and potentially outside publishers as commerce becomes a bigger revenue stream. “All advertisers are looking for full-funnel partners,” Group Nine chief operating officer Chris George told The Drum. More.

But Wait, There’s More