Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here.
Yah Or Nah?
Can Yahoo be saved?
That’s a question you probably thought you’d never hear again. But it’s relevant once more with Yahoo’s re-re-rebirth under private equity firm Apollo and Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone, former chief of Tinder and CBS Interactive, reports The Information.
According to Betteridge’s law of headlines, however, the answer is: “No.”
But Yahoo still has a multibillion-dollar ad business and a miscellaneous assortment of valuable media, such as TechCrunch, the popular Yahoo Finance site and fantasy sports.
If Yahoo’s turnaround does work out, though, it would be largely thanks to piecemeal asset sales – Softbank acquired the rights to Yahoo Japan for $1.6 billion a little over two years ago, for instance – and by ditching ad tech. Yahoo’s native advertising went overboard in favor of a more cost-effective partnership with Taboola, and the SSP business was shut down, too.
Without those ad tech units, Yahoo flipped from a large annual loss to profitability, per Lanzone.
Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson tells The Information that although “Yahoo clearly has had its ups and downs, right now it’s very much on the up.”
“It’s kind of miraculous to see this company from the mid-’90s come roaring out almost 30 years later,” Nelson says.
Don’t Hate, Generate
Adobe isn’t in the news as much as OpenAI when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning products. But Adobe might just be the biggest beneficiary from the first wave of gen AI tech on the market.
DALL-E and ChatGPT, the art and text generators created by OpenAI, are exciting, and they get a lot of press. Yet advertisers are slow-rolling adoption of products built on OpenAI, because they don’t have confidence that gen AI content is always, well, legal.
Adobe, on the other hand, is a safe option trained on Adobe’s own stock imagery, The Verge reports.
Adobe is also the keenest example of the power of distribution versus product.
Even if DALL-E is a superior product to Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI offering, it simply doesn’t matter, because Adobe already has practically every creative and content production person using its system. A true startup competitor in generative AI isn’t competing with OpenAI’s engineering talent – they’re up against the scaled distribution of Adobe Photoshop and people’s inertia in the face of change.
It’s A Package Deal
Streaming media bundles are all the rage, Insider reports.
US consumers are interested in adding shopping deals (50%), internet service (48%) and event discounts (48%), according to a new study from EY.
Media providers are already hastening to rebundle the old cable package. Comcast, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney all have bundles with live channels and entertainment libraries. By joining forces, streamers can reduce their own churn and ease the sky-high costs of marketing, user acquisition and content production.
New bundling dynamics were also at the heart of the recent Disney-Charter dispute, which was settled this week.
But the trend toward bundled products and away from solo subscription fortresses could be a boon for companies like Walmart, too, which benefits if streaming networks can drive customers to Walmart+, its version of Amazon Prime. Walmart already has a bundle in place with Paramount+.
The other could-be winner is news, since anything with a subscription model can be bundled, and adding news or written media is generally a much cheaper option than streaming content.
But Wait, There’s More!
Criteo looks to unify retail media with a DSP and a three-pronged set of data tools. [Digiday]
Tech titans descend on Washington, DC, to lobby – in different directions – on AI. [WSJ]
Netflix will sell “Stranger Things”-themed ice cream at Walmart. [Marketing Brew]
Why some social media marketers are fed up and plan on leaving the field. [Ad Age]
You’re Hired!
Raptive names former Red Ventures exec Marc McCollum as EVP of innovation. [release]
The OOH technology and services company Billups names Stephanie Gutnik as global chief strategy officer. [release]
