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A Vast Ocean
Mediaocean is planning to acquire video ad rendering company Imposium to boost its CTV ad product.
Although Mediaocean has deep roots in software for TV ad management and analytics, it’s evolved to embrace CTV and digital over the past year. (The company also changed ownership.)
Just a few months ago in June, Mediaocean bought Drishyam AI, a startup with image recognition, audio processing and creative personalization tech for social in general (and TikTok in particular).
Now Mediaocean is hoping that Imposium can help with ad personalization on CTV.
In May, Mediaocean integrated support for Imposium’s video personalization tools to make them part of Flashtalking’s Lightning Renderer. (Mediaocean bought Flashtalking last year, and Lightning Renderer is Flashtalking’s creative customization product.)
The results of the Imposium partnership pleasantly surprised Mediaocean, so it decided to all-out buy the company, Imposium CEO Jason Nickel tells The Drum.
Taking Imposium’s tech in-house will allow Mediaocean to scale it across a wider client base of brands, agencies and marketers – including TV advertisers.
Shopkeepers
Meta released a product last week called Advantage+ shopping campaigns that puts more decision-making into the hands of Meta’s machine learning.
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One key value prop of the product is that it allows Meta to optimize 150 creative combinations at once.
Facebook’s sharpest edge pre-ATT was that it could optimize practically endless combinations of creative and audience segmentation, because it saw almost every conversion. The postlapsarian Meta now suggests that advertisers consolidate similar campaigns and wait before optimizing because it can take days to collect a statistically significant amount of data.
Google, meanwhile, has ramped up Performance Max, which is taking over for Smart Shopping campaigns and has a similar feel to Advantage+ because it requires advertisers to further rely on walled garden reporting. Google no longer reports conversions by connecting individual sales to impressions, but rather models aggregated and less exact data.
Not to be left out, TikTok on Wednesday introduced Shopping Ads, a suite of tools for live shopping and click-to-cart functionality. That’s a different vibe though, as the kids say, since TikTok is angling to become a new kind of video shopping hub, while Google and Meta are just trying to re-grease their preexisting prospecting funnels.
Conversions (API) Is The New Religion
Are you sick of hearing about social media shopping advertising product news?
Too bad.
Because Twitter announced two new products – a Conversions API and an App Purchase Optimization service – as well as updates to its pixel, which now connects Twitter ads to shopping carts on advertiser sites, Adweek reports.
It’s not exactly a surprise, since every social platform (and seemingly every retailer with some first-party data) is following a trail blazed by Google and paved by Facebook. The new Twitter server-side Conversions API is the same as Meta’s Conversions API, in that advertisers upload first-party “events” data (like a conversion happening on their site or app, or other measurable consumer engagements) directly from the company’s server. This is a way around Apple’s privacy rules.
“In the world of app ads, performance talks – and the performance that most app advertisers care about is not simply installs, but driving lower-funnel actions such as purchases,” according to Twitter’s release.
But Wait, There’s More!
VidMob, which makes software to rate digital ad creative, raises $110 million. [WSJ]
Meta pulls out a familiar political ad policy playbook for the US midterms. [Bloomberg]
What’s a “decentralized” exchange? [Digiday]
Gen Z TikTokers are turning against Amazon. [WaPo]
Tweaks to Airbnb and the Google Travel search engine have made travel planning somewhat less terrible. [NYT]
You’re Hired!
Dentsu hires Pedro Pérez as chief creative officer for its Chicago office. [Ad Age]
Two large retailers, Kohl’s and the jeweler Pandora, name new CMOs. [MediaPost]
