Home Ad Exchange News Retail Media Rookies Want Theirs; L’Oréal Pays To Take Down Paywalls In Brazil

Retail Media Rookies Want Theirs; L’Oréal Pays To Take Down Paywalls In Brazil

SHARE:
Comic: Alternative Currencies

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

Retail Media Mania 

Feels like everyone and their Marriott – I mean, their mother – is or has a media network now. At its Digital Media Summit last week, LUMA Partners projected that retail media alone will be a $60 billion market by 2024, poised to rival TV ad spend.

Why the boom? It’s all about attribution.

Retail media networks are like mini walled gardens compared with the open web, where last-click attribution still reigns (even though everyone hates it), according to Mike Shields in a recent Substack.

Although consumers spend as much as 60% of their online time on the open web, purchases usually happen elsewhere. That’s why Google gets credit for ad clicks even when those clicks were driven by a CTV ad, for example. Great for Google … not so great for everyone else.

The challenge for everyone else is how to track users throughout the purchase journey. “You need a huge footprint and a huge amount of data,” Shields writes. 

Barring that, the open web can only hope that retail media networks, brands and publishers share their wealth and work together. “The more reasons you can give them to share,” Criteo CEO Megan Clarken said at LUMA’s event, “the more access you have to first-party data.”

Scaling The Wall

L’Oréal Paris ran a three-month campaign called Paywall Down, which paid to remove paywalls from Brazilian news stories about sexual harassment across Condé Nast titles and Editora Globo, a Brazilian publishing house.

“L’Oréal Paris understands the need to circulate information to help combat harassment in public spaces, which is not always easy to identify,” said Laura Parkinson, director of L’Oréal Paris in Brazil, in a release. “As a world-leading female brand, we need to educate and inform, this is also our role.”

Subscribe

AdExchanger Daily

Get our editors’ roundup delivered to your inbox every weekday.

It’s surprising that paywall removal sponsorships like this aren’t a more common tactic. The L’Oréal Paris campaign is tied to a specific social issue in Brazil, where roughly 90% of people have already encountered disinformation on social networks.

But paying publishers to take down their paywalls in the name of generic do-goodery, like supporting journalism, would be reason enough. Although, really, brands don’t need an advocacy-based reason at all. A music brand could do this for a music site, a fashion brand for a fashion site – and the same for travel, culture, lifestyle or any other paywalled publisher.

Because it’s a win/win. Visitors get free access, but they still see ads, so the site gets sponsor revenue, ad revenue and the opportunity to generate more impressions, collect data and expand its prospecting pool.

Especially for publishers that may have overstepped the line with a too-rigid paywall approach, why not make a little cash while they walk it back?

Don’t Rate The Player, Rate The Game

Behind the scenes, alternative currencies are all anyone can talk about. But they didn’t play a starring role in the TV upfronts this year. Instead, it was crickets. 

“The currency thing, it’s kind of just hit a wall,” one television network exec tells Digiday.

Advertisers are open to testing new ad measurement solutions. But with an emphasis on “testing.”

The broadcasters are eager for a change, but haven’t convinced advertisers.

Sharon Cullen, president of integrated investment at Omnicom’s Hearts & Science, says the agency has been testing Nielsen alternatives, “but that being said, we’re not 100% confident that that’s what we should be transacting on this upfront.” 

For one thing, even if iSpot, NBCU’s replacement currency of choice, does outperform Nielsen, it still needs time to make that case – and fight against Nielsen’s very strong incumbency advantage.

Advertisers won’t make large guaranteed ad deals on measurement technology that hasn’t been tested like crazy. And not just tested, but tested specifically against Nielsen ratings in some kind of media-mix-modeled bakeoff.

“We’re paying for Nielsen ratings anyway, and we won’t agree to [an alternative] currency without having done tests against Nielsen,” says one agency buyer.

But Wait, There’s More!

Near, a location-based user profile provider, raises $10 million and goes public via SPAC merger. [TechCrunch]

Meta to squeeze money from WhatsApp with Cloud API for businesses. [The Register]

Why the WFA, an ad industry advocacy group, supports the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act. [Ad Age]

Twitter tightens its content moderation policy to combat misinformation. [Adweek]

You’re Hired!

Basis Technologies names former Progress Partners managing director Jeff Coon as its new chief strategy officer. [release]

Must Read

Comic: Lunch Is Searched

Based On Its Q3 Earnings, Maybe AIphabet Should Just Change Its Name To AI-phabet

Google hit some impressive revenue benchmarks in Q3. But investors seemed to only have eyes for AI.

Reddit’s Ads Biz Exploded In Q3, Albeit From A Small Base

Ad revenue grew 56% YOY even without some of Reddit’s shiny new ad products, including generative AI creative tools and in-comment ads, being fully integrated into its platform.

Freestar Is Taking The ‘Baby Carrot’ Approach To Curation

Freestar adopted a new approach to curation developed by Audigent that gives buyers a priority lane to publisher inventory with higher viewability and attention scores than most open-auction inventory.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters
Comic: Header Bidding Rapper (Wrapper!)

IAB Tech Lab Made Moves To Acquire Prebid In 2021 – And Prebid Said No

The story of how Prebid.org came to be – and almost didn’t – is an important one for the industry.

Discover Wiped Out MFA Spend By Following These Four Basic Steps

By implementing the anti-MFA playbook detailed in the ANA’s November report, brands were able to reduce the portion of their programmatic budgets going to made-for-advertising sites to about 1%.

Welcome to the Cookie Complaint Department

PAAPI Could Be As Effective For Retargeting As Third-Parties Cookies, Study Finds

There’s been plenty of mudslinging in and around the Chrome Privacy Sandbox. But the Protected Audiences API (PAAPI) maybe ain’t so bad, according to researchers at Boston University.