Oracle Intends To Stay Out Of The Ad Transaction Biz; Dentsu Sees Revenue Growth, But Lowers Guidance

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

Head In The Clouds

Of all the big marketing clouds buying ad tech, Oracle “may have the most influence when it comes to steering where those ad budgets are spent and not spent,” writes Mike Shields at Business Insider. A major factor there is Oracle’s commitment not to enter the ad transaction business, unlike Adobe, which bought TubeMogul. “You don’t have to worry about us [getting into media activation],” Oracle Data Cloud’s senior VP, Eric Roza, tells Shields. “We will not do that. You can be very confident that we don’t have an agenda here. We’re not gonna sell you media.” And as Oracle Data Cloud acquisitions like DataLogix and potentially Moat start to pull the cart, the walls between Oracle’s different cloud platforms are starting to dissolve [AdExchanger coverage]. More.

The CPG Problem

Dentsu on Wednesday reported H1 year-over-year revenue growth of almost 12%, totalling roughly $4 billion, but lowered its full year guidance by 1.5%. Read the release. Dentsu President and CEO Toshihiro Yamamoto said growth is expected to slow in the second half of the year, due to “the movement by clients in industries such as consumer packaged goods to review their global marketing budgets.” Other agency CEOs have cited the move to zero-based budgeting among large CPGs as a significant drag on growth, as it usually leads to drastic cuts on ad spend. As a result, agencies have had to rethink the services they offer these clients. More.

Transparency: Take Two

The ANA and investigative firm K2, which released a big report on media buying transparency last summer, have released 10 suggestions for advertisers that want to deal with similar concerns around ad production. Read the release. The ANA’s new report specifically focused on production issues, and it hopes advertisers are wary about practices like bid rigging, a type of collusion exposed by a Department of Justice investigation in December. Some of the recommendations for advertisers include understanding which in-house resources agencies have, reviewing production bid specifications and making sure agencies put their clients in the best position to get discounts or rebates. Download the report to get the full rundown.

Sensing Change

Google AdSense published a blog post on Tuesday saying it will start the plan it laid out in June to cull popups, autoplay video with sound and prestitial ads (when an ad loads before the homepage) with countdown timers. The attention mostly fell on a few big-name publishers that fail to meet the standards, including Forbes and Tronc-owned newspapers like The Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel. In other AdSense-related news, some publishers were filling product forums with news of plummeting CPC rates – some as much as 50% to 70%. A Google spokesperson tells AdExchanger the issue with the CPC drops has been resolved, and involved a combo of campaign parameters that had been set. More at Search Engine Roundtable.

Cloaking Device

Want to sell a crummy product on Facebook without Facebook knowing it? A handful of badvertisers are trying to get away with selling things like diet pills or porn, against the social network’s rules, by gaming the review process. For instance, the ads might direct Facebook users to a website that adheres to Facebook’s policies, but which then redirects them to a site that doesn’t. Facebook is now fighting back by bringing in a new battle tank: an artificial intelligence tool designed to expose that type of sneakiness. Of course, the process of de-cloaking those advertisers isn’t entirely automated. Adweek reports that Facebook is also revising its policies and “expanding efforts by human reviewers” to dig up those bad actors. More.