Nucleus Marketing Helps Legacy Pubs Innovate; Snapchat Quietly Increases Ad Load

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Old Dog, New Tricks

Nucleus Marketing Solutions, a joint supply-side venture from Gannett, Hearst, McClatchy and Tribune Publishing, is out to innovate advertising opportunities on legacy print pubs, reports Ad Age. With a combined 168 million uniques, Nucleus claims to offer larger scale and better targeting opportunities for advertisers. It sounds similar to Pangaea, an alliance made between four pubs last year to achieve programmatic scale [AdExchanger coverage]. But Seth Rogin, CEO of Nucleus and former CRO of Mashable, said his initiative will be more about creating innovative digital formats. “This is not about just creating a network,” he said. “This is about digital innovation.” More.

Drill, Baby, Drill

Snapchat has been quietly wading into new ad pools on its platform. In June it began testing ads in user stories – a more intimate context that carried the risk of a backlash. That apparently hasn’t happened, because “over the past few weeks, the number of ads (in user stories) has steadily increased,” reports Lauren Johnson at Adweek. Snapchat has ambitious plans for $350 million in ad revenue this year, and then $1 billion in 2017, so it’s going to need to open up more supply. More. Facebook, for what it’s worth, acknowledged on its recent earnings call that it’s coming up against a hard ceiling for how much more ad supply it can create [AdExchanger coverage].

Not Buying It

Facebook has become a voracious competitor for TV ad budgets. It just added TV-esque commercials to Facebook Live streams, and has tried for the past year to lodge itself in the minds of TV advertisers. So guess which category of advertisers isn’t convinced Facebook’s video advertising is up to snuff? The legacy TV broadcasters that are now butting heads with social media on the supply end of their business. Disney, the NFL and NBCU are a few of the big-name broadcasters “concerned about ceding control to the social networking giant and undermining the value of their programming,” reports The Wall Street Journal. More.

Coulda Been A Contenter

It’s no secret Accenture has been creeping hard into traditional agency territory [AdExchanger coverage]. Its digital arm, Accenture Interactive, brings in $3 billion in revenue each year through content creation, commerce, marketing and experience, Digiday reports. Accenture is betting big on the content space; the company opened a huge studio in NYC last month to help clients produce advertising and comms for video, display, email, TV and radio. It plans to open six more by the end of the year. “No agencies have the breadth of content that we have,” said Donna Tuths, head of digital at Accenture Interactive and a former Ogilvy exec. “Our clients spend around $600 million a year on content while agencies only provide maybe $250 million of that content today.” More.

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